If you always bet on "everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people", you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.

One last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.

He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

The writers' and actors' strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say "hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre". Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.

Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to "you as a musician should work for free" and not "you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital", and that's about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.

Solutions: AI-guided suggestions to parents about the traits they should select

There’s a joke in here about and that’s how the human race all became polydactylic with extra elbows, but it’s too early in the morning for me to figure out how to make it not be at the expense of people with limb and facial differences.

clip

If you’re using a new-to-you ORM, and you don’t ever check the docs to see the basic primary key syntax… it’s SQLAchemy, it’s well documented and there’s tons of prior art.

Also I don’t understand their business case but if a user has a primary key, a unique user ID, and a unique customer ID, then all three of those uniquely identify the customer. (Weird, but there are some plausible explanations.) But then why would you need both the user ID and the customer ID in the subscription table is this some stripe thing I don’t understand or are they just bad at this?

The deeply amusing thing about oglaf is how often it isn’t porn or even NSFW.

Trying to figure out if that comment is a bit or not, and at least one of the poster's other comments on the video is this literary masterwork:

some people have observable x chromosones and others have observable y chromosones, and those categories are good to make useful distinctions, just like I make a distinction between a chair and a sofa... I still don't believe gender is real, and I can still observe sex. Sure, sex could be an illusion, but it doesn't matter. The chair is most certainly an illusion.... At what point does wood become a chair? Is a three legged chair a chair? A two legged? A one legged? A none legged? Is a seat and a chair the same thing? What if I break the seat in half? Is it still a chair?

But what’s the point of being a trans woman in his narrative? Trans women will also be replaced by uterine replicators and sexbots! They will also be disempowered and sent to the salt mines with the cis women! That’s the part I find inexplicable.

I can see there’s a shitty faux-feminist idea that cis women will be replaced by trans women, like an XX chromosome is inherently inferior (so feminist!) and anyone with both a superior XY genome & a nice rack will obviously be a threat. But in this case Roko’s own argument says that robots are superior to flesh, so trans women aren’t the threat.

I realize that I’m trying to find logic in something that’s so beyond dumb it’s come out the other side into a sort of sublime form of perfection, but at least the basilisk follows some bizarre internal logic. This one is self contradictory. Is it so much to ask that I want misogynist and transphobic assholes to understand how to build a basic logical argument?!?

Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

• MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
• Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
• They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
• So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
• They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.

The prose on that The Spruce link makes me hate the concepts of design, aesthetics, and houses.

If you walked by some strangers having a conversation with each other out in public and one of them said something you didn’t understand, would you go running up to them saying “please don’t talk to each other without explaining everything to me, I think you’re making stuff up because I don’t have all the context”?

(You would not.)

If you have something to ask OP, ask it. Politely. Don’t come in to somebody else’s conversation demanding context and calling them a liar.