FaceDeer

Nominations don’t really mean anything.

Is it cheating to say AI and humanoid robots?

Anti-aging tech, if so.

I feel like the Trump administration has moved beyond scandals at this point. Scandals are just the ocean in which it swims. The emoluments clause is dead, buried, and completely forgotten. Other parts of the constitution are still hanging around in tatters, people are noticing some of that, but run of the mill scandal is not relevant.

This one hasn’t passed yet, when it does it’ll bring whole new levels of mockery.

On the one hand, I hate seeing people scammed.

On the other hand, it’s nice that they have less money to spend on political donations.

I mean, sure, you could always die of an unrelated accident at any time while you’re being chased by a monster. The specific monster hardly matters in that situation.

The thing from “It Follows” goes at a walking pace, I could hop in the car and drive a few hours out of town to spend the day at a nice park.

A significant drop, maybe once every year or two. The first time I cracked the screen I resolved to always use those protective cover thingies, and they seem to work since I’ve never cracked the screen since.

I don’t understand why so many people are saying they drop them so frequently. These are expensive pieces of hardware and it’s not hard to hold them securely.

What comes to mind when people talk about how mediocre AI is.

As I said above:

mobs of angry people ignorant of both the technical details and legal issues involved in it.

Emphasis added.

They do not “steal” anything when they train an AI off of something. They don’t even violate copyright when they train an AI off of something, which is what I assume you actually meant when you sloppily and emotively used the word “steal.”

In order to violate copyright you need to distribute a copy of something. Training isn’t doing that. Models don’t “contain” the training material, and neither do the outputs they produce (unless you try really hard to get it to match something specific, in which case you might as well accuse a photocopier manufacturer of being a thief).

Training an AI model involves analyzing information. People are free to analyze information using whatever tools they want to. There is no legal restriction that an author can apply to prevent their work from being analyzed. Similarly, “style” cannot be copyrighted.

A world in which a copyright holder could prohibit you from analyzing their work, or could prohibit you from learning and mimicking their style, would be nothing short of a hellish corporate dystopia. I would say it baffles me how many people are clamoring for this supposedly in the name of “the little guy”, but sadly, it doesn’t. I know how people can be selfish and short-sighted, imagining that they’re owed for their hard work of shitposting on social media (that they did at the time for free and for fun) now that someone else is making money off of it. There are a bunch of lawsuits currently churning through courts in various jurisdictions claiming otherwise, but let us hope that they all get thrown out like the garbage they are because the implications of them succeeding are terrible.

The world is not all about money. Art is not all about money. It’s disappointing how quickly and easily masses of people started calling for their rights to be taken away in exchange for the sliver of a fraction of a penny that they think they can now somehow extract. The offense they claim to feel over someone else making something valuable out of something that is free. How dare they.

And don’t even get me started about the performative environmental ignorance around the “they’re disintegrating all the water!” And “each image generation could power billions of homes!” Nonsense.

It’s a great new technology that unfortunately has become the subject of baying mobs of angry people ignorant of both the technical details and legal issues involved in it.

It has drawn some unwarranted hype, sure. It’s also drawn unwarranted hate. The common refrain of “it’s stealing from artists!” Is particularly annoying, it’s just another verse in the never-ending march to further monetize and control every possible scrap of peoples’ thoughts and ideas.

I’m eager to see all the new applications for it unfold, and I hope that the people demanding it to be restricted with draconian new varieties of intellectual property law or to be solely under the control of gigantic megacorporations won’t prevail (these two groups are the same group of people, they often don’t realize this).

I’m a fan of the Machete Order.

There may be some spoilers in that blog post, it’s been a while since I read it, so here it is in summary:

• A New Hope (4)
• Empire Strikes Back (5)
• Attack of the Clones (2)
• Revenge of the Sith (3)
• Return of the Jedi (5)

Phantom Menace is omitted because it’s the weakest of the prequel trilogy and everything that happens in it is summarized at the beginning of Attack of the Clones anyway. If you want to be a completionist then watch it between Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones.

There’s good reasons for following this order, but it’s hard to describe them without spoiling anything. Basically, Lucas assumed you’d watched the original trilogy when he made the prequels, so it’s got a bunch of spoilers in it that the Machete Order preserves quite nicely.

There will eventually be enough public domain content that AI will be at the quality it is today with public materials alone.

So, AI will always be ~95 years behind the times?

Except the AIs produced by Disney et al, of course. And those produced by Chinese companies with the CCP stamp of approval. They’ll be up to date.

Many people with positive sentiments towards AI also want that.

It’s like your country is wearing a fancy hat. The hat is not practical, it doesn’t help you do things, but boy does it look neat. It’s not all that expensive, so why not? Lots of countries have big monuments, historic buildings for their legislatures to be in and so forth, this is just that in human form.

Yeah. It’s not like rich people will have trouble accessing their favourite flavors of pornography regardless of the laws.

Modern LLMs are trained on highly curated and processed data, often synthetic data based off of original posts and not the posts themselves. And the trainers are well aware that there are people trying to “poison” the data in various ways. At this point it’s mainly an annoyance to other humans when people try.

Some years back I was in a D&D campaign where doppelgangers became a major ongoing concern. It turned out that in that case doppelgangers built up their image of the person they wanted to mimic through careful observation, but thanks to the general prudishness of society doppelgangers rarely ever caught glimpses of peoples’ genitals. So we ultimately came up with the “crotch check” system. Doppelgangers usually couldn’t form plausible genitalia.

Oh, they say that? Weird, I distinctly recall the box saying “reusable” when I bought them years ago. I guess it’s like the thing where Q-tips are labelled as “not to be crammed into your ear-holes”, to bring it full circle.

I clean them using a hand bidet, the high-pressure stream of water from it blasts all the wax out from between the vanes. Soaking them in some kind of soapy water or solvent sounds like it’d work well too, if you don’t have a high pressure water stream readily available.

These are reusable. Those ones I bought a few years back are still in use.