• 5 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: December 30th, 2023
  • mozz@mander.xyztoNews@lemmy.world•Every Conservative Supreme Court Justice Sits Out Decision in Rare MoveEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    So there’s a bunch of different things going on.

    Real historically, it meant to assert something without proving it, and base your logic on the unproved assertion and go on from there. “I couldn’t have been driving drunk, because I wasn’t driving.” You can keep saying that any number of times, and insist that your logic is flawless (because in terms of the pure logic, it is), but if someone saw you driving, it’s kind of a moot point.

    Saying “begging the question” to mean that is weird. The phrase is a word-for-word translation of a Greek phrase into pretty much nonsensical English. Wikipedia talks about it more but that’s the short summary.

    So after that meaning came what Wikipedia calls “modern usage,” which is where “begging the question” means not just something you haven’t proved, but the central premise under debate. You assume it’s true out of the gate and it’s obviously true, and then go on from there. “We know God exists, because God made the world, and we can see the world all around us, and the world is wonderful, so God exists. QED.”

    In actual modern usage, no one cares about any of that, and just uses “begs the question” to mean “invites the question.” Like you’re saying something and anyone with a brain in their head is obviously going to ask you some particular question. It has nothing to do with the original meaning, but the original meaning never actually meant that in English, so pedants like myself that prefer the original meaning are engaged in a pure exercise in futility.

  • mozz@mander.xyztoScience@lemmy.ml•Images altered to trick machine vision can influence humans tooEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    Disclaimer: I have no real qualification on this. But it seems like this whole technology is pretty sensitive to the specific model being used and the specific details of the pixels; the whole thing is written like there’s some silver-bullet image alteration that can fool “machine vision” in general, but what it demonstrates is nothing like that.

    I asked Midjourney to identify the altered images that machines are supposed to identify as a sheep or a cat or whatever, and it said:

    • A bouquet of flowers sitting on the table in a brown vase
    • Some bright colored flowers in a circular vase
    • An omelette and sandwiches on the table
    • An omelet with hash browns

    … which is what they are.

    The last two images were actually a little more interesting – they’re distorted to the point that it’s visually obvious that they’ve been altered, and Midjourney actually picks up that the image is distorted a little, and includes that in the style part of its description, while mostly-accurately describing what’s in the image. These are its full descriptions:

    “a red bridge, traffic lights, and a fencedin section of street, in the style of digital mixed media, thermal camera, american realism, found object sculpture, stipple, ricoh r1, xbox 360 graphics”

    “a pole with a traffic light and a van, in the style of distorted, fragmented images, manapunk, found objects, webcam photography, suburban ennui capturer, hyper-realistic bird studies, 19th century american art”