Joined the Mayqueeze.

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  • 391 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • All the so-called AI companies are [expletive redacted] that often obtained their training data in questionable ways. And they should be sued and made to pay.

    What is missing in my opinion from a lot of artists, who now hold one fist in the air and a pitchfork in the other marching on Silicon Valley, is an acknowledgement of risk that they took when they put their artwork themselves on the internet. The risk used to be other people could take, copy, duplicate it but this was balanced by being able to monetize it. That nothing that ends up online is ever safe was known two decades ago. If your stuff was stolen from galleries and coffee table books, I’m not talking about you. If you made your stuff available so search engines and social media sites could bring you costumers, you’re it.

    Also, why are companies able to obtain training data in “creative” ways? Because you and me and all of us like cutting corners and getting shit for free. So we steal, copy, duplicate, torrent stuff. Sure, point your finger at Facebook for torrenting together their model. Also point your finger at the people who provided the training data this way. Many people will end up pointing their fingers at themselves here.

    I think the author invokes the Luddites and doesn’t realize that we might just see history repeating. The Luddites were skilled artisans fighting against slave labor automization. They lost. Many were displaced by industrial progress, a smaller number remained. Fast forward to today and visual artists like the author fight the evil automated LLMs. They will also lose; a small number will prevail.

    Every technical advancement has brought these upheavals and we are in one right now. There are far fewer landscape and portrait painters around today because they had to go Picasso or impressionist when photography rolled around. There are far fewer negative developer jobs these days as entry level jobs in photography because use of film has fallen off a cliff. We also have fewer manual typesetters and no cavalry to speak of. Shit changes. Shit is changing now.

    Art will prevail. Human made one will be sought after. But there market will not be the same. The only thing we can do now is trying to catch all those people and jobs this technological leap will shuffle loose. Like we tried our best with coal miners or factory jobs that went to China.









  • The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn’t come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.

    Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that’s not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it’s really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.

    And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That’s a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.


  • You can help stop your elected dickheads. Protest, general strike, a constant barrage of your elected officials with dissent. They were bombing schools in your name.

    Iran has been under the longest internet blackout in history (if you don’t count North Korea). The things that trickle out from there are scarce and that little bandwidth may be better used to collect evidence of atrocities, ironically committed either by the regime or the US/Israel coalition. The current top 40 may be less important at this point in time. So there is a pretty high chance that you won’t get a good answer to your question.







  • I fear there won’t be a solution that doesn’t cost money somewhere. Please don’t buy 3 burner phone numbers at once. I would feel bad if it didn’t work and/or you get suspected of being a criminal.

    Check your current phone subscription if you have one. There might be a way to get an additional number for free or very little extra. And it might be a good backup emergency service to have just with your parents maybe even if you go down a different route for the rest.



  • Anything other than Signal seems unadvisable from a privacy POV. Do you have a way of talking to them live on the phone, at the same time? You can try and register their Signal on a burner phone wherever you are. As they sign up, you sit on the call and give them the phone number and security code when it comes through. Unless having Signal on the phone is itself a reason to get arrested in Russia, which frankly wouldn’t surprise me either.

    I don’t know if this will work. I did it on a different service using the number on a dumbphone to register for use on a tablet once.