ebu

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

ooh, just found out he has a post tripling down. it’s a rather rich text, maybe could stand to be its own post on techtakes

the obnoxious self-aggrandizement is dripping all over the text, not the least of which when he conceptualizes himself as a part of a “new and potentially valuable class of contributors”, as if the addition of a slop-generator can transform the layperson into someone capable of contributing to a complex software project. but that’s old news. here’s what’s getting me now:

For a project like Mesa, which uses the permissive MIT license, accidentally incorporating a snippet of code that carries the “viral” obligations of the GPL could potentially trigger a legal catastrophe. Faith Ekstrand drove this point home with a chillingly practical example: “If we piss off Nvidia and they sue us, the project is over. It doesn’t matter whether or not we can theoretically win.”

this is a legal issue – this should be Seyfarth’s home turf! obviously he can’t code and has a sneering contempt for anyone who learns to do so, but in this micro-instance, giving an informed legal opinion on how this issue could be handled would actually be in the Mesa project’s best interests! let’s see how he

However this is a hypothetical scenario and there are several ways to mitigate such legal risks. Most projects already shift the legal burden to the contributor. The project still has to reject any code that openly violates the licensing terms, but if such violations are not obvious, there is little legal risk to the project itself.

“it wouldn’t happen, and even if it did, you could just try to sacrifice your individual developers to NVIDIA one at a time and hope that makes them go away.” great cool thank you. this is the best you’ve got with your legal background. fantastic. what an utter tool

you definitely did in fact say that the idea that “copyright is about trading art for money” is bollocks. that is in fact a thing you said, straightforwardly

compare and contrast with “real artists do it for love, not money”, which is a thing nobody in this entire thread said

and wouldn’t you know it, a complete devolution into full-tilt “”“debate”“” shadowboxing is my cue to turn off notifications. best of luck in the ring, i hear the spectre of communism has a nasty left hook

the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money, is about as attached to reality as the ai technorapture

this barely has to even be argued, in spirit or in practice. even the concept of “ownership” as ascribed to creators is basically just a right to sell the work or sublicense said “ownership”

i think her takes make a little more sense if you think of the infinite noise machine as the art object itself rather than any particular output of it. i obviously can’t read her mind but if you think of a music-generating model as an interactive music toy rather than “a replacement for a musician”, then her position makes way more sense. why wouldn’t you want more people doing Poet Laureate Infinity? i think for her the crime isn’t scraping, but scraping in service of overmarketed smoothed-over slop generators instead of actually interesting art

aside from the rest of the assheadedness of this comment, this jumps out to me:

Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven’t given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven’t quit.

and, uh, no? if you stop smoking, you’ve stopped smoking. there’s not yet solid scientific evidence that vaping is a reliable path to nicotine cessation but it is, in fact, not smoking.

if it is nicotine cessation you’re talking about, then nicotine patches and pills are known effective tools. they’re often prescribed to people quitting. in that case, taking pills is literally “quitting”.

but let’s be real: you don’t care about either the physical act of burning tobacco or the medical act of kicking a nicotine dependency. you’re just invoking “smoking” as linguistic shorthand for a(nother) group of people you feel smugly superior to for having problems you don’t have

and people get very defensive about this one too. like i’m pretty confident that coolboy004 on reddit is not giving a nuanced delivery on the ethics of a company running an ai-powered call center when he types “screws will not replace us” in all caps on /r/fuckai, and yet

i think it sucks that we’re stuck with, say, bluesky engineers genuinely trying to pull the most moronic variant of “but what if the stochastic text generator might have feelings in the future too”, but we still need to be able to talk about why people feel the need to make “clanka with the hard r” jokes (answer it’s racism)

from what i see, white people simply clamor for a context in which they’re “allowed” to finally call someone the n-word, and are willing to accept substitute targets for their racism

add in a protective cloak of “it’s ironic and a joke and YOU’RE the real racist for pointing this out” and you get a whole lot of people who are extremely okay slinging around barely modified racial slurs

dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it

replacing ChatGPT with a script that replies “Great, I’ll finish that for you by ${Date.Now() + 86400}”

1. no one is assuming iNaturalist is being malicious, saying otherwise is just well-poisoning.
2. there is no amount of testing that can ever overcome the inherently-stochastic output of LLMs. the “best-case” scenario is text-shaped slop that is more convincing, but not any more correct, which is an anti-goal for iNaturalist as a whole
3. we’ve already had computer vision for ages. we’ve had google images for twenty years. there is absolutely no reason to bolt a slop generator of any kind to a search engine.
4. “staff is very much connected with users” obviously should come with some asterisks given the massive disconnect between staff and users on their use and endorsement of spicy autocorrect
5. framing users who delete their accounts in protest of machine slop being put up on iNaturalist, which is actually the point of contention here, as being over-reactive to the mere mention of AI, and thus being basically the same as the AI boosters? well, it’s gross. iNat et. al. explicitly signaled that they were going to inject AI garbage into their site. users who didn’t like that voted with their accounts and left. you don’t get to post-hoc ascribe them a strawman rationale and declare them basically the same as the promptfans, fuck off with that

“emotional”

let me just slip the shades on real quick

“womanly”

checks out

this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though

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