Discovered this morning that Maven https://heymaven.com (a social media startup who's CEO is ex OpenAI "Ken Stanley: leading the Open-Endedness Team at OpenAI") is mass importing public posts from the #fediverse with no links back to the original and no way to delete them. It seems there is no Opt-out or Opt-in mechanism at all. It also has posts from #Bluesky pulled in via @bsky.brid.gy that are also not linked back to the original.
I found my shadow profile on maven, too, spanning 5/17/24 - 6/8/24, but not every one.
They've stripped hashtags from the bottom of my posts. Image AltText seems to be missing or inaccessible there. And, they add their own imprecise tags.
I wonder if hashtags in the body of a post would stop them, get stripped – bastardizing the content, or simply be ignored? What about Emojis? I'll throw a hashtag into today's post and see if it turns up there in a few days.
My first video from my trip to Japan is now up on Patreon and Nebula.
I visited the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku station in Tokyo. This station transports 3 MILLION people every day!
Shinjuku station is really interesting because it isn’t just a ridiculously efficient transportation hub, it’s also an excellent example of how an effective train station can make the surrounding neighbourhood truly great.
We were in Taiwan and Qingdao around the same time you were in Japan. TW platforms (metro and HSR) all have queue markings that people obeyed with almost no exceptions. In contrast, on the mainland (and back here in Vienna) people would frequently stand in front of train doors and block exiting passengers.
We debated whether this was habituation to the markings; to queuing generally; or a deeper cultural disposition maybe dating back to Japanese rule.
@notjustbikes Hi from Nagoya, the fly-past city on the way to Kyoto, which you must also have visited? I earlier offered to liaise with city planning offices in one of the ten or twenty million comments that I assume you read in detail, having nothing better to do with your time 😳, sorry I couldn't be of service. Hope you had an enjoyable and productive visit!
We need to distinguish clearly between car sellers and fuel sellers in order to understand some of the disorientingly stupid discourse around all of this better.
Both are trying to kill us, mind you, but they are still not the same forces, and they are no longer friends.
ive been thinking about how i learned the computer programming stuff i know, and i think it boils down to "don't worry about which one", "keep trying", and "if it feels too hard or frustrating, then take a break and do something different, and then come back to it later if you are in the mood to try again".
and the most important thing: find (a) communit{y,ies} you like
thank you for reading my textbook on how to learn computer programming
The current wave of AI hype demonstrates of the problem of capacity creep. In some measurable regards, hardware keeps getting better, right? More powerful, more efficient, more affordable. But rather than letting those gains ameliorate the problems created by tech, tech companies see them as increased capacity, and look to fill that capacity. So while hardware improvements should be reducing the emissions caused by computing, their growing as companies look for ways to turn capacity into profit.
It follows that assurances to the effect that the AI industry will eventually find ways to shrink the carbon footprint of their technology are entirely untrustworthy. Any improvements that might lower the emissions caused by AI processing are bound to be treated by the industry as excess capacity, which they will promptly find ways to fill, excusing the increasing size of the footprint the same way they excuse it now: by promising that they'll find ways to shrink it in the future.
Every WiFi network access point that has ever been in range of an iPhone has its network name (SSID) and GPS location (taken from the iPhone) stored and used by Apple.
Apple introduced a way to opt out in March 2024 - you must append the string "_nomap" to your SSID.
The issues around this were discussed more than a decade ago in the IETF's geopriv working group. @coopdanger was one of the chairs at the time, and the utter insanity of expecting home users to change their SSIDs to get this privacy was well-explored. That Apple is only now adding this fig leaf of a "better than nothing" solution would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid and sad.
@jgoerzen reviewed mail providers and the one I use came up on top, Migadu. The only thing I wondered was that John criticized Fastmail for being in Australia where the state has far reaching powers and Migadu is in Switzerland, where the state also has far-reaching powers, as far as I know.
The lawyer that keeps popping up in these situations is Steiger, and he wrote about Proton Mail and Threema (in German). The short summary is that Swiss companies must cooperate with the state and the state cooperates with foreign powers. Furthermore, Switzerland forces providers to keep logs for long times and to hand them out when required. It’s not trivial and not automatic, but my assumption is that it slow and thorough. There’s nobody fighting for your rights before a trial, after all.
I guess what I want to say is that I use them, I like them, but I very much dislike the Swiss privacy fairy dust that Proton Mail, Threema, Migadu and others imply which doesn’t actually exist. In Germany, at least, politicians vote to force providers to keep logs and the constitutional court kicks it out again. Not so in Switzerland. Network analysis is just a legal request away.
I’m not a lawyer and I barely know a thing, of course, so don’t believe me – but also don’t believe them without investigating and understand the implications. Like, maybe the state doesn’t keep logs but it forces every email provider with more than five customers to keep logs? It’s only marginally better.
@jgoerzen reviewed mail providers and the one I use came up on top, Migadu. The only thing I wondered was that John criticized Fastmail for being in Australia where the state has far reaching powers and Migadu is in Switzerland, where the state also has far-reaching powers, as far as I know.
The lawyer that keeps popping up in these situations is Steiger, and he wrote about Proton Mail and Threema (in German). The short summary is that Swiss companies must cooperate with the state and the state cooperates...
« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations.
Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.
"Remove the people"
"What would you like them changed to?"
"... grass. I just don't want them there"
They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.
I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.
Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while.
But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time. » – from a Facebook group called Artists Against Generative Al, via Danielle Sanfilippo, @scottfgray, @Hyades51@dice.camp.
« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping...
@liaizon
A guy who used to work for a company that commits blatant content theft is once again committing blatant content theft.
And, bafflingly, getting away scot-free. I guess because Fedi users don't have million-dollar legal departments.
@liaizon
Thank you for sharing.
I found my shadow profile on maven, too, spanning 5/17/24 - 6/8/24, but not every one.
They've stripped hashtags from the bottom of my posts. Image AltText seems to be missing or inaccessible there. And, they add their own imprecise tags.
I wonder if hashtags in the body of a post would stop them, get stripped – bastardizing the content, or simply be ignored? What about Emojis? I'll throw a hashtag into today's post and see if it turns up there in a few days.
@liaizon @djsundog
Looks like I'm in there, and somehow they scooped up a "Mentioned people only" post?????