jaschop

joined 10 months ago
[–] jaschop@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

First I thought "Oh jeez, what a wall of text" but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.

I don't think callling genAI output "not art" is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That's kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.

But I also share your sentiment about "AI artists" pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of "not artists", because that's what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.

And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.

The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that's just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 47 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

....pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

18:30

[Reporter Dude] If you launch the coin, isn't it unfair for you to snipe the coin?

[Shitcoin Wizard] ponders deeply I would say no.

[Reporter Dude] WTF did he just say that on the record?

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 23 points 1 month ago

For those who just can't shake their Wordle habit:

Try https://duotrigordle.com/

32 times the Wordle and none of the NYT enshittification

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 24 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.

We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.

The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison

That's from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

https://www.byom.de/trashmails/

Decent functionality, and it didn't get flagged most of the time I used it.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The pivot-to-ai writeup is out, they did seed! I assume it's documented then.

Multinational corporations can act ethically after all.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 38 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Did they seed at least?

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!

Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I'd use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.

 
 

archive of the mentioned NYT article

 

So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.

Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...

Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)

Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:

"With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."

So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?

But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.

Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).

I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).

And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.

 

Apparently a senior SW engineer got fired for questioning readiness of the product, dude must still be chuckling to himself.

Found the story here https://hachyderm.io/@wesley83/112572728237770554

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