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Renowned Tumblr folklore expert Strange Æons covers Yud's Potter Fanfic
  • Honestly the most surprising part was when she went "of course we know fanfiction can be used for cult indoctrination, ever since that other cult did it"

    I skipped that episode because it seemed boring, but now I might come back to it.

  • Renowned Tumblr folklore expert Strange Æons covers Yud's Potter Fanfic
  • goofy shrugging

    be me, super genius autodidact

    be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck

    proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

    mein face when

  • Renowned Tumblr folklore expert Strange Æons covers Yud's Potter Fanfic

    I haven't watched it. I don't know how well she will cover the subject or how deep the rabbit hole she will venture.

    All I know is she's delightful and I sure as hell won't read that bilge myself, so I'm looking forward to an entertaining summary.

    Edit: I watched it. I had a good time.

    16
    OpenAI brings you statistically average literary fiction
  • First I thought "Oh jeez, what a wall of text" but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.

    I don't think callling genAI output "not art" is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That's kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.

    But I also share your sentiment about "AI artists" pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of "not artists", because that's what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.

    And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.

  • OpenAI brings you statistically average literary fiction
  • I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.

    The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that's just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)

  • Microsoft research: Use AI chatbots and turn yourself into a dumbass
  • While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.

    We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.

    The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison

    That's from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.

  • I Miss the Internet (rant post)
  • Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!

    Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I'd use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.

  • Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AI
  • The point would be, to roll it all into the ID issuing process. I think most EU IDs already have cryptographic identities built in. The certificate issuing should probably be a state service as well. The alternative would probably be, just mail your birth certificate and a 3D scan of your anus to the private age verification provider of your choice.

    It of course all falls back to a central state authority. But the process wouldn't have to be more centralized and privacy-invasive than state IDs already are. Control of resident data could be kept at municipality level, and you wouldn't need a central approver, that gets a running feed of all my age-restricted activities.

    Before I sound like I'm soying over ID verification, I'll add that all this junk can become insidious very quick, if it becomes easy to implement and gets used everywhere. I also detest beyond measure that my ID currently stores a scan of my fingerprint, and I hope the court-ordered deadline makes that shit illegal again in 2027.

  • Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AI
  • I'll slightly nitpick the claim about the central ID register, because you can do a lot of this stuff decentralized with smart IDs.

    I imagine it works like this: You somehow get your hands on a certificate that reads "yo, the controller of the key pair with public key a4c6... is over 18 - signed, new south wales records agency". You hook up your smart card to pass some cryptographic test, and voilá: you proved you have the ID of an adult and know their PIN.

    Not that I advocate for IDing everytime you visit a website, but I guess I'd be fine with it for ordering weed online. I expect we'll get something like it in the EU, if we decide not to go full fucking surveillance state.

  • NSFW
    Never Forgive Them
  • Apropos Bruce, I have this writeup sitting around half-finished, where I go over the AI chapters of A Hackers Mind and try to pinpoint his naivité (however you spell that) of the subject. I really should dump that in a Snubstack.

  • Get your Torment Nexus news from reputable journalistic outlet Know Your Meme (Character.AI Suicide Lawsuit)
    knowyourmeme.com Character.AI Teen Suicide Lawsuit | Know Your Meme

    Character.AI Teen Suicide Lawsuit refers to a controversy and lawsuit against the user-generated artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot website Character.AI

    Character.AI Teen Suicide Lawsuit | Know Your Meme

    archive of the mentioned NYT article

    18
    www.techrepublic.com AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses

    Businesses using artificial intelligence to generate code are experiencing downtime and security issues, according to Sonar CEO.

    AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses

    cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919

    33
    Federated vs Distributed Rant

    So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.

    Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...

    Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)

    Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:

    "With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."

    So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?

    But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.

    Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).

    I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).

    And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.

    17
    Enforced positivity policy at Humane
    arstechnica.com How to build a DOA product: Humane AI Pin founders banned internal criticism

    Questioning the design and dev progress was apparently "against company policy."

    How to build a DOA product: Humane AI Pin founders banned internal criticism

    Apparently a senior SW engineer got fired for questioning readiness of the product, dude must still be chuckling to himself.

    Found the story here https://hachyderm.io/@wesley83/112572728237770554

    4
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JA
    jaschop @awful.systems
    Posts 6
    Comments 43