Hey everyone? This is not okay. In May, the US government officially adopted a policy separating children from their parents when they crossed the border. It was meant to act as a deterrent to anyone seeking to immigrate to this country. Don’t come with your kids, or we’ll arrest you and take your children away. Children should never be used as political pawns like this. It’s inhuman and cruel.
Parents, after being separated from their children, are being tried as criminals. According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “If you cross the Southwest border unlawful, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple” So not only are families being torn apart, parents are being sent to jail. It’s really hard to be reunited with your child if you are in federal prison.
Please pay attention to what is happening at our southern border. Please care about these people. I know there is a lot gong on in the world, and it’s hard to care about everything all the time, but please don’t forget about the immigrant families. Call you representatives. Vote the people who support this policy out of office in November. Find a local rally/protest. Donate to a charity. Don’t let the people in power get away with this.
Sources are from The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a video interview with Jess Session found on NBC news. Jacob Soboroff is a reporter for NBC news and MSNBC. 13 June 2018
And keep in mind this is the NICEST of the centers and these journalists were INVITED in imagine what the facilities are like when no one is watching? the scariest part of this to me is the fact that they were ok with him there but normally media get an immediate police call, meaning normally they don’t want people to see what goes on in there but they made it look nicer in order to try and deceive us about how bad they actually are
That Trump mural looks downright Orwellian, to say nothing of EVERY OTHER PART OF IT.
Okay, at this point there has to be something wrong with me, right? I’ve watched this 20 times in the last half hour, I still don’t know what they are saying half the time, but it doesn’t seem to matter because i’ve been crying my eyes out laughing for the entire last half hour …
what the fuck is this from i gotta know
it’s called letterkenny and it’s about a man who gets dumped and then goes on to shirk his pacifism and reclaim and hold his title as the toughest dude in the rural town of letterkenny ontario. every episode cold opens like this in increasingly bizarre ways.
I read the bit about not being able to parse what’s being said and then I read the bit about it being set in this fuckin province, and I thought, like, what kind of accent could they possibly use that was so incomprehensible while still setting it in northern goddamn
Ontario? and actually, okay, you know what, despite having lived immersed in it my entire life I’m not sure i’ve ever seen this exact accent on tv before, it is just weird to see actors using it
My cousins grew up with the guy who wrote this show and is the main actor. It’s scary accurate for hick town Ontario (it’s based on the town of Listowel) and apparently some of the characters are based so closely on real people that they’ve recognized themselves while watching.
ARE YOU GONNA FIGHT IN THOSE SHADES OR PLAY POKER STARS DOT COM
Distribute some free literature.
I lived near Ontario in rural NY and we picked up this sort of similar affect. It’s so scary how true-to-life this is in that area of the contintent
i’m all for peter being portrayed as a teenager bc that’s just classic spidey, and if you prefer him being portrayed as a teenager that’s fine we all have preferences. my only issue with it is that people who only watch the spidey films and don’t read the comics are really missing out on some good adult peter moments. like right now in the comics peter parker is around 30 years old and watching him interact with younger superheroes is really heart-warming, because he’s been there and he gets how hard it can be, he feels responsible for these kids
and then there’s the renew your vows comic where he’s an actual dad married to mary jane, and they have a daughter who’s named annie may. and that series is full of really fun stories, plus it’s interesting to see how peter juggles being spidey and being a dad/husband and how those two things intertwine, also the dad jokes are endless
teenage peter parker is a timeless version, but that version is shown so much (especially in film) that it seems like a lot of spidey fans feel like adult peter wouldn’t be as good or true to his character which just isn’t true, so if you’re ignoring the adult version of peter parker then you’re seriously missing out on great character development/stories that show peter’s journey and his character more than anything
There is a delightful algorithm called Visual Chatbot that will answer questions about any image it sees. It’s a demo by a team of academic researchers that goes along with a recent machine learning research paper (and a challenge for anyone who’d like to improve on it), and its performance is pretty state-of-the-art, meant to demonstrate image recognition, language comprehension, and spatial awareness.
However, there are a couple of interesting things to note about this algorithm.
It was trained on a large but very specific set of images.
It is not prepared for images that aren’t like the images it saw in training.
When confused, it tends not to admit it.
Now, Visual Chatbot was indeed trained on a huge variety of images. It can answer fairly involved questions about a lot of different things, and that’s impressive. The problem is that humans are very weird, and there are still many things it’s never seen. (This turns out to be a major challenge for self-driving cars.) And given Visual Chatbot’s tendency to react to confusion by digging itself a deeper hole, this can lead to some pretty surreal interactions.
Another thing about Visual Chatbot is that most of the images it’s been trained on have something in them – a bird, a person, an animal. It may have never seen an image of just rocks, or a plain stick lying on dirt. So even if there isn’t an animal there, it will be convinced there is. This means this bot always thinks it’s on the best safari ever. (For the record, it thought the stick lying on dirt was “a bird is standing on a rock in the snow”)
If you ask it enough questions, could you get an idea of how it made its mistakes?
Upon further questioning, however, it also decided that dogs also have horns, and birds do not fly. Actually, it turns out that a lot depends on how you ask the question. The answer to “do bunnies fly?” is “no”, but the answer to “can bunnies fly?” is “yes”, so either the algorithm is answering a lot of these questions at random, or bunnies *can* fly but choose not to. (The construction “Do <blank> have <blank>?” seems to almost always result in a “yes”, so I can report that yes, bunnies do have spaceships and lightsabers.)
So I wouldn’t necessarily believe Visual Chatbot’s answer to my question about the zoo rocks thing. In fact, it seems to have learned to give explanations that are total lies – if it doesn’t know the color of something, it’ll answer “it’s a black and white photo so i can’t tell” without realizing that this excuse only works on an actual black and white photo.
It’s too bad this is so tricky. Since algorithms can often be biased, it would be great if we could ask them “Why did you show me that ad?” or “Why did you decline my application?”. But getting a sensible answer from them may not be all that straightforward, especially if they pretend they know more than they actually do.
