Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)

"Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown"

Even CNN is slowly starting to get it.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/27/tech/apple-ai-artificial-intelligence

OpenAI's move to allow generating "Ghibli stlye" images isn't just a cute PR stunt. It is an expression of dominance and the will to reject and refuse democratic values. It is a vulgar display of power.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/28/vulgar-display-of-power/

"If you're trying to dunk on the practice by linking to articles or examples that showcase the work, inadvertently flooding people's timelines with examples of this ghoulish, stolen work, stop.

Nobody wants to see that shit. Nobody needs to see it."

(Original title: Stop Sharing The Ghibli AI Slop, What Is Wrong With You)

https://aftermath.site/studio-ghibli-ai-art-openai-gpt-sam-altman-is-just-the-biggest-pile-of-shit

I think David got it right
"OpenAI’s financials weren’t any different before or after DeepSeek. They were still completely stupid and unsustainable. But the idea that burning money would protect them wasn’t viable any more.

This means OpenAI has to make more and more announcements so they look to the investors like they’re still cool and interesting. Any old garbage will do, like a literary fiction writer bot or something."
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114236556171702070

@cwebber "The attitudes of slop hucksters resemble incels, a kind destructive bitterness stemming from jealousy" perfect analogy.

Using AI image generators to create Ghibli style images just shows that you neither respect those pieces of art and their creators as well as not understanding their message of the importance of humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

I understand that everybody wants a narrative of technologically created "abundance". But you have to realize that without massive social changes even if we only used "green" technologies this amount of consumption would become a problem. It's very hard to turn that narrative into something truly aspirational, most of the time it will just end up being a "magic tech will fix all our issues, I don't want to change a thing and accept the consequences of my behavior lalalalalala I can't hear you".

Seriously Mozilla.ai: The fuck? The whole project is a bit of a mess but this meme is so tone deaf, such a slap in the face. In a time where people feel corporations abusing all data they can find it is a special kind of brain worm to claim: "Yeah, we also believe that."

Immer dran denken: Einen Feiertag zu streichen ist eine direkte Lohnkürzung.

(Original title: Streichung eines Feiertags könnte Milliarden Euro bringen)

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/arbeitsmarkt/streichung-feiertag-bip-milliarden-steigerung-100.html

The Fediverse should totally be more silly. Play around with the format more. Do shit that might not make sense on corporate platforms but that are human and weird and just some fucking fun.
https://icosahedron.website/@halcy/114184973143804131

With Open Source/Free Software as well as Creative Commons we have build pipelines to contribute to the commons (great!) but we never thought about how to defend those commons against appropriation.

That is why Open Source ends up massively benefitting corporations who don't give much back. That is also why Creative Commons has no interest in building more modular licenses that do for example prohibit training "AI" systems.

It's the market-based, liberal idea that if there's a lot of stuff there someone will make some money, someone will fund a startup and that is what everything is about. We've been had.

@cwebber Being a young kid who managed to configure my parents' 286 machine in a way that Commander Keen would run (remove mouse driver and crap, I am very old) was such a feeling of agency, of understanding that I was able to actually actively do things. I still sometimes get it when I can solve my (or a friend's) real-life problem with a few tech tricks.

When talking about "AI" there's a lot of chat about "hallucinations" but I think it is a bit misleading. Because it's _all_ hallucinations, some just accidentally true.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/16/its-all-hallucinations/

I've been using Open Source for decades now but I still can't get over how many people in that space immunize themselves (and their life decisions and bound identity) by denying everyone the right to criticize anything unless they themselves have put in hours upon hours of coding work.

"You can fork it or send a patch."

Yeah. So people who can't code have no right to complain at all, right? What's with people fluent in a programming language that the project doesn't even use? Is their criticism also invalid?

Really confirms what I wrote in https://tante.cc/2025/03/03/who-is-free-software-for/ :
"Because what we are selling isn’t a solution to people’s actual problems but a new identity. And most people already got one of those."

"Being told we cannot draw is the first step to telling people that no, they are not as competent as they believe themselves to be. Once you can convince a human being they cannot draw, you can convince them of mostly anything."

(Original title: How to draw an orange)

https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-draw-an-orange/

Okay, okay, I'm gonna do it.
https://mastodon.social/@Sarahp/114105346063266676

Remember the failed "Free Our Feeds" campaign that wanted to run a second bluesky relay for a fuckton of money and never got anywhere?

Well they now partnered wit a Blockchain company because what their failed idea needed was a slow database.

Fucking hell, that's incredibly stupid.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/who-owns-the-future-of-social-media-a-giant-leap-to-decentralize-core-components-of-blueskys-at-protocol-ecosystem-302387397.html

I am super in favor of people working for big tech "to do good from the inside" or "to change them from inside" realizing that you don't change the system, you either leave or you are changed.

Sometimes I'd love to see a tracker though: "It took me making 1 million dollars to realize that you can't twist capitalism into something good from the inside" would at least help contextualizing later fundraising.

@residuum let's just go with C for efficiency. https://jkorpela.fi/forms/cgic.html

Sorry but if your "we're here to make it easy to build small web things" is just another JS mess I can't take you seriously.

If it's about allowing more people to build something on the Web it needs to start with HTML and CSS. Not weird App routing and NPM dependencies.

(Yes I am old.)