M O I S T U R I Z E M E

Science location, you rube.

It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.

The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).

It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.

Yeah, it’s basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:

https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/

This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don’t need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.

I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.

Lemmy might be less active but doesn’t make you feel like every contribution is rewarding someone who actively insulted and disrespected you and ruined something you used to enjoy. Big plus.

If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT’s existing “search the web” function, I don’t know why they’d bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it’s often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you’re only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google’s decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.

Heckjumpers

ABC cites an odd claim:

Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.

You can’t make audio using OpenAI or Bing, just text and images. I really hope they didn’t arrest the wrong person based on a hunch and office politics.

“…a pigeon could shit on it, who knows!”

There’s an excellent chance that even some of the “authentic” discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.

Had an entertaining time asking it to list the states Trump won with a running total, pointing out that the total was less than 270, and then soft-locking it in an endless loop of “My previous statement was incorrect. Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election” in response to literally any statement. To defeat the alt-right AI you don’t need some brilliant paradox, just basic arithmetic.

They’re not releasing this yet though, and require even private testers to get explicit consent and not imitate public figures, restrictions I’m sure will carry over if and when it becomes public. They’ve been cautious to a fault. Look at something like ElevenLabs for an example of lax enforcement for cash.

Does this have any impact on the IPO? Would they have to delay it (again)?

So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.

As shitty as American politics can be, we should be very thankful that overt violence against political candidates, journalists, volunteers, etc. has not (yet) been normalized. I can’t imagine being involved with Mexican politics, especially anti-drug/anti-corruption reform, with the threat of cartel retaliation hanging over you and your family. Strong respect to those who tough it out.

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, but at this point I think he would have been destroyed, McGovern-style, if he’d been the nominee either time. He never had to face a truly negative campaign in the primaries and there’s no telling how he would have fared if Republicans (and some Democrats!) really twisted the knife with stuff like “the rape essay”, his employment history, his association with socialism, etc. We made out so much better with a moderate-seeming guy like Biden who managed to secure most of what Sanders would have been realistically able to pass while giving it a nice centrist sheen.

I’m a little puzzled by the name, since it seems to be more about vintage computer hardware than the web. Or I guess maybe it’s like a mini-web about retro things? Idk