Is computer vision Bad?

I’m doing some work with computer vision. Some cool things with GANs, some things with getting features out of images. In a sense, I want to reduce every image to a vector that describes it well. That’s kinda the dream; reductionism is my job.

… most applications of this turn out to be Bad. And I thiiink I’m in a case where my reductionism is not so bad. (clothing images, eesh, it’s fine.) But I’m open to the possibility of everything I’m doing being bad.

Related: YOLO creator Joseph Redmon stopped computer vision research due to ethical concerns.

IBM is exiting the face recognition business. Even this garbage about Amazon and Rekognition - though “we’re suspending it for 1 year” seems suspiciously like “we want good press now and then will sneak it back in while you’re not looking.”

What went wrong in the move process?

Moving caused me a heck of a lot of stress, and that seems avoidable. Why was it so stressful?

• important scarce markets. I hate being in scarce markets; I usually try to just structure my life to avoid them. when other people want something, I try to want it less. like, theme parks and concert tickets - usually I just don’t want them. but housing is always kinda scarce - especially housing for one particular apartment is really scarce, there’s only one of it!
• not clear what you can logic and what you can feel. It’s sorta clear; you can say “the apartment needs to check these boxes: N bedrooms, M bathrooms, X minute walk to the Bart, etc.” But most of the things are not actually that clear! Like, I wanted an in-unit washer/dryer, but I certainly wouldn’t say that was a deal-breaker. And even more shaky examples: “we need a place for our cat to sleep; will this little room be ok?” “bike storage is necessary… this one has a bike storage situation that is already pretty full, so, maybe that will be a problem for me. maybe it won’t!”
• ego and pride while being in a powerless situation. all the garbage from this previous post.
• it’s kind of stressful to keep searching. each new apartment you look at costs at least 2 hours: 1 hour setting up times to see it, 1 hour walking to/from it and seeing it and saying “nope.” That’s if it’s very nearby and is a clear no; most cases are harder. Because people don’t provide good information (like a floor plan), and because many listings are a waste of time (landlords are greedy, overpricing their place and just hoping), you’ll spend 2 hours * a lot of apartments. So the decision of “do I want to keep searching another week” is roughly “do I want to do another 15 hours of work next week?”

In which our government turns covid-19 into Your Problem

edit: turns out I’m rather angry, which means the rest of this post isn’t for kids, which I mention only so the babies out there will know how cool they are for reading.

our country has decided that we’re just gonna spend our 3 “flatten the curve and screw your life” months fucking around and not bothering to increase testing or contact tracing or anything that actually makes things safe for our people, so there’s a new constant danger out there, 1000 people will die every day, the rich will be mostly pretty protected, but even the rich might fall into the “unfortunate” bucket at any time and if you do then fuck you. (this seems verrry American, tbh; I’m surprised I guessed it might ever go another way.) Given all this, I’m trying to get a better sense of how viruses spread and what is more/less safe given that I know nothing about what anyone else’s deal is; this article seems decent.

Protest and cop shit

I’ve mostly gone to “G-rated” protests that happen during the daylight, because I’m kind of ill-informed about protest time/places, kind of “too busy” (ugh gosh), and kind of a pansy. I feel like I’m failing a little bit; like, I firmly believe that those who are getting tear gassed are moving this conversation forward more than us. So, if/when I do go to PG-13 protests, I want to more thoroughly follow this article. Meantime, probably everyone should follow a couple steps in this article.

“Confessions of a former bastard cop” - I feel like this makes the case that ACAB pretty well? I’m kinda always curious for like, if I ever have a conversation with a family member and they’re like “ACAB, isn’t that going a little far?” I want to have the right backup, and maybe this is it?

(I do think ACAB would be easier to sell to family members if it weren’t about the individual cops. like, yes it’s possible to be a cop and not, holistically, a bastard in all of your life; just like it’s possible to be a Facebook employee and not a bastard. What we’re saying is, their work is guaranteed to be net evil, not that they are bad people; “x is a bad person” is always hard to prove. I guess I’d say something like “All cops are participating in a corrupt and broken system and therefore their work cannot be good” but ACAPIACABSATTWCBG doesn’t have as nice a ring.)

Speaking of ring, I see Ring cameras around, and they’ve been pissing me off more and more. I was thinking about setting up RingSellsDataToCops.com, which would just link to some appropriate news articles and a PDF you can print “RingSellsDataToCops.com” onto cheap printable labels, and y’know if anyone just happens to print them out and stick them on top of people’s Ring cameras, :shrug:. Activism by stickers, maybe this is my (tiny, pathetic, but manageable) thing.

Art

“my paint brush is alive”

SuperRare: owning online art. I’m not sure if this is the best or the worst thing.

“Folders is a language where the program is encoded into a directory structure.” aw geez aw hell - I’m never surprised that this exists, really - just, I’m often curious about the question, “X is an idea that someone could do; is the world big enough that someone out there will do that?” In this case, the answer is yes.