We must do the communal chant to summon him.

Someone remind me how the chant goes again.

Can you point on the doll to where the bad penguin man touched you?

I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.

Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.

I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.

And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.

And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.

Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.

Fortunately I’m accepting applications for a new sleep paralysis demon.

And a whole bunch of Windows users clearly thinking way more about Linux than they care to admit.

Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag

But they repeat themselves.

More like “nice-in-quotation-marks”. Maybe “polite” would have been a better word. They smile bigger – exaggerated and insincere. They try to satisfy whatever you’re wanting so they can conclude the interaction as quickly as possible. They keep an air of superior self-righteousness while being nice… defensively.

Mind you, I do even put “polite” in quotes on purpose. The more stuck-up folks can very “politely” cut you straight off at the knees in a way that preserves some semblance of plausible deniability where poorer folks (on average, very much a generalization) may be more real/authentic in general and can be more direct about calling you an asshole.

Mind you, this friend of mine who made this observation didn’t say any of what I said in this comment. That’s just my own editorializing.

I have a friend who recently moved from the poorer side of the town I live in to the richer. (I’ve always lived in the latter, richer area.) And he was talking about how striking it was to him that on the richer side, strangers would go way out of their way to avoid interacting or making eye contact or anything, but the moment you forced the issue and start actually talking to them, they’re the nicest people ever. The other side of town, interaction wasn’t avoided the same way, and they wouldn’t necessarily be quite as nice in their interactions.

I love you all.

I mean, not OP, but the rest of you.

Does the pet store offer returns?

Bah! Ok, yeah. That’s super annoying. Hopefully they move uncharacteristically fast for you.

You sure deleting your cookies wouldn’t fix it?

Very possible it wouldn’t, but it’d be the first thing I’d try.

Tardigrade’s underwhelming skill on the micro-cello is greatly outstripped by Tardigrade’s enthusiasm.

He’s bowing on the wrong side of the bridge.

Necropost much?

• Get one made that says “kick me”.
• Give it as a gift.
• You know who.

Because white folks already stole everything else from Native Americans.

“Not fair, they’re too smart.”

For sure. But I’ve seen a lot more sins committed in the name of reusing code than in the name of minimizing dependencies.

“A little copying is better than a little dependency.”