ebu

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.

having worked there (IBM Consulting specifically) in the last year, at least on my end it seemed like they were churning through everyone, not just the seniors. it felt like every two weeks you could show up to the office and there would just be people missing

i left for better pastures (and nearly double the salary)

for a second i thought we were talking about the audio codec and got mildly interested but no

“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!)

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