A future sci-fi writers never could've imagined

ZeroCool@vger.social to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1028 points –
94

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Bozos

They have been part of the core Cyberpunk TTRPG rulebook since the 1980's.

Also William Gibson wrote about foiling facial recognition with makeup over thirty years ago.

Also i think in Spook Country (but i'm not sure) he makes them use a t-shirt with an "ugly face" which is designed to disable facial recognition.

Some years ago, Pussy Riot put out information on how to use Makeup to confound face detection algorithms.

On an unrelated note: This is probably going to be blocked in ML because I used the word "pussy". I wonder why that instance has a problem with me mentioning that word. Could it be perhaps the name of a feminist anarchist group activity resisting domestic Russian oppression? No, I'm sure that's a coincidence.

Edit: Ty to everyone who helped correct my misunderstanding. The feedback has been informative, but I'll leave my comment as-is so people reading have context incase they also have misconceptions.

I'm on ML and can read your comment without a problem. Let's see if I can type it.

Pussy Riot

EDIT: No problem there.

says Pussy riot in the mirror 3 times as the clock strikes midnight

nervously waits (or excitedly? how big exactly is a riot of pussy? Big enough? How many hectares does the average Pussy Riot engulf?)

AFAIK .ml doesn’t automatically block comments from other instances containing slurs, they only automatically block slurs from being posted by their own users.

Yeah, .ml blocks all words potentially used as slurs so people don't mention one band, lol

Not true. Here is the regex doing the blocking: slur_filter_regex: https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/site

It's not exactly secret.

What if a farmer wants to join the instance and comments about waking up to the cock singing, finding the bitches in heat and gathering faggots from the yard

"slur_filter_regex":"(fag(g|got|tard)?\b|cock\s?sucker(s|ing)?|ni((g{2,}|q)+|[gq]{2,})[e3r]+(s|z)?|mudslime?s?|kikes?|\bspi(c|k)s?\b|\bchinks?|gooks?|bitch(es|ing|y)?|whor(es?|ing)|\btr(a|@)nn?(y|ies?)|\b(b|re|r)tard(ed)?s?)"

Turns out animals' camouflage including background matching, disruptive coloration, shadow elimination, counter shading, counter illumination and others are there to prevent optical recognition.

Who would have thunk.

What we didn't know was that Zebras evolved to defeat AI comera recognition.

New studies indicate face paint makes your face look a bit different.

You'll also need a silly walk to defeat gait recognition

Well that's why they set up a ministry to manage the silly walks, to make sure they complied with gait recognition before they were used.

Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.

I met a juggalo once and he was a racist Trump supporter who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money.

That sucks. I worked with a few when I was younger and knew a couple others in high school too, and my experience was the opposite. They weren't exactly Rhodes scholars lol, but they were open-minded, kind, and dependable colleagues. Juggalos have a reputation for being trashy, and it's something they proudly embrace, but I've found them to be generally harmless. Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money...

My buddy and I were just talking about this. Juggalos get a lot of shit, but my experience is that they are one of the most accepting groups around. It doesn't matter if you're a PhD or are stealing copper out of abandoned houses, if you show up with some clown makeup and fire poi, juggalos are down to clown.

Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.

Chiming in with another juggalo friend who was an incredibly good hearted person. Ended up going to jail for "assaulting an officer" by trying to pull a cop off of someone during the George Floyd protests. I lost touch after that.

sigh meanwhile the cop has still probably got a cushy job and probably goes home every night to get drunk and hit their spouse because that is statistically as far as we can tell what 25-45% of cops do based on difficult to predict statistics that rely on cops snitching on their own illegal behavior (so logically it is probably much higher as hard as that is to wrap your head around).

Bring back the Juggalos! I've been saying it for years. We need them now more than ever.

It's nice being able to see people talk about icp like this thread without being nasty about it tbh

Love the worst band in the world, fam.

If nothing else, they're an inspiration for just doing your own thing artistically. Fuck the critics, just make some shit you're passionate about, make it available to find its audience, and connect/bring in other folks who want to do the same.

IMO, they created/'popularized' an entire genre of music, and some of it's better than what they put out (for example, I like Twiztid more - but they wouldn't be what they are if it wasn't for ICP and Psychopathic Records)

Edit: For those who need a pick me up going into work tomorrow, a little MMFCL for ya.

I like twiztid, too. I'm not a big huge fan of icps newer stuff, but man, their older stuff is awesome.

I don't think so.

That's not doing facial recognition though, that's a reverse image lookup. It's a lot easier to find an exact match for a photo.

Shhhh they think they’ve outsmarted the shitpost. Let’s just let ‘em have this one. They could probably use the win.

Exploitable

Replace top clown with normal person to show it finding that Juggalo

(Apparently that’s Violent J, next to his buddy… Shaggy 2 Dope)

I presume the facial recognition would be trying to match against faces without the makeup.

If you always use the same makeup pattern, then I guess it can latch onto that like anything else, if trained to do so.

Also note that facial recognition tries to break down a face into discrete "pieces" so it can match a face in profile against the same face from the front. In your example the image is visually similar because they are both exactly the same angle, no 'facial recognition' involved. If it can't figure out what a cheekbone is, what a nose is, generally what a 'face' is, then that would count as fouling the facial recognition because it would be unable to use a reference facial database.

Abracadabra boom shacka dae

I'm Violent J, and I'm back like a vertebrae

vertebra is the singular form of vertebrae

which does not rhyme with day but rather dee or die

Huh, the tweet the article referenced is five years old, I wonder if there’s been any advancement in facial recognition in that regard

Last I heard, the CCP did a bit of social engineering and got a load of TikTokkers to post videos in juggalo makeup in order to retrain their facial recognition software.

I don't recall if it was successful, but it happened.

That's how the Juggernaut collective started

Huh, the tweet the article referenced is five years old, I wonder if there’s been any advancement in facial recognition in that area

The closest to this I can remember rn was the movie oblivion, where humans used masks to distort their voice? Not sure about the logic behind that, pretty sweet visuals tho, the UI design was sick

TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.

Have you checked out Stanislaw Lem? Solaris is pretty interesting