swlabr @ swlabr @awful.systems

Only Bayes Can Judge Me

---

Read more

Posts

39

Comments

1,956

Joined

2 yr. ago

Before I knew that they were called skeets, I was mentally calling them “bluesks”. So maybe “blasks?” Btw these are intentionally bad, so spare your critiques.

Uh I think his name is actually jimbob snuffleupagus

Tech bros: putting the “meth” in “prometheus”

Anno was cooking when he predicted that the tech elite (seele) would try to melt down all of humanity into amorphous data (orange tang) and control the “superintelligence” singularity (third impact)

She’s way too far down the list imo. She should make a deal with Woz, and get him to swap their places

Hand in hand with Glenn Beck!

TL; DR: please forgive my ignorance on this topic:

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a “good” leftist in the sense that I don’t do a ton of reading, and didn’t think too hard about copyright at this level. I did try do some reading because the anti-copyright takes as I encountered them in this context initially seemed iffy, but through research I found that my initial ideas weren’t well informed.

The most common form of anti-copyright sentiment I’ve encountered comes from mostly the piracy community. I don’t really participate in the community part of that, so I haven’t spent a lot of time reading any of their theory or philosophy, which has been to my detriment here. That being said, the stuff that I have seen has been mostly from a place of entitlement, so I felt safe in not exploring the literature.

Also, basically all of my recent reading of leftist material has had no focus on copyright. It’s all been economic, geopolitical stuff. That isn’t to say copyright issues aren’t important, it just hasn’t been in focus.

Anyway, this all started on my end because, in a discord server unrelated to this instance, I had expressed consternation over individual artists getting fucked over by AI companies, and celebrating whenever they clawed back whatever amount of justice they could. This was immediately in bad faith equated with full throated support for Disney’s ruthless copyright lawyer army. I didn’t really understand why that was happening, so I did some reading, and thought it was worth sharing about here.

So to specifically answer this:

Were we anti-copyright leftists really so invisible before, or have you been assuming that No True Leftist would be anti-copyright?

More the former than the latter, but only due to my blind ignorance. The latter was not my assumption. I had encountered someone claiming to be a leftist but was not, for reasons unrelated to being anti-copyright.

Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:

It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

There is actually, but it is mostly on youtube.

Ah yes I am always finding out ways in which I can be more online

Yeah definitely synonymous with the whole “neutrality sides with the oppressor” thing

Guy should just get “I love for-profit prisons” tattooed on his face instead of dressing up an island in bad bioshock cosplay.

I’m stealing this take :p

Yeah. At the very least copyrights give some level of protection to the individual that you don’t often see elsewhere. Like, the government can take your land, but they can’t steal your memes.

Reading the post and later seeing that Steve Harvey clip was like reading Pinker and then seeing his pics with Epstein. Except Coffin (or just his own foot) is his own Epstein.

The “thus pro-AI” is just so, so, stupid. Like, any anti-capitalist argument you make against copyright just immediately implodes when you do the qui bono.

Kind of a ramble: So, I’ve been out in the wild recently. I use discord and have noticed that in most of the servers I’m in, either they have an explicit no-genAI policy or quarantined sections where genAI content is allowed. On one podcast’s server, I posted a complaint about some genAI content that was posted to the podcast’s socials, and the embed was removed because it showed the genAI content- 10/10, love to see it. On another server, I figured out that the channel was created specifically because they had a sealion problem but didn’t want to ban their sealion (it appeared to be just one).

An interesting (read: stupid) thing about this sealion was that they are a self-styled leftist that was pro-AI. I won’t try to replicate any of their nonsense here, because A) it was nonsense stemming from a refusal to believe any anti-AI data and a lack of understanding of how LLMs work, and B) I don’t want to look like I’m posting about some kind of argument I had elsewhere here in order to score internet points, as I’m self aware/anxious enough to know that I sound exactly like that right now.

They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin. There isn’t much about this guy on the internet. All I can gather is that they are some kind of breadtuber or in the breadtube orbit. It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”. Either they don’t understand how the technology works (i.e. ignorant) or are accelerationist, wanting both the destruction of the environment and art (i.e. wilfully stupid)

Anyway, this exploration has shown me that some leftists don’t support copyright protections. I understand that from a couple different perspectives: 1. The main beneficiaries of copyright protections are large media corporations, and 2. it can be interpreted as trying to capitalistically extract fictional value, much like a landlord charging rent. I’m not trying to debunk this (I don’t think I’m representing this well enough). My thought is that I don’t give a shit about corporations losing money, what I care about is the work of individual artists being under/de-valued. Copyrights are an imperfect method that artists use to try seek justice, so it’s a grey area for me. Coffin in the article linked paints the situation as black and white: anyone who tries to stop someone “stealing” is actually rent seeking, whether or not they are a megacorp or a starving artist. (edit) I think this comes from Coffin's "extremely pro-AI" agenda, i.e., being anti-AI is enough to be reductively lumped together under some conspiratorial pro-capitalist agenda.

End of ramble, sorry that there wasn’t much of a point or structure here. Would love to hear any thoughts that come out from reading this.

E: note that this vid is posted as a common criticism of Coffin.

E2: ::: spoiler re: video above: I really didn't know about this before writing that edit. I did some more reading. Coffin is something of a pick-me internet guy, his entire personality crystallised by that video. He's moved from internet trend to internet trend, one of note being gamergate, formerly anti, now pro (yes, as of 2024). He also did rap parodies? Anyway this isn't about him. :::

Yahtzee, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol'ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got "they chose to write this as a narrative" of course they fucking did. It's their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of "really makes you think" and "big if true".

Here's a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree

but maybe I’m being too picky?

This is something I’ve been thinking about. There’s a lot of dialogue about “purity” and “purity tests” and “reading the room” in the more general political milieu. I think it’s fine to be picky in this context, because how else will your opinion be heard, let alone advocated for?

Like, there’s a time and place for consensus. Consensus often comes from people expressing their opinions and reaching a compromise, and rarely from people coming in already agreeing.

So wrt this particular example, it’s totally fine to be critical and picky. If you were discussing this in the forum where this letter was written, it probably wouldn’t be ok.