An Actual Real Person my Dad knew. Pretty sure he worked as a bush guide. When someone asked the time he’d pull off his hat - some kind of broad brim - and use to take a few measurements of the sun’s position relative to the horizon. Then he’d declare the time.
He was accurate to the minute.
Fvvdvddsfdssdhnvfh you get back here and say this to the rest of the crew
It’s the neural net equivalent of shouting “enhance!” at a computer in a movie - the resulting photo is MUCH higher resolution than the original.
Could this be a privacy concern? Could someone use an algorithm like this to identify someone who’s been blurred out? Fortunately, no. The neural net can’t recover detail that doesn’t exist - all it can do is invent detail.
This becomes more obvious when you downscale a photo, give it to the neural net, and compare its upscaled version to the original.
As it turns out, there are lots of different faces that can be downscaled into that single low-res image, and the neural net’s goal is just to find one of them. Here it has found a match - why are you not satisfied?
And it’s very sensitive to the exact position of the face, as I found out in this horrifying moment below. I verified that yes, if you downscale the upscaled image on the right, you’ll get something that looks very much like the picture in the center. Stand way back from the screen and blur your eyes (basically, make your own eyes produce a lower-resolution image) and the three images below will look more and more alike. So technically the neural net did an accurate job at its task.
A tighter crop improves the image somewhat. Somewhat.
The neural net reconstructs what it’s been rewarded to see, and since it’s been trained to produce human faces, that’s what it will reconstruct. So if I were to feed it an image of a plush giraffe, for example…
Given a pixellated image of anything, it’ll invent a human face to go with it, like some kind of dystopian computer system that sees a suspect’s image everywhere. (Building an algorithm that upscales low-res images to match faces in a police database would be both a horrifying misuse of this technology and not out of character with how law enforcement currently manipulates photos to generate matches.)
However, speaking of what the neural net’s been rewarded to see - shortly after this particular neural net was released, twitter user chicken3gg posted this reconstruction:
Biased AIs are a well-documented phenomenon. When its task is to copy human behavior, AI will copy everything it sees, not knowing what parts it would be better not to copy. Or it can learn a skewed version of reality from its training data. Or its task might be set up in a way that rewards - or at the least doesn’t penalize - a biased outcome. Or the very existence of the task itself (like predicting “criminality”) might be the product of bias.
In this case, the AI might have been inadvertently rewarded for reconstructing white faces if its training data (Flickr-Faces-HQ) had a large enough skew toward white faces. Or, as the authors of the PULSE paper pointed out (in response to the conversation around bias), the standard benchmark that AI researchers use for comparing their accuracy at upscaling faces is based on the CelebA HQ dataset, which is 90% white. So even if an AI did a terrible job at upscaling other faces, but an excellent job at upscaling white faces, it could still technically qualify as state-of-the-art. This is definitely a problem.
A related problem is the huge lack of diversity in the field of artificial intelligence. Even an academic project with art as its main application should not have gone all the way to publication before someone noticed that it was hugely biased. Several factors are contributing to the lack of diversity in AI, including anti-Black bias. The repercussions of this striking example of bias, and of the conversations it has sparked, are still being strongly felt in a field that’s long overdue for a reckoning.
Bonus material this week: an ongoing experiment that’s making me question not only what madlibs are, but what even are sentences. Enter your email here for a preview.
So technically it doesn’t make sense for Geralt to have vertical pupils like house cats since those mostly benefit short animals (like house cats, foxes) after you get too big it’s not beneficial. (tigers, lions, humans) Giving him a tapetum lucidum would improve night vision and make his eyes more reflective tho.
BUT! If he has vertical pupils then you know what? He struggles to see things near his face. (Why whiskers are so important) Once your in the 10 inch (~25 cm) range things get difficult to see.
This is my long-winded way of saying Cat Eyed Geralt has to hold all the contracts and such at arms length to read them like the old man he is. Jaskier definitely makes fun of him for this. Reading probably isn’t Geralts favorite pass time because its hard to hold the books so far away and read them.
Which means Jaskier becomes Geralt’s audible account. Reading him contracts, books they find, and obviously stories he just makes up but pretends they’re in a book.
Just imagine. Squinty eyed Geralt trying to read something. Jaskier plucking it out of his hand and reading it out loud.
Geralt setting camp earlier in the evenings so its still light out when everything is done and just. Nonchalantly suggesting Jaskier keep reading that one book they found.
Jaskier smiling cause he knows what’s up and just plonking down next to him. Settling into his shoulder to read.
Geralt leaning into him and closing his eyes as he listens to the story. Listens to Jaskier. Enjoys the story just as much as he enjoys the physical closeness they share.
I think one of my favorite stories I’ve ever heard Mark Hamill tell is the one about how the first time he heard the score for A New Hope he got sort of jokingly offended because it seemed like every other character had a specific song for them and he didn’t and John Williams just looked at him and said “…The main theme is your song” and Mark was like “WHAT OMG” like he didn’t actually understand before that moment that he was the protagonist.
Plus, since Harrison was a traditional leading man, and I hadn’t read the screenplay, I thought he was the star of the film, and that I was Bucky to his Captain America, that I was the kid sidekick. Because in the screen test that we did, I was kind of annoying and he was so cool. But I’ll never forget, I remember the chair I was sitting in, the one-bedroom apartment looking out at the beach looking at the sundown of the ocean, and I couldn’t believe it. I was thrown for a minute. I thought, “Wait a minute.” Because on the front page, it said “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller.” [Lucas soon changed the last name.] I said, “Wait a second. I thought I was Luke. Oh, Harrison must have been Luke.” I started reading it and then I got to where they’re describing me and I said, “Wait a second. I’m Luke!” I didn’t think I was the star of the movie, I thought it was just from my point of view.
i can think of nothing less king-like than blindly following in the tracks of others.the morality of the kings is your morality because you are a king. if you want new traditions and new morality—then create them.
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Witcher (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion Characters: Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Additional Tags: Torture, Hurt/Comfort, (a little), Imprisonment, moderate violence but not enough for the warning, OT3 vibes but no actual OT3 yet, Geralt very briefly gets to pet a cat, Polyamory, Singing, respectful but not modern language used to describe trans people, (See notes) - Freeform Series: Part 3 of children’s work Summary:
In which Yennefer deals with her feelings, learns some sleight-of-hand, makes friends with a cat, and kills a wizard, not necessarily in that order.
I FUCKIN….FINISHED IT…..i really didn’t think i would, fuck. thank you to everyone who encouraged me for the past almost-three-months, i could never have done it without y’all. now to start on the threequel, which hopefully will take a LITTLE less time…
The pond is very busy today because it is super hot outside. While I am busy with work too, I cannot help but watch them do their thing in the bath every now and then too. They always look so concentrated, it cracks me up. New photos tonight or tomorrow morning.
When in sudden need of a place to stay, Caleb Widogast finds a room for rent at a price so low he can’t believe his luck. Ignoring the concerns of his friends, he moves in and quickly finds himself tangled up in the life of one Essek Thelyss, a reclusive scholar who may be even stranger than Caleb himself…
The sun lanced arcs across Caleb’s face as he set his phone
down on the nightstand, and yawned.
He’d gotten used to sleeping in strange places during the
last few years of his life, and there was a part of him that missed the
coziness of his room back in his and Nott’s apartment. But the other part of
him, namely the part comprised of bruises from too-narrow walls—relished in
this chance to stretch out a little.
alright so headcanon that sometimes after death animals or mythical creatures can come back as ghosts and haunt where they lived or people they loved, and geralt is just strolling around the continent with like a HUNDRED ghosts of past Roaches following him around on the path
jaskier (for some dumb reason) can see ghosts, so when he sees geralt in posada he also sees his hoard of devoted horse ghosts, and it isn’t really that he decides geralt needs to be his muse so much as his inner desire for adventure and all things strange and weird going “fuck i gotta follow this insanely attractive man around and figure out what the FUCK is up with him and these horses”
i told my family about the rabbinic definition of a “wall” as “a barrier that impedes the passage of goats” and my mother was so delighted by this that weeks later she showed me a photo of a baby goat squeezing itself under a gate and was like “this is NOT a wall!”
If the baby goat had to squeeze through, that may suffice? Impeding can mean slowing down or delaying or making more difficult, so if the gate posed enough of a challege, it may be a wall.
A wall that does not stop goats is not a kosher wall but the rabbis, IMO, define it too narrowly, as they say a wall two handsbreadths off the ground will stop a goat and admittedly I have kind of big hands but I’ve seen goats get through a smaller space than that on many occasions
My neighbor has a goat farm with a cattle grid instead of a gate on his driveway. It seems to contain them, to my surprise. Does a cattle grid count as a “barrier”, and if so, could a goat-stopping cattle grid be considered a wall?
If it doesn’t stop a goat it’s not a wall, but if it does stop a goat it isn’t necessarily a wall
in average
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