Michael Burns (of Wisecrack) has a pretty good analysis of this: https://youtu.be/VtyRTFGfw6o

I like this one: https://youtu.be/Dt6iTwVIiMM

I can’t think of a time when I added the wrong person to a group chat. I’m sure it’s happened, but probably not in the past 10-15 years.

And my online chats are pretty low-stakes, so it’s not like I’m trying very hard.

💍🧙‍♂️🌋

This way lies madness

Functionex: because a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

Vampires… Man, I dunno…

If you’re designing games for the male gaze, the gender select screen is basically “are you here for the ooh-ra, or the a-woo-ga?”

True… but you can sure enable one by not voting.

Running both Linux and macOS on a daily basis… They’re both completely competent, and have basically the same amount of rough edges once you dig in and get your hands dirty. If you find one of them impossibly difficult, it’s a skill issue.

Punishing women for being insufficiently feminine has always been a parallel goal of the anti-trans movement.

Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

Nobody:

Me: Remember to do your part and crop out the useless “Nobody:” before posting memes

Just to be clear, I was referring to a poem by Dayna EM Craig, titled “A Narcissist’s Prayer”.

How does that one go?

SnotFlickerman nailed it, so I’ll just add that the “man or bear” saga taught me what a “scissor statement” is.

For me, that was the biggest revelation of the whole thing.

You had people encountering the same general words in the same general order, but understanding them to mean completely different things, and not being able to comprehend how anyone could disagree with them.

It was like a rehash of “the dress”, but not so whimsical.

It was really kind of distressing, the extent to which it laid bare (no pun intended) how poorly we’re actually communicating with each other online, even though it otherwise seems like we’re communicating more than ever.

Aaaaand then we just kinda shrugged that off and went back to internet as usual.

It seems like any time you criticize AI, you get an escalating series of responses akin to the narcissist’s prayer:

• It must be faked
• And if it wasn’t faked, you were using the wrong model
• And if you weren’t using the wrong model, you prompted it wrong
• And if you didn’t prompt it wrong, don’t worry — “this is the worst it’ll ever be”

Just some humble guys who pooled their money to buy it for $100,000 and then renovate it for $3.3mil.