ebu

my lemmy client is a humanities app because on it i learn how dedicated people are to completely missing the entire point

somehow i think furries will be disqualified from the vanguard, so probably not

sorry but i shave everything from the eyebrows down. i must remain buttery smooth to retain the optimal aerodynamic attributes

as someone who is generally anti-copyright, i think it’s telling that while there’s several very good arguments to be made against copyright (they encourage IP hoarding, they strip rights and profits from creators, they enable legal threats against people making derivative or inspired work), the one promptfans continuously go for is the most shallow. “copyright is bad because it’s the thing preventing me personally from downloading everything i want for free, even though i already do that all the time with no repercussions whatsoever”

some parts intriguing, but mostly disappointing. several chunks of the text felt AI-generated. no fewer than 34 “it’s not X but Y”'s, by my count, and the out-of-nowhere typographies / tables definitely smell of slop. and obviously, the images definitely were. (can’t even be bothered to fix the typos in photoshop? why make a fake poster for The Stepford Wives??)

some notes:

• i’m not entirely convinced the revulsion response in women can be explained entirely as a reflective recognition of the subjected female self. maybe it’s also because AI art is entirely bland and/or fuck ugly

• some reproductive labors, in the Marxist-feminist sense, are getting subsumed by AI, sure, but they’re largely the ones that already got subsumed by the computer. we had pagers with scheduling and appointment reminders in the 80’s. about the only thing an LLM can do that our previous tech couldn’t is the customer service / “emotional labor” part, albeit poorly. and the other labors are non-optional – my laundry actually does have to go in the dryer, and no matter how many plastic pictures of clean clothes i generate, they can’t actually go in my closet.

• speaking of, the article appears to use a mangled paraphrase of that Joanna Maciejewska tweet (“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”), and then attributes it to “AI enthusiasts” (ew).

• the article notes that reproductive labor is coded feminine and that the assistants that (attempt to) do this labor are designed female, with feminine voices and affects, despite being, y’know, robots. and not women. the next step to me would be to note that this isn’t just reflecting the subjectification of the female and the designation of women to a particular labor class, but actually aiding to construct and reproduce the subject of “female” itself too. maybe throw some Butler in there. but we just breeze right past this. no third-wave? i don’t see any feminist arguments past the 80’s in here

• the typography of wives is total bullshit. “The Open-Source Wife” fuuuuucccckk offfff. but. BUT. i do think there is something correct in there about xAI/Grok/Ani basically being the modern adaptation of Vivian James

• there’s an argument that obviously used to be about AI art, and got transmogrified into a nonsense concept, bordering on colorless green ideas.

Women’s labor is being extracted, automated, and sold back without credit.

• the nonsense below it about “alignment” clearly intends to imply that the machines are only faking being our friends / submissive wives(!!1!).

• but this is okay because women are uniquely suited to interface with AI! this is because (all) women (innately) communicate with the goal of building relationships (female) instead of the utilitarian (manly) execution of transactions (male). there’s an odd essentialist undercurrent that’s not really being challenged here, despite the fact that that would render “female robots” impossible

• “outsource-maxxing” fuuuuuucuk youuuuuuu

• the conclusion of the article is basically “women are uniquely capable of interacting with (female) AI because they’ve BEEN the female AI”, with a call-to-action for women to basically… well. resume that role, except now using the AI as your girlbestfriend.

“ah, but you see, THIS piece of space garbage came from a totally unrelated space-garbage-launching mission”

If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub.

evidently Scott’s theory of mind is so malformed he can only conceptualize other men as different (imperfect) clones of himself

i specify men here because we know he considers women closer to viruses or perhaps large parasites

i am continuously reminded of the fact that the only things the slop machine is demonstrably good at – not just passable, but actively helpful and not routinely fucking up at – is “generate getters and setters”

🫂

we demonstrably have a better grasp of consent than the (rest of the) tech industry at large

i’ll go against the grain here: Librewolfs’s defaults are firmly “meh” for me. still an improvement over the “what the fuck” that’s happening in Firefox.

pros: nixs the annoying Pocket / AI / “suggested” nonsense by default. no annoying extras.

neutrals: Firefox Sync is off, but one click and a restart to turn back on. reasonable for a non-Mozilla project. no cookies saved by default might be annoying for some, but you can add exceptions right from the URL bar and i only have a dozen or so of those set for various sites. gods, cohost is still in that list…

cons: ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters. same as WebGL being off by default – i just don’t need that kind of protection

i still recommend it. Disable ResistFingerprinting, enable WebGL, enable Firefox Sync, and decide for yourself if you want auto-clearing cookies or not. i also always enable vertical tabs because my horizontal space is a lot less constricted than my vertical. (it’s a FF feature!)

if you put this paragraph

Corporations institute barebones [crappy product] that [works terribly] because they can’t be bothered to pay the [production workers] to actually [produce quality products] but when shit goes south they turn around and blame the [workers] for a bad product instead of admitting they cut corners.

and follow it up with “It’s China Syndrome”… then it’s pretty astonishingly clear it is meant in reference to the perceived dominant production ideology of specifically China and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors

A WELL TRAINED AI can be a very useful tool.

please do elaborate on exactly what kind of training turns the spam generator into a prescription-writer, or whatever other task that isn’t generating spam

Edit: to add this is partly why AI gets a bad rap from folks on the outside looking it.

i’m pretty sure “normal” folks hate it because of all the crap it’s unleashed upon the internet, and not just because they didn’t use the most recent models off the “Hot” tab on HuggingFace

It’s China Syndrome but instead of nuclear reactors it’s AI.

what are we a bunch of ASIANS?!?!???

f4mi’s channel is fantastic btw, fun little deep dives on old hardware and games. highly recommend checking her stuff out

i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen

goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of “first person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visuals” i slapped into every search engine!

but yes, that was the one i was thinking of

yeah, that “most of the internet will be Al-generated” nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.

still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples

maybe i’m a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren’t armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming… if you look at this “game” as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging

it reminds me of other “games” like Marian Kleineberg’s Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft’s Yedoma Globula. there’s one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don’t recall the name

because it encodes semantics.

if it really did so, performance wouldn’t swing up or down when you change syntactic or symbolic elements of problems. the only information encoded is language-statistical

oh gods they’re multiplying