Notices by Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)

RE: https://dialup.space/@TechTangents/117128373167235184

I figured I would self quote this because replies are weird on mastodon. This is a big part of why I have a hard line "Never AI" stance.

Water usage can be mitigated, energy can be renewable, manufacturing can catch up, but generative AI will always be built on theft because it needs so much data.

@thomasfuchs
But then AI companies came and destroyed all of that. Apparently copyright law doesn't exist if you operate piracy at a large enough scale. I think there are two parts to why "we" accepted it. First was "Open" AI's weird corporate structure with the 501c3 that clouded the for profit motives. Second that the entire planet is being held hostage in a software cold war where the, legitimate, concerns are that rival countries will have more powerful AI that can exploit vulnerabilities

@thomasfuchs
My biggest frustration about the AI situation, aside from people offloading critical thought to it, is copyright has been completely ignored. For years I've been learning minutia of how US copyright law works for preservation. I only publish materials through archive.org because they're a registered 501c3. I've looked into what it would take to run my own legal archive as well. For videos I've also read more into what properly counts as "fair use" and try to work within those laws

@thomasfuchs
It is indisputable that AI companies are training on copyrighted materials, and that they seek to profit from it. But they have been deemed untouchable for this crime which has only emboldened them and investors into thinking they are unstoppable. The only solution I see is to nationalize these companies and make access free. But "muh freedums" will call that "socialism" while the entire economy, from fab throughput to electricity usage, is pillaged for infinite corporate growth.

@thomasfuchs
PS: To pre-counter "but humans train on copyrighted material". Humans can be sued if they directly copy their training material
- The street vendor selling air brushed Elsa shirts is obviously breaking the law
- Parody laws exist as a carve out to protect works that transform existing material
- Clean Room engineering exists because just seeing the source material "taints" you

The law has been VERY clear on this for humans. But automate it at a huge scale and suddenly "it's okay"

@NanoRaptor
I heard a rumor that you can just use Nikon lenses on these. Apparently Canon white labeled the L lenses from Nikon since the mount threads were already backwards.

@thomasfuchs
At a more fundamental level, public libraries will never have rare or "lost" information. They wouldn't want the plebs trashing a book worth thousands of dollars. So if *you* can access it at a library, it's probably not hard to find another copy of it.

The "library of congress" just confuses the name, that is an archive. Completely different. Archives should not curate, they should hold indefinitely.

@thomasfuchs
The good news is I wasn't buying it. That's something I would just use MDN for now anyway.

It makes sense that the good parts of Javascript ends up being the shortest programming book here.

@thomasfuchs
I definitely agree that it gets used in the wrong places. Discord always surprises me by using it. My preferred usage of it doesn't extend being text files.

It is kind of sad that all the web 2.0 rich HTML editors have been thrown out for just markdown.

(I didn't know about the creator issues, that is unfortunate)

@thomasfuchs
I think it's more of a social problem. I feel Markdown is mostly fine (nesting headers is bad) when you use it as intended, making plain text documents that have some syntax flavor sprinkled in. I like how vim can do some light terminal codes for bold, italic, color, etc with it

It is a problem is when people are treating github as their home page and trying to use it as a replacement for HTML instead. I agree that if you are using a WSIWYG editor for markdown it is a poor choice

@thomasfuchs
You know what, this might be the one time I don't think this is a scam. You are definitely going to learn something from this and be wiser after. Just probably not in the way you thought...

Gee I sure love how AI gives the power back to the people. The people who use it to constantly flood my public email with garbage. It's so bad that real emails that aren't this nonsense are more likely to be marked as spam and filtered out now.

I'm becoming increasingly tempted to just nuke this email address and move to a new one that isn't listed on the channel about page anymore.

@thomasfuchs
I was given my hat as a gift, so I'm not 100% sure of its origins, but I think it is a true vintage hat made by K-Products.

In particular, I really like the embossed metal tension buckle on the back. I don't a modern recreation would bother with that detail.

@thomasfuchs
Ooh, either those aren't extrons or they are...

WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT?

Okay, *new guess* without even looking up anything. This is a test rig for one of those wrap around 4D movie theaters or arcade roller coasters and the computers are genlocked to playback different parts of the video or effects in sync.

Very fascinating photos!

@thomasfuchs This is basically what my office looks like now for VGA capture.

Definitely some kind of VGA broadcast overlay system. The two black boxes are synced and being fed some kind of converted VGA signal from the white boxes.

It's also possible the black boxes are just converting the VGA to composite and the extrons at the bottom might be the compositing/chroma key overlay.

I put out a video that was critical of AI without AI being mentioned in title, thumbnail, or description. And it was dogpiled with pro-AI comments almost instantly.

This video has almost 2.5X as many comments per view as my most recent "controversial" video, and 4.5 the average.

I don't want to say that AI bots are being used to astrorturf videos after scraping scripts, but I have a hard time believing this is real based on experience.

Update: The exact same two games are still for sale, a third seller just listed one for $90.

If you need me I'll just be screaming into the void.

I pay for Google Workspace to host custom email domains so they don't get blocked by the cartel. And gmail has stupid AI nonsense in it (that is broken and impossible to disable without support due to the age of the account, I don't use it).

But the thing that drives me the most nuts about it is its insistence on replacing idioms with bland corpo speak.

I get that these don't translate well to other languages. But sanitizing all language down to a lowest common denominator is awful.

Welcome to our future. My grandmother bought a book on Amazon a few days ago and this is what arrived. My BS radar went off like crazy as soon as I saw it.

This is a almost completely AI generated book, printed on demand, and sold as a physical product.