curser

I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there’s some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs

fresh install:

• at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it’s going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
• figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself…)

while I’m certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it’s fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don’t even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s

christ I’m gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time

I wish I was cool enough to have the world’s worst people get so mad at me that they…make fan art and put it up on their website. What’s Elon going for here?

If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, they’re doing a good job.

“I want to speak to the manager” energy.

oh boy it’s gonna be funny/painful to see musk’s biggest fans try to litigate this on Wikipedia with all the banal nothing and weird stalking that trace’s article consists of

I put way too much effort into evaluating TW’s rant.

Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.

good luck! it sounds like you’re coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless they’re gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PM’s better than that), you’re at least likely to make an impact

Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose

between this and all the SEO on OpenAI’s marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, it’s exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, I’ve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAI’s promises didn’t pan out. I’m hoping you can find what you need — our back archives might have a few links if you haven’t searched through here yet.

Best of luck!

This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, I’m sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.

Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.

Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:

Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon’s stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.

They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…

It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.

we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine

I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.

I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place

I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story

It’s weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it’s fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder’s objection doesn’t matter.

For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they’re not only infringing on typical “all rights reserved” works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?

My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.

They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.

Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity’s business model again?

they wish this technology didn’t exist

this is supposed to be invalidating, but like… yes? what’s wrong with that?

Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.

You know you’re dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.

Man, it’s almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.

If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how’s GE doing these days again?

Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.

I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy

I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(

Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.

According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it’s actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can’t do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.