Yeah, Lemmy is a bit over-the-top anti-AI, but most of it is based in reality.
There are a bunch of problems with AI. And they outbnumer any good ones by a mile.
The main cause of that fact is the entire AI bubble.
AI wastes a fuckton of energy. Of course, this energy isn't free: communities pay. Electricity demand goes up, and so does price. Then, most electricity isn't green. And on top of that, the rise in demand causes more electricity peaks, which almost exclusively get "fixed" through fossil fuel-based methods.
From another angle, AI disrupts markets. And not in a good way. Companies dump millions into AI while neglecting their employees (who get laid off because AI "can replace" them), and their customers as well (since instead of doing useful stuff for consumers they pump out AI-branded bullshit no one wants or needs).
Then, big AI companies spit in the face of copyright and have the audacity to turn around and claim copyright on their models' outputs. If inputs are free game, so are the outputs. Copyright is a very vague, misunderstood and misused term, and no argument I've heard claiming feeding stuff into AI is fair use was grounded in reality.
That all veing said, AI is here to stay. I've been thinking long and hard about similar fundamental changes to how human society functions, and I think i found one. Photography.
Way back when, you had to do things painstakibgly by hand. Drawing, copying books by hand, etc.
Then the printing press came. Revolutionary? Sure. But not as revolutionary as photography. Instead of writing by hand, you had to typeset by hand before printing. This made the process scalable, but it was still painstaking work.
But photography is a different matter. You just have to make (or buy) a camera and other required supplies (film, developing media, etc), and then you merely have to set up the camera, take the photo, develop the film, and make the photo.
Even in the early days of photography, while these processes took some time, it wasn't painstaking. To take a photo, you set up the camera, and wait. To develop film, you dunk the film into a chemical bath, and wait. To transfer the image onto paper - a similar ordeal. Set, forget.
Photography fundamentally changed how the entirety of society works. Painters complained and lost jobs and livelihoods - like the "jobs stolen" by AI. Instead of drawing stuff, which required a lot of skill, taking a photo is much simpler (abd faster).
Yesterday, instead of having to paint stuff, you'd take a photo. Today, instead of taking a photo, you ask AI.
On the copyright front, the paralels are obvious: Taking a photo of a book is fair use. But photocopying a book isn't. The problem with AI is that it does some transformations to the original, so it's obfuscated inside the model. But the obfuscation can be undone, as AI often happily spits out certain inputs verbatim when asked. Take a photo of a page - okay. Photocopy the entire book? Not okay.
The situation is the same when we look at artwork instead of books. Taking a photo of an artwork in a museum is okay. Scanning an artwork (duplicating it verbatim) - isn't. Same for movies. A frame is probably gonna be okay. The entire movie - won't.
Going by the closest analogue, there is absolutely no justification to indiscriminately feed everything and anything into AI, for indiscriminately photocopying and vervatim copying the same material is clearly protected.
A potentially groundbreaking vaccine for seasonal flu would not be getting approval from regulators. In fact, it wasn’t even getting formal consideration, Moderna announced in a Tuesday press release, because officials were refusing to accept the application. ...
Once it's out of view for 5 mins, it despawns. Gotta keep the simulation running smooth & efficient.
Oh, and there are three suns?
One is the winter sun (no microwaves), the other is the summer sun. There's a third one in between. No microwaves from the power-saving sun in winter is why winter is cold.
That only increases the barrier for entry into the market, but doesn't make it impossible to counterfeit.
The only time such a scheme would work is if the cost of counterfeiting the tags is higher than the cost of turning a counterfeit operation into a legitimate one.
And even then, it'd be better to use hologram seals on packaging or embedded into the cheese crust instead of "edible RFID". Most crusts aren't even edible so it seems more like a gimmick than anything else.
So: more sinister explanations acrually hold more weight here.
Anything that requires remuxing multiple times pretty much requires lossless compression. Else it'd become like screenshots of memes because the compression adds up.
That being said, last time I was working with professional audio people, they still preferred WAW as their intermediary format.
Innovation is good. That being said, slapping "AI", "Smart" or more pixels is the opposite of innovation. Innovation is something new, out of the box. 1080p > 4k > 8k is logical progression.
tl;dr rust yt-dlp frontend in a flatpak for some reason
This is why we can't have nice things.
The communityVocal members thereof, instead of seeing genuine effort as something praiseworthy always find the worst stupid angle to belittle well-meaning people from.
In recent months, Israel’s public broadcaster aired several reports on Israel’s massive problem in exporting fruits, particularly to European markets. ...
The death of an illegal immigrant inside a Texas detention camp is likely going to be ruled a homicide after a medical examiner determined his cause of death was asphyxia. ...
Honestly, this idea has me pretty mortified as well. Just seeing ”rm -rf /” as part of a string sends chills down my spine.
Granted, any reasons or explanations to cause a string being cut short to this godforsaken form and accidentally run is extremely unlikely, but a valid theoretical possibility: I can easily imagine someone mistyping the first letter after root and, wishing to delete it, pressing Backspace while simultaneously accidentally grazing the Enter key.
Sure, the chances of it happening are about the same as a gun user accidentally dropping their gun, clumsily catching it in the air and accidentally shooting someone right in between the eyes as a result.
The licence over 100 pages long, with deliberately convoluted language no one ever expects you to read. Some services even block you from accepting if you haven't scrolled to the end, but then most give a "Skip to bottom" button!
And since most EULAs are not grounded in reality and as such unworkable, they're pretty much just a scare tactic.
This is the way. Take their words at face value - but just the ones that you like. Repeat them like a parrot. Embellish them. Make up stories.
Facts truly don't care about felings. But a lie repeated oft enough effectively acts like the truth.
Use their weapon against them.
To convince idiots, sometimes you have to play by idiotic rules.
And for the bootlickers out there: No, I'm not saying OC is lying or an idiot by any means. I feel like I have to spell this out precisely because of the unreasonableness of the times we live in. Some bootlicking facehugger is bound to come and take the most unreasonable interpretation of my words and sink thei facehugging claws into my mouth. Maybe not right here or right now, but inevitably time and time again.
It's easier to screw over consumers than businesses.
Busunesses like to complain. They have long-term contracts. They have a lot of purchase power. They're more likely tp swotch to a competitor. When they threaten, they're more likely to go through with the threats since they have both money to burn and employees to blackmail with pay cuts.
Among other things.
There's a lot of consumers, so those that do jump ship usually don't cause a big dent in profits when they do. Consumers are also less likely to jump ship in the furst place since they have only their extended family and their family lawyer to look out for them (if). They usually have "bigger" problems than the electricity bill: car payments, mortgages, school bills, you name it.
There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others ...
Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.
But that's not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.
Also, it's not just roadside - they're plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.
Physical ads don't finance anything. They're just obnoxious. I don't know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that's heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).
Some economist please corrcxt me if I'm wrong, but: Trickle down may not work. However, trickle up should.
If you do say, UBI, people will spend the stuff. And the money will go to the big players. They'll buy their food at Walmart. Or meds at Target Pharmacy. Or get a loan at JP Morgan.
Unlike, say Walmart, who won't buy their huge private jet collection from the swathes of less-than-well-off people across all of America.
So even if UBI made people lazy, even if it made people less productive, the money will still disproportionately end up in the hands of the rich.
Well, anarchism in general isn't a "Get rid of state" nuclear button type of thing just as all communism isn't a magic "skip the socialism part" ideology. (I'm skipping this part a bit, but if you need/want this explained, feel free to ask!)
There are more and less "extreme" versions of both. And the core idea is to abolish state authority, although the way they go around it is very different, but I feel the percieved reasons (by anarchists in particular) as to why it should be done are the most misunderstood thing about anarchism in general.
One of the core tenants of anarchism is its definition of a state: A monopoly on violence, full stop. And I have to add, this definition is academically accepted, as in, all academic definitions of a state agree on the "monopoly of violence" part, but also add other things into the focus of what "a state" embodies, while anarchists don't.
The reason for this is that a state inherently takes away power away from the people, no matter how "good" the state itself is. If anything, the bureacuratic process oftentimes harms its citizens and makes misinformed decisions based on procedure rather than the facts and merits of each case (which is a general fact of life anarchism isn't immune to, but it hopes to avoid).
Another reason is that to save costs, decisions aren't made by all people in referendums on a local or national scale, but by nationwide election to decide "representatives" who wote in the general electorate's stead. Or because it concentrates power and money in the hands of the few. But it probably goes both ways.
Anarchism doesn't believe in "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" as much as it believes people should make all the important decisions. It is also aware of the fact that some compromises have to be made in reality.
This is why a bunch of streams in anarchism aren't so focused on achieving direct democracy (a general referendum for every little thing imaginable), but rather want to upend the direction of power: all power must be bottom-up, as opposed to top-down: people join into neighborhood councils, which join into larger units of various sizes and names. Self-sufficiency is valued and respected, but isn't a requisite. People aren't islands, but being less dependant on others is seen as a good idea.
And it's not just limited to democracy. People are expected to be members of multiple "home units", for example a geographic one, a work-related one and one for a social issues they have strong feelings about. In other words, "Anarchism applied" translates strongly into workplace syndicalism and membership in charitous organizactions, i.e. looking out for your own interests as well as helping other members of the community.
These smaller units make smaller decisions. As they form larger ones, they jointly decide their leadership, but the focus is always on the top being more dependant on the bottom than vice versa, all the way up to the national assembly (or even beyond).
The most important idea here is the "social contract". Individuals "sign off" a part of their "rights" (i.e. give decisionmaking power) to the larger units, in hopes of achieving a stronger, more general impact.
This is the core idea about globak decisionmaking. With power comes responsiblity. The more units join in on this issue, the more accoubtability the newly-formed body has. These are kind of like government-run agencies and departments work today, but are formed by groups "joining in", as opposed to an assembly "going down" and saying "This town needs a hospital, thus one doesn't". Or "The maximum number of hotels in a city is one every 15 blocks" (What is a block? What is a hotel? Why everywhere, etc?).
It's not quite different from how contemporary democracy works in theory. Merely the accountability in practice is flipped right around. The rest can stay mostly the same.
In contemporary democtacy, there are only a few elections for a few rigid bodies. In anarchism there'd be more bodies which would make up those bodies. Those bodies would retain some of their power*, but the lesser bodies could (and would) exercise some of that power as well.
Decisionmaking bodies are still made up of experts, but not spawned from above, but rather synthesized from bellow.
Power corrupts, so all power must be spread as democratically as possible. Holders of concentrared power must be personally and fully accountable to those under them whom they represent (and not, say, view those underneath them as pawns on their personal chess-board).
Don't worry. That will only happen when (and more importantly, if) this genocide rightly finds itself on the wrong side of history like the one from some 80-ish years ago did by 75-ish years ago.
However, that unfortunately doesn't seem too likely to happen.
Some countries are currently doing quite well on the morality front, but most don't give a shit while certain ones still have only shits & giggles to give.
It's just that kicking Russia out for doing war stuff but not Israel for the same sits the worst with me.
Had they said "we never kick out anyone", they'd have a case keeping both. But I feel if they kicked out Russia, Israel should be kicked out by the same criteria. Both wage war nad neither seems like a good side of a war to be on to me, an outsifer to both conflicts.
It really does read like you said, though. Kicking out Russia and having Ukraine win that year was a very popular choice. Keeping israel, while not as popular still seems like the "right" thing for someone minmaxing viewership to choose. My bet is Israel wins. If not them, then a german-speaking country like Germany, Austria or Switzerland sibce they mostly support Israel.
I think even a bad translation is better than no translation at all, but for some reason the majority of books don't seem to get translated. Why is that?
Because historically (and for the most part today as well), it costs money.
Sure, today stuff like ChatGPT and the somewhat older Google Translate exists, but that doesn't solve the cost issue. (And I'm skirting on the huge elephant in the room called quality for a bit of brevity).
There's a huge chance someone paid a good chunk of money for all the books you find dirt-cheap at a flea market, check out at a library or happen to find in your own house.
Printing physical books is expensive. Publishers also want a margin, and a lot of authors want royalties.
In the end even if the publisher and author are both good souls demanding nothing, someone needs to foot the cost of printing. But before that, you'd need to go through non-trivial talks with most authors' publishers and/or authors themselves.
Then you need to arange for translation, typesetting and printing if you're not doing it yourself. That takes both time and money.
And if you were to do all that yourself, it'd be a huge time investment, with a potential lawsuit if you don't do those damn talks. So most just don't bother.
Businesses are incredibly inefficient, even though some are "successful" and have a lot of cash to burn. They need to pay workers, bills, buy and fix equipment, and of course, a cut needs to go to the top people. Usually the "golden" 80-20 rule applies to almost everything: 20% of books make 80% of money, 20% of employees make 80% of money, and a different 20% of people do 80% of the work, etc. And of course, in this world, it's all about the money.
A translation is usually initiated by a publisher that has a manager who wants to get his section's metrics up to go cry to his own manager about how good he is to get a raise or not get fired. This is a daily grind. Sometimes (but quite rarely), that leads the manager to the decision of publishing a new book. Usually such actions are guided by things like bestseller lists, reviews and personal biases of the manager and the company as a whole. Sometimes the publisher hires an agency to try to approximate the demand for such a book (even more money spent). Then they do the talks. This also costs money, and the result is also a cost of money (the royalties to be paid). Then comes translation, then printing, then distribution to bookstores, and finally advertising.
These are just the steps that come to mind. All cost money, and all the books you see for sale in a bookstore went through all of these steps. For a library, not as much (but still the vast majority) did.
Sure, not every situation is the same, so there are companies that specialize in providing translations of well-known works or companies whose manager at one point said they need to publish 25 translations yearly (instead of one individual one), so they kind of "flood" the market.
But sometimes it's just the whim of a newspaper whose management thought printing classic works of shorter length and bundling them with their newspaper would drive up newspaper sales.
It's incredible how each document (edition of a book or otherwise) has multiple stories (of the author, publisher, translator, seller, advertiser, buyer, worker in logistics/delivery driver,...) that shaped the life of it. Some lasted a few hours, and some took hundereds of man-hours. All of this somehow translates to money.
That's the long answer.
The short one is: 80% the economy and 20% human laziness.
I'm used to Inkscape since forever. I'm no graphics design expert, but do know my way around Inkscape for simple SVG editing, mostly stuff shamelessly taken off Wikimedia.
Way back in college, I enrolled in an elective "graphic design" course. Of course, being a course, they used Illustrator.
That thing works nothing like Inkscape. It was a long time ago, but I remember being baffled by it, to the point of being unable of doing basic stuff.
To be fair, I had no need for learning Illustrator and no wish to do it either, so I quit the course while I still could and exchanged it. I just felt like i'd be losing my nerves on switching, when I had better stuff to do than becoming dependant on Adobe and losing my minf in the process.
Both programs may indeed sport menus in the same spots, but the menus aren't the same. They may look like the same thing, but they're really not.
It's kind of like a bus and a train. Illustrator (the bus) sports all the nice stuff (i assume) from other Adobe stuff. Just like a bus uses the same road like cars do, with the same signalization.
Inkscape is more like the train. It does things differently from say Krita or Gimp, but it also does other stuff than either Krita or Gimp. Which (dare I say) makes it more effective at what it's meant to do.
I know I write essays which is a weak point of mine. One I should address, but I see the gist of my message didn't get to you.
For one I use (and like) Inkscape and have strong negative feelings towards Adobe (and run Linux). Just like most of the folks here. That, however, should be pretty clear-cut from my original message.
Since the developers of Magic Earth decided to pull a bait-and-switch with their latest update, locking the automatic dashcam function behind a perpetual 15$/year paywall, I need a new alternative that ideally also supports automatic dashcam recording while navigating. Does anybody have a good recommendation?
A free alternative is an old phone you don't use anymore, permanently in airplane mode and with just the regular camera app. Can be one where the battery doesn't hold a charge anymore that you just have plugged into your car.
How is it supposed to be recording?
AFAIK dashcams are usually connected to the car so they run when it does. Having tp manually turn it off and on (and having to wait 20+ seconds for Android/iOS to spin up) & fiddling around the phone to start recording seems like way too much work. Or am I missing something?
I think Lemmy in general is very against AI. I'm rather new here, is it like a fediverse group thing or is this even based on reality?
This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like ( www.thebulwark.com )
A potentially groundbreaking vaccine for seasonal flu would not be getting approval from regulators. In fact, it wasn’t even getting formal consideration, Moderna announced in a Tuesday press release, because officials were refusing to accept the application. ...
‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront ( www.theguardian.com )
Republican Joins With Dems on Constitutional Amendment to Give Congress Power to Reject Trump Pardons ( www.mediaite.com )
What's your theory on where the sun goes at night?
Tune a fish
This goes all the way to the top
BMW’s Newest “Innovation” is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair ( www.ifixit.com )
cross-posted from : ...
Can't believe it's been renamed for a year now!
In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud ( www.tomshardware.com )
China builds world’s first 20GW microwave weapon that can fire a 60-second burst ( www.scmp.com )
The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K ( arstechnica.com )
I published my first app on Flathub
Hi. I recently published my app on Flathub and have been steadily updating it to make it better. ...
Israeli agricultural exports face looming ‘collapse’ as world rejects products over Gaza genocide ( mondoweiss.net )
In recent months, Israel’s public broadcaster aired several reports on Israel’s massive problem in exporting fruits, particularly to European markets. ...
Migrant who died in ICE custody was 'choked to death' ( www.dailymail.co.uk )
The death of an illegal immigrant inside a Texas detention camp is likely going to be ruled a homicide after a medical examiner determined his cause of death was asphyxia. ...
Don't vote for BlueMAGA this fall
How the UK is shaping a future of Precrime and dissent management - Freedom News ( freedomnews.org.uk )
Fascist paramilitary invaders start unconstitutionally raiding houses door-to-door in the USA. We no longer have rights in America. Welcome to the home of the oppressed. (Minneapolis, MN - 1/11/26) ( cdn.social.linux.pizza )
Source
when you notice that the rm command takes longer to run than expected
💀☠️
Why the PS5 ROM Leak Could be a Turning Point for Console Security ( respawn.outlookindia.com )
Kristi Noem calls actions leading up to ICE shooting ‘an act of domestic terrorism’ ( www.fox9.com )
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Home electricity bills are skyrocketing. For data centers, not so much. ( yaleclimateconnections.org )
I am definitely a bird me personally
It's probably not reasonable to expect this to improve in 2026.
94.3° F
iot ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115785046591172230
Will an anti advertisement movement ever materialize?
There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others ...
'Depraved Response to a Depraved Act': Netanyahu Blames Attack on Australia Recognizing Palestine | Common Dreams ( www.commondreams.org )
Jessica Corbett ...
What's the most painfully obvious thing you've seen have to be written out?
Things along the range of: ...
Elon Musk wants to abolish the EU. He has a point ( swentr.site )
Rich coming from him. Anybody got any of those... "Elon Musk doing a Nazi sign" gif?
A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent. ( theintercept.com )
In February 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh. ...
Berlin: Police can secretly enter homes for state trojan installation ( www.heise.de )
cross-posted from: ...
"We must remain apolitical"
Why books haven't all been translated to every language by now?
I think even a bad translation is better than no translation at all, but for some reason the majority of books don't seem to get translated. Why is that?
Explaining Communism to an amerikkkan
Tweto
Welcome Dan Williams, new LibreOffice Developer focusing on UI/UX - The Document Foundation Blog ( blog.documentfoundation.org )
excited to see what this means for the project, the poor UI/UX of libreoffice is easily its most glaring flaw imo
Alternative to Magic Earth?
Since the developers of Magic Earth decided to pull a bait-and-switch with their latest update, locking the automatic dashcam function behind a perpetual 15$/year paywall, I need a new alternative that ideally also supports automatic dashcam recording while navigating. Does anybody have a good recommendation?
Oh! Here is terminal for you
Chat Control approved: Certain EU countries will see your private messages. Is yours on the list? ( euroweeklynews.com )
Israel’s IDF Bans Android Phones—iPhones Now ‘Mandatory’ ( www.forbes.com )