This is what tea will be like in The Simulation

What would it look like if, in the distant future, a group of machine intelligences tried to make tea? Not just to brew tea, but to recreate the entire concept from long-forgotten synapses buried deep within the hidden layers of their virtual brains?

To see what that might be like, I turned to a neural network I’ve used before, a huge model called GPT-2 that can draw on words and correlations that it’s learned from scanning huge chunks of the internet. I prompted it with a list of green teas - teas with evocative names like “Yellow Furry Peak”, named for its fuzzy leaves whose pointed tips resemble the peaks of the Yellow Mountains.

My first attempt, via talktotransformer.com, produced names that seemed more like what you’d get if you randomly started mixing words from the original list - you could tell what they were supposed to be, but they had less character, as if the features had all been smoothed away. That’s one way neural net-generated stuff can go - realism, but a sort of cardboard realism.

So for my second attempt, I used another way of sampling GPT-2, gpt-2-small, that gave me more control over the output. With temperature set to 1 and truncation turned off (both ways of letting the neural net produce less-probable output), I got results that wouldn’t pass as human teas, but were exactly what I was looking for. That’s my favorite style of neural net-generated text - the type that flagrantly fails the Turing test.

Six Vermilion Unicorn Playing The Amber Eagle Glowing Sky Rabbit North Circular Eye Afternoon Supper of Peace Cold Sheep & Thunder! Giving Away Stardust Green Great Gourd of Sunrise Slippery Violet Sands Ember Lathe Wet Leaves

Laptime Tree Spider (Black) Old Blue Beetle Drink Pieces of Peppercorns Memory boops Headaceous Granite Drink Fine Deerscald (fresh scent) Indoor Cream Wave Safe Bucket Buddy Somewhat fair Clever Cat 1 Angry Egg Fluffy Sandberry Tea Squirrely Bubbles Sonara Goat Potswreck Travesty Bee Hatch Kitten Pond Winter Snail Glitter Bomb Hating Frosty Moon Glands

Green Slime Essence Fresh Green Skunk Strawberry Lime Dissolution  B Ice Chlorophyll Glaze Bleeding Apples with Sea Salt Dangerous Rock TREET REFILLED POWER Fraps 0-3 ½.5Gridges 26 Grief Hills 4 Cup Emulsion Drcrated skin finishes! Size Yes 37 (21,28,38) x 54 (9 or 15)mm Shiny Living Veins Blue Foam Duet Fish Drumstick A unique combination of leaf of fire and custard Sodium ascending Fujiyama

Bonus content: more teas!

I would absolutely drink Memory Boops tea.

olivia de recat for the new yorker

can someone explain this to me in words bc i don’t understand any of them 

It's something like charting relationship closeness over time. So e.g. you are super close with your childhood best friend early in life, but then you drift apart, but then late in life you might re-enter each other's orbit. Whereas a one-night stand is two completely separate life lines that intersect at one discrete (discreet?) moment. Or a relationship with a dog is super tight, but also temporary, since dogs only live for so long.

Comic strip by classmate Bohzo (earth name Tzu Lun Hwang)

University of Wisconsin-Madison

See more of her work here.

The Flood

by  Simon Stålenhag

Dear Students,

This picture is to remind you that this week’s comic strip can really, for real be about anything.

Sincerely,

Professor Hantu

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

Note :  Le Kaibutsu Ehon est un livre de 1881 qui s'inspire des œuvres influentes de Toriyama Sekien 鳥山石燕 (1712-1788), érudit du XVIIIe siècle et artiste ukiyo-e 浮世絵, connu pour sa tentative de cataloguer les nombreuses espèces de yōkai 妖怪 au Japon.

Dear Students,

For extra credit, copy any of these pictures.

Draw your frame, do a 10 minute non photo blue pencil rough, then do simple line work for 20 minutes, then water color for 30 minutes. Try to keep it to exactly one hour. You can do it in your compbook or on your Strathmore paper but remember to cut it down to 8.5. 11.  Draw the frame any size you like but be sure to leave at least a 1/2″ all around.

Copying is such a good way to learn about your materials and about lines you might have otherwise never thought to make.

Sincerely,

Prof. Hantu

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

Note :  Le Kaibutsu Ehon est un livre de 1881 qui s'inspire des œuvres influentes de Toriyama Sekien 鳥山石燕 (1712-1788), érudit du XVIIIe siècle et artiste ukiyo-e 浮世絵, connu pour sa tentative de cataloguer les nombreuses espèces de yōkai 妖怪 au Japon.

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

Note :  Le Kaibutsu Ehon est un livre de 1881 qui s'inspire des œuvres influentes de Toriyama Sekien 鳥山石燕 (1712-1788), érudit du XVIIIe siècle et artiste ukiyo-e 浮世絵, connu pour sa tentative de cataloguer les nombreuses espèces de yōkai 妖怪 au Japon.

The Day After Halloween

Happy Halloween

Beck - Colors

Starring Alison Brie and directed by Edgar Wright

Dear Students

Tonight in Sellery Hall we drew four self portraits together. Each self portrait took three minutes. Person, animal ,fruit or vegetable, and monster.

Each page is 12 minutes worth of drawing.

Dig it! Why not try it! Only rule is draw the entire body.

Sincerely

Prof. Hantu

Sincerely professor Hantu

“Competitive“ by Woshibai

Translator: @paradisesystems, Sally

hello fungus lovers

Some of the new items from my fave D&D NPC’s refurbished Slightly-Cursed Items Shop, in which she sells my players items ranging from effectively useless to legitimately deadly – but always entertaining. Feel free to use these tragedies!

UH SCUSE an first of these things sound EXTREMLY ROOD

I follow this page on Facebook called Toilets With Threatening Auras and well…

POST MORE

As you wish!

And just because…

Just when you think it can’t get more “uh… wut?” it goes there. 

It goes there hard.

note that whenever I say huge amounts of wealth can’t be gained through ethical methods this is what I’m talking about

To explain just a hair more, if a landlord can use someone’s rent to buy a new property, and use tenants in a new property to buy yet more property, it means every person who pays rent could have also eventually bought a property outright and not had to have such a constant drain. But, no renter could: for lack of upfront funds, for a lack of access due to racism or ableism or classism, for lack of trust given by financial institutions, etc. Put plainly, a landlord contributes no value or service but uses someone else’s funds to compound a landlord’s own riches and get more human livestock to bleed, simply because of a moment of permission granted by more powerful groups. How many people are suffering and struggling to keep an ex-nurse afloat in luxury? What is being contributed?

I’m not saying this is always true in practice, or that I think the current system is a wholly just state of affairs, but a landlord contributes a number of things:

Now, maybe instead you just want public housing rented out to people en masse, at least in principle I wouldn’t be opposed to that idea, but I think it’s wrong to say landlords provide nothing.

If only the wealthy and powerful knew they could count on defenses like yours, I’m sure they would finally feel safe venturing out of their castles to kiss us all! That’s glib. I’ll rephrase: I agree that the original post imagines the landlord as a wholly valueless position in society and that this reading of the services provided by landlords oversimplifies the issue. But, honestly? Not by enough to matter. Landlordship is, like, the literal definition of “rent-collecting” as a bullshit capitalism job. The fact that the incentive structure of the world directly and obviously favors transition from a clearly value-generating job like nursing into Ownership As Job Unto Itself, is an indictment of the incentive structure. Also, and this may be a personal quirk: even as the sort of horrifying contrarian so prone to defending folk devils that I’m currently getting anon hate from some remarkably diverse points on the political spectrum I still don’t waste my time coming up with defenses of the wealthy. They don’t need it. Their position is so perfectly isolated from any consequence of criticism that, like, why bother? The rich don’t need our help. They don’t need allies. They own everything, run everything, and this kinda defense is why noxious twitter leftists are so fond of “bootlicker” as a term of abuse. It just… isn’t that important to make sure that we all have a sufficiently positive regard for owners and middlemen.

This argument has the useful property that it has insulated itself against any possible criticism.

Yeah, talk to me about that? In my own head, criticism still feels possible but if I’ve managed to illegitimately and preemptively discard any critiques I’d sure like to hear /how/. All I took myself to be doing above is making the meta-point that defenses of the rich and powerful are deeply unnecessary and necessarily argumentatively bolster the status quo. (And if you’re someone who looks at our economic status quo and doesn’t see some Big Problems, we probably share too few base assumptions to have a productive discussion.) What did it come off as?

Sorry, I get leery whenever I hear a something that sounds like a closed system of thought.

"Is there anything about the rich that is rationally worth defending? Of course not! If you think there is, then you have been fooled by the rich into defending really terrible and awful things."

Another way to present what seemed to be happening in this thread:

I think the semantic slide in step (4) is the problem: a move that encourages pitched argumentation rather than productive conversation. What specific groups of people do terms like "wealthy", "powerful", and "status quo" refer to? Are we talking about Bilderbergers? Anyone whose net worth is over $100,000,000? $1,000,000? Property owners? Business owners? The fortunate children of any of the above? Anyone who has savings in an investment portfolio? Americans making above $100,000 a year? White cishet men? Anyone who doesn't think mainstream economics isn't total bullshit? Former nurses who decided to get into business so they could take an awesome vacation every year?

It seems useful to me to be able to draw some distinctions between these groups. I suspect you agree. So I'm honestly not sure why I'm writing any of this.

I usually don't respond to stuff other people write online because 80% of the time what I'm tempted to write is actually just me responding to my own shit that I've projected onto it.

Now I'm descending into my "aw shucks" self-deprecating bullshit, so I'm going to stop writing now.

note that whenever I say huge amounts of wealth can’t be gained through ethical methods this is what I’m talking about

To explain just a hair more, if a landlord can use someone’s rent to buy a new property, and use tenants in a new property to buy yet more property, it means every person who pays rent could have also eventually bought a property outright and not had to have such a constant drain. But, no renter could: for lack of upfront funds, for a lack of access due to racism or ableism or classism, for lack of trust given by financial institutions, etc. Put plainly, a landlord contributes no value or service but uses someone else’s funds to compound a landlord’s own riches and get more human livestock to bleed, simply because of a moment of permission granted by more powerful groups. How many people are suffering and struggling to keep an ex-nurse afloat in luxury? What is being contributed?

I’m not saying this is always true in practice, or that I think the current system is a wholly just state of affairs, but a landlord contributes a number of things:

Now, maybe instead you just want public housing rented out to people en masse, at least in principle I wouldn’t be opposed to that idea, but I think it’s wrong to say landlords provide nothing.

If only the wealthy and powerful knew they could count on defenses like yours, I’m sure they would finally feel safe venturing out of their castles to kiss us all! That’s glib. I’ll rephrase: I agree that the original post imagines the landlord as a wholly valueless position in society and that this reading of the services provided by landlords oversimplifies the issue. But, honestly? Not by enough to matter. Landlordship is, like, the literal definition of “rent-collecting” as a bullshit capitalism job. The fact that the incentive structure of the world directly and obviously favors transition from a clearly value-generating job like nursing into Ownership As Job Unto Itself, is an indictment of the incentive structure. Also, and this may be a personal quirk: even as the sort of horrifying contrarian so prone to defending folk devils that I’m currently getting anon hate from some remarkably diverse points on the political spectrum I still don’t waste my time coming up with defenses of the wealthy. They don’t need it. Their position is so perfectly isolated from any consequence of criticism that, like, why bother? The rich don’t need our help. They don’t need allies. They own everything, run everything, and this kinda defense is why noxious twitter leftists are so fond of “bootlicker” as a term of abuse. It just… isn’t that important to make sure that we all have a sufficiently positive regard for owners and middlemen.

This argument has the useful property that it has insulated itself against any possible criticism.