FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

@altruios @dalias @woe2you @tante

By this logic, I should be allowed to scrape movies encoded in H.264 off of streaming websites and transcode them to H.265.

The transcoder is inspired by the original copy and creates something new and different (at the byte level). Since the output product is now something completely different (but still contains the same information, a watchable movie), by your logic this is now completely legal instead of obvious piracy.

Yet if I were to do this, I would be breaking the law. Why is it different when AI does it versus when ffmpeg does it? They're both just software reading and interpreting information and transforming it into something else. Either both should be legal or neither should.

Cool project: "Nepenthes" is a tarpit to catch (AI) web crawlers.

"It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse."

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

If you see someone who’s questioning Elon Musk for the first time because he obviously lied about having a top account on Path of Exile — do not mock them, do not shame them, do not complain that they should have figured this out years ago. That would just be pushing them back into the radicalizing environment they’re currently standing on the edge of saying “wait a moment…”

Radicalizing environments and cults pull people away from their friends and family and tell them that they’ll be mocked for embracing the truth but it’s worth it. The mockery then pushes them into the arms of the ones saying “shh shh, we understand… don’t worry, you’re the smart one here, they’ll be sorry.”

Yes, obviously lying about Path of Exile doesn’t even make his top one hundred worst sins. That’s not the point. The point is that this one is clear as day to the exact demographic he’s targeting — lonely young men. Once you conclude for yourself that someone is irrefutably a liar, it becomes easier to revisit what they said before and reevaluate it.

me: i’ve single-handedly written software used by tens of millions of people, you can see it right over at github.com/april

prospective employers: sorry, but unfortunately you did poorly in a high-stress 40-minute coding exercise, writing code with no time to think about how to solve a problem you’ve never seen before, in a terrible dev environment, while someone stares at you the whole time

YOU MUST SATE YOUR THIRST TO HAVE STRENGTH TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES.

Bad internet because the shark girlfriend keeps nomming the WiFi cables. ​​🩷

I hope this email finds you well and cheery; myself, I am in good health, dirty perhaps, still happy as a wee pig.

@jk Every checkbox will spin up a whole new server in the background, because it's 'serverless', and kill it again when it's unchecked, no wonder it's slow.

2025. you go to a website. you see all the elements on the page pop-in, loading one by one. it's like the 90s again. your internet connection might be hundreds of megabits per second. the web designer is using a 4k video file as a looping background, and that somehow loads quickly compared to all the actual useful elements on the page. three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. each checkbox and table has to initialize its own software stack of UI abstraction libraries and surveillance middleware

@patterfloof I think we'll be there basically forever now. There's a limit to the S-curve of increasing productivity, and we're well along the top of it. Maintenance and services are most of the economy of the future, that means labour and that means paying for it. Privatising wealth in the hands of tech bros makes real solutions harder to effect

Yesterday's government announcement that AI is going to fix potholes continues to live rent-free in the rage room of my head.

I don't have words to describe how stupid this is.

Council workers with shovels fix potholes. And since the government continues to fail to fund councils, they are sacking the workers who do this job.

There just aren't the words, faces or palms enough to deal with the asininity.

int. Kremlin
agent 1 (sets down bong): what if
agent 2: (giggling)
agent 1: what if we get trump to buy, like...
agent 2: (stifling laughter, holding back tears)
agent 1: ...fucking greenland
agent 2: (fully crying)
agent 1 (opens gmail): who's the dumbest senator

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/01/13/danish-intelligence-russia-forged-letter-to-spark-trumps-greenland-purchase-bid/

But all big tech will need to do is market the concept enough, so that people accept it as what AI always meant

Then they can control what it spits out and control what is "intelligent"; right now what these models spit out is often racist

Who would have known putting in all books into a model would make it racist? I guess anyone who reads, but besides them, who?

I'm not going to entertain the idea that we did not move the goalposts on what AI is.

In addition, the backtracking to AGI is just as stupid because it fails to understand the concept general intelligence too

The conversation begins with everyone agreeing this is marketing hype

There are interesting applications of all types of machine learning-- but pretending we can create artificial intelligence when we can't understand the animal brain is hubris beyond belief

I have a proposal for a solution of the term "AI"; it is neither intelligent by any definition, and often has humans cultivating data sets

And even artist talking about it are forced to talk bout it in the terms as it if is "AI" which benefits them anytime you even engage in discussion

I think a far more accurate and useful description is:

Slop Algorithm

It is a series of machine learning algorithms not AI, and generates slop, not intelligence

de nada

The geography of technical terms according to live on-device captioning:

ROM: Rome
UART: York
ASIC: Asiatic
JTAG: Democratic Republic of JPEG