pendell

Pendell

@pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.

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pendell
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atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs
atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

i found a guy on twitter who is the exact opposite of cohost. he's an "ML researcher" who has created an app called "Furry Block List" that automatically and irreversibly blocks the 5% of people in his "furry accounts" dataset, amounting to thousands of users, that Google's Perspective API identifies as toxic.

screenshot above is the sort of comment that Google's Perspective API thinks is toxic.

and he insists he's doing the right thing, because he used a "freely available" API to do it. and that he is correct for doing so, because there's too much data on twitter to not use computers to do things. and that the computer is correct, because the computer is correct.

i am so glad there is now a website that would presumably ban this motherfucker on sight if he tried to pull this sort of thing

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

the battle grows more complex

i'm gonna go insane. furry fucking valley has entered the fray on the side of the enemy. i'm at war with Simba now

edit: i tried to be Honorable and warn him on another account, but because i am an attacker, he has elected not to believe me (despite me linking evidence and telling him to google "furry valley simba accusations"). and he has now aligned himself with the grooming cult leader/sex pest/omnifreak who's had dozens of credible accusations of abuse and other absolutely heinous shit leveled against him

absolutely incredible thing to jump into as someone who isn't even a furry. he couldn't have done this any worse if he'd tried. maybe he's going to get zaush on his side next

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

i apologize for bringing Twitter Drama to cohost but this one in particular is remarkable. i have been involved in plenty of it before but this is beyond the pale. there's madness in it

edit: cool he's looked at my cohost account and decided to message me on telegram from an account with the display name "Deleted Account." this is a very normal thing to do, not creepy

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

update: the "ML researcher" is fake and the "toxic furry blocklist" is a psyop by the cult leader designed to isolate his victims

I heavily suspected this after someone reached out and pointed out that the guy, Simba Lion (real name Chris Bryant, lives in the UK) has Made Up Guys before, and a bunch of circumstantial evidence lined up. a friend pried on the app and the cult's various sites and hosted services and found concrete evidence to confirm these suspicions.

this is So Goddamn Stupid and Nasty. what a fucked up little creep this guy is

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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

widr
@widr

i agree with thumbs i think he might actually think this. he could just be a learned-to-code hype follower who just credulously chugged all the corporate propaganda for idiots and doesn't actually know fuck all about anything

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bersl2
@bersl2

Something I just wrote on birdsite:

BTW, even "toxic" as a metaphor is not a sufficiently complete way to judge the acceptability of particular speech.

  1. "Toxic" to whom and for what purpose?
  2. The dose makes the poison.

"Toxicity" isn't enough.

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dukecarge
@dukecarge

I'm not even a ML guy, but I've done the basics courses and worked with a real-world ML use-case.

The most interesting thing to me, while working on it, was that our data was biased just from being gathered internally. The moment we started adding data from a contracted third party, the model changed.

The third party, at worst, was getting data at a different location, and maybe the subjects were in a different sitting position.

Bias is one if the first things you learn when learning the fundamentals of ML

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chamomile
@chamomile

The thing that makes me suspicious is the way he's seemingly chosen the furry community out of thin air and dropped in our laps a tool destined to create a shit storm, even going so far as to make a website dedicated to it. Especially with goons like Simba joining in.

Still, you may be right and it almost feels worse somehow.

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mby
@mby

tech-optimism like that is seriously frightening to me and gives me extreme Nazi vibes, in that they famously justified atrocities (e.g. against people with mental illness) with scientists (especially in medicine) as cited authority

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cofruitrigus
@cofruitrigus

Not perspective! I know that AI, I wrote a post when it was in the news recently. 1) It has some flaws in what it determines to be toxic or not (some slurs were found to not trigger it but swearing almost always did) and 2) This isn't a good use for it, it's all probabilities of being toxic, there should be human review of any results you get from it.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

the tech sector's credulity of "ai" snake oil is one of the things that was just... a source of endless background despair on twitter

however i see this thing doesn't even list who it's going to block (or any other information really) anywhere so i'm also gonna lay some blame on people who actually fed their credentials to a mystery box. surely we already learned this lesson once

i eagerly await his followup paper on the "impact" of this work on the communities he inflicted it on

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widr
@widr

i had to point out earlier that twitter itself already uses this exact species of snake oil bullshit to silence "abusive" speech, with its "most people don't send replies like this" mechanism. if you push through that dialog your reply is hidden by default and generates no notifications. it already makes it almost impossible to call out Nazis. every time it pops up it's for using softer language. you can't even call someone an idiot now

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

ugh do they really? i've never noticed such replies being hidden but i also have twitter filtered in such a way that if i fire one off, i don't expect notifications for them anyway. having five-digit follower count might also tip the calculus, i don't know

i had actually thought that was kind of nice because it adds a bit of friction without actually stopping you from doing anything. of course i have always told it to fuck off so i don't know if it's actually improved anything at all

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widr
@widr

i'm not 100% sure because i don't want to shadow realm my entire account testing it but it's certainly true at least sometimes, based on the same or similar metrics. i had to completely redo a whole reply because it was aggressively hidden, almost impossible to find without having a link to it in incognito. maybe that was just an exceptionally mean reply (it was and i was right to make it) and there's like some kind of Limit Break Overdrive Hyper Damage threshold that's like idk 50% higher than the normal "rude" threshold that summons the friction dialog.

i think the friction dialog is only nice in that it gives some haptic feedback when you're pushing up against those limits but i really don't like how low the bar is becoming

the fact remains that there is already definitely a sentiment-based quality filter that hides replies and it's not very good

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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

hailthefish
@hailthefish

yeah it's phrased in a context collapse attack type way to subtly imply you're just mysteriously attacking some hardworking innocent CNA who just came home from a 12 hour shift making minimum wage giving sponge baths to bed-ridden orphans or whatever without actually SAYING it, when he does R&D for CVS, presumably using ML to make their insurance billing more racist or whatever it is "ML Researchers" actually do for a living when they're not making The Civility Nanny that silently mutes anyone who has ever said anything more spirited than "h-e-double-hockeysticks"

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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

Kafouille
@Kafouille

If you look at his timeline it's full of completely inane retweets about clickbait lists of 'AI' tools.

He's one of those complete smoothbrains that have fucked around with some ML driven toys and been completely bamboozled by it, and so have decided that 'AI' is there and the future and right. So obviously he must jump on the bandwagon and become an 'ML researcher' even when all he's ever done with it is fuck around with the API of a tool he fundamentally doesn't understand. Hell, with those people the very fact they don't understand it is why they are so die-hard about it, after all they are VERY SMART don't you know and if they can't understand how it works it must be a magical thing that can do anything.

It's basically the same type of dumb nerd that latches onto cryptocurrency, and has about the same level of introspection.

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rilight
@rilight

I can't imagine how much harm this guy's app has caused to the community on Twitter, especially with the large amount of people I've seen mention that they or their friends have been on this blocklist. The part that really gets my blood boiling is that this violates every ethical rule about scientific experimentation and yet he won't listen to any reason and insists he's the Most Correct person in this debacle

I dunno, machine learning is interesting but, imo, should probably not be used for anything of social importance or else you end up here where the "toxic" thing you're fighting is... queers telling off Nazis, an objectively nontoxic thing to do!

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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

HeySora
@HeySora

probably the only time i'll ever say that i'm glad to be blocked on that list too, lol; makes my job easier filtering out idiots like that

not that i'm going to spend much more time on that hellsite anyway.

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HeySora
@HeySora

oh quick thing i wanna mention: i'm 1000% sure that NONE of my tweets could have ever been flagged by the Perspective API

however i do know that i've been blocked by furry valley years ago, so i wouldn't be surprised that this blocklist really was just furry valley's own blocklist, rather than using that AI at all, lol

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SenshellShark
@SenshellShark

First time I remember hearing about Furry Valley was when I made some post about my experience as an ex-cultist. Somebody made a comment mentioning the group and condemning it which immediately drew in a member of the group who was likely just searching for tweets about the group, which is just bizarre and sad, as cults are. The two commentors going back and forth in my mentions had me feeling really bad potentially being on the radar of another idiological cult once again. Not on the list though, which I find a bit more surprising given this link to this "study".

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