ebu

🫂

we demonstrably have a better grasp of consent than the (rest of the) tech industry at large

i’ll go against the grain here: Librewolfs’s defaults are firmly “meh” for me. still an improvement over the “what the fuck” that’s happening in Firefox.

pros: nixs the annoying Pocket / AI / “suggested” nonsense by default. no annoying extras.

neutrals: Firefox Sync is off, but one click and a restart to turn back on. reasonable for a non-Mozilla project. no cookies saved by default might be annoying for some, but you can add exceptions right from the URL bar and i only have a dozen or so of those set for various sites. gods, cohost is still in that list…

cons: ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters. same as WebGL being off by default – i just don’t need that kind of protection

i still recommend it. Disable ResistFingerprinting, enable WebGL, enable Firefox Sync, and decide for yourself if you want auto-clearing cookies or not. i also always enable vertical tabs because my horizontal space is a lot less constricted than my vertical. (it’s a FF feature!)

ooh, just found out he has a post tripling down. it’s a rather rich text, maybe could stand to be its own post on techtakes

the obnoxious self-aggrandizement is dripping all over the text, not the least of which when he conceptualizes himself as a part of a “new and potentially valuable class of contributors”, as if the addition of a slop-generator can transform the layperson into someone capable of contributing to a complex software project. but that’s old news. here’s what’s getting me now:

For a project like Mesa, which uses the permissive MIT license, accidentally incorporating a snippet of code that carries the “viral” obligations of the GPL could potentially trigger a legal catastrophe. Faith Ekstrand drove this point home with a chillingly practical example: “If we piss off Nvidia and they sue us, the project is over. It doesn’t matter whether or not we can theoretically win.”

this is a legal issue – this should be Seyfarth’s home turf! obviously he can’t code and has a sneering contempt for anyone who learns to do so, but in this micro-instance, giving an informed legal opinion on how this issue could be handled would actually be in the Mesa project’s best interests! let’s see how he

However this is a hypothetical scenario and there are several ways to mitigate such legal risks. Most projects already shift the legal burden to the contributor. The project still has to reject any code that openly violates the licensing terms, but if such violations are not obvious, there is little legal risk to the project itself.

“it wouldn’t happen, and even if it did, you could just try to sacrifice your individual developers to NVIDIA one at a time and hope that makes them go away.” great cool thank you. this is the best you’ve got with your legal background. fantastic. what an utter tool

you definitely did in fact say that the idea that “copyright is about trading art for money” is bollocks. that is in fact a thing you said, straightforwardly

compare and contrast with “real artists do it for love, not money”, which is a thing nobody in this entire thread said

and wouldn’t you know it, a complete devolution into full-tilt “”“debate”“” shadowboxing is my cue to turn off notifications. best of luck in the ring, i hear the spectre of communism has a nasty left hook

the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money, is about as attached to reality as the ai technorapture

this barely has to even be argued, in spirit or in practice. even the concept of “ownership” as ascribed to creators is basically just a right to sell the work or sublicense said “ownership”

i think her takes make a little more sense if you think of the infinite noise machine as the art object itself rather than any particular output of it. i obviously can’t read her mind but if you think of a music-generating model as an interactive music toy rather than “a replacement for a musician”, then her position makes way more sense. why wouldn’t you want more people doing Poet Laureate Infinity? i think for her the crime isn’t scraping, but scraping in service of overmarketed smoothed-over slop generators instead of actually interesting art

aside from the rest of the assheadedness of this comment, this jumps out to me:

Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven’t given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven’t quit.

and, uh, no? if you stop smoking, you’ve stopped smoking. there’s not yet solid scientific evidence that vaping is a reliable path to nicotine cessation but it is, in fact, not smoking.

if it is nicotine cessation you’re talking about, then nicotine patches and pills are known effective tools. they’re often prescribed to people quitting. in that case, taking pills is literally “quitting”.

but let’s be real: you don’t care about either the physical act of burning tobacco or the medical act of kicking a nicotine dependency. you’re just invoking “smoking” as linguistic shorthand for a(nother) group of people you feel smugly superior to for having problems you don’t have

and people get very defensive about this one too. like i’m pretty confident that coolboy004 on reddit is not giving a nuanced delivery on the ethics of a company running an ai-powered call center when he types “screws will not replace us” in all caps on /r/fuckai, and yet

i think it sucks that we’re stuck with, say, bluesky engineers genuinely trying to pull the most moronic variant of “but what if the stochastic text generator might have feelings in the future too”, but we still need to be able to talk about why people feel the need to make “clanka with the hard r” jokes (answer it’s racism)

from what i see, white people simply clamor for a context in which they’re “allowed” to finally call someone the n-word, and are willing to accept substitute targets for their racism

add in a protective cloak of “it’s ironic and a joke and YOU’RE the real racist for pointing this out” and you get a whole lot of people who are extremely okay slinging around barely modified racial slurs

dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it

replacing ChatGPT with a script that replies “Great, I’ll finish that for you by ${Date.Now() + 86400}”

stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of “capitalism make computer bad”

and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general

50% success rate? sorry, all this for a coin flip?

i needed this giggle, gods bless our dubbers

you have to scroll through the person’s comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros

it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel we’ve all come to know and despise remains unknown

they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can “work in the background” on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestacey’s other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed

oh 100%. on the flipside of that, the advantage is that usually it’s relatively easy to flip basic constructions into sneers. the combination of getting their arguments picked apart while being mocked usually causes the monocle to fall off the seal reeeal quick.

maybe there should be some kind of scoring system. perhaps a golf-like. par for three comments before they complain about your tone (sneering in a sneer club, my gods!), four for getting themselves banned. a bonus sticker in the shape of a star if “ad hominem” is typed verbatim