I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.

Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.

I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.

And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.

And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.

Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.

Fortunately I’m accepting applications for a new sleep paralysis demon.

And a whole bunch of Windows users clearly thinking way more about Linux than they care to admit.

Is there any particular piece of information that he revealed which could have been used by anyone really to… I dunno… bypass defenses or take advantage of people or whatever in some a way that could actually hurt people?

I dunno. Everything I’ve heard is that everything that he leaked that has been released was super innocuous militarily (not that the military is a bunch of knights in shining armor or anything) or national-defense-wise. It is (or at least should be) very embarrassing to the U.S. “intelligence apparatus”. And it’s clearly good reason to believe that Uncle Sam clearly doesn’t have our (American’s) best interests at heart. But what could possibly have even hypothetically been used to cause any harm?

(And, I don’t know, maybe you know something I’m unaware of, but it really seemed like he went out of his way to avoid any harm to anything but the reputation of the intelligence industrial complex. And maybe a few presidents.)

made us more vulnerable to threats

How so?

Standup comedy is all about personality and “vibes”. What they’re drinking affects the audience’s perception of both. It helps to set expectations. Their drink is often part of the performance. (Mind you, comics don’t always have beverages. I watched a comedy routine today and I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a beverage at all. Not even water.)

Reddit owns/uses multiple domains and the multiple domains can certainly collaborate to compromise your anonymity (or at least pseudonymity) even with third-party cookie blocking enabled. For instance they use redd.it for url shortening like this url. You could clear all your cookies for *.reddit.com and perhaps hide that you are the same user they previously banned for a while, but if redd.it has ever set any cookies that you haven’t cleared, the first time you visit a redd.it it could reveal your identity to Reddit. They probably own quite a number of other domains that might similarly reveal your identity to Reddit, and there are most likely third party companies that own other domains that will collaborate with Reddit in some way or another that will reveal your identity to Reddit.

As someone who has been boycotting Reddit since the API-enshittificationing, I can’t help but echo SpaceNoodle.

However.

Did you make sure your IP address has changed? Typically dynamic IPs don’t change very often unless you disconnect your router and/or modem temporarily (and sometimes even that won’t do it.) You’d need to check what your public IP is, restart or disconnect-and-reconnect your modem to get a new IP address, then check your IP address again. Unless you do all that and confirm your IP address has changed, it’s risky to try again on your laptop.

Also, you’ll want to clear more than just your Reddit cache. To be safe, I’d recommend clearing all your data in your browser. Cache, cookies, history, local SQL, all of it. And for all domains. (I don’t know to what extent Reddit may use other domains for things like authentication and such. They might still be able to tell you’re “you” even if you clear all the cookies and such for *.reddit.com.)

After what they did to Majora’s Mask for the 3DS re-release, I’m perhaps a bit unfairly biased against remakes/remasters/re-releases in general. I’d pretty much always prefer to have the “authentic” original experience.

I love you all.

I mean, not OP, but the rest of you.

A lot of your posts make me feel like I’m missing a lot of very specific context.

Does the pet store offer returns?

The feds blackmailed and jailed some of the most respected members of the community. That’s kinda when it fell apart.

• Step 1: Figure out why you’re not doing thing.
• Step 2: Take steps to address the reason why you’re not doing thing.

Seems simple, and in a way it is, but in other ways it can be very difficult.

On step 1, I recommend first researching the term “maladaptive daydreaming”. Seems relevant to what you’re describing.

Bah! Ok, yeah. That’s super annoying. Hopefully they move uncharacteristically fast for you.

You sure deleting your cookies wouldn’t fix it?

Very possible it wouldn’t, but it’d be the first thing I’d try.

Tardigrade’s underwhelming skill on the micro-cello is greatly outstripped by Tardigrade’s enthusiasm.

He’s bowing on the wrong side of the bridge.

• Get one made that says “kick me”.
• Give it as a gift.
• You know who.

Because white folks already stole everything else from Native Americans.