You know, I’m something of a failed game developer myself.

The #1 thing I learned was: Set your sights low. Lower than you think you should have to. And then lower than that. And now take that and cut it in half. Got it? Okay, now, from that, figure out what you think you could get done in 2 weeks. And now imagine that you’re 2 days in and someone told you you actually only have 1 week to finish completely. Pencils down, you can never work on this again. What would you focus on?

If the design is only fun if there are heaps and heaps of content, hyper-realistic art, epic soundtrack, and intricately-tuned parameters, you’re pretty much doomed to fail. It has to be fun even with one basic level, placeholder art, some sfxr audio clips, and wildly unbalanced stats.

Over the past year, Microsoft’s support for artificial intelligence tools by backing OpenAI has helped boost its value

…which I’m sure is not just hype and grift obscuring a heap of pending lawsuits.

I’m dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

We’re mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content’s real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn’t a huge problem, because that’s the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the “real home” of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you’ll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

–

There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don’t even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this “protection” gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

And then that copyright – the very same thing that was intended to protect creators – is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can’t speak out of turn. Fans can’t remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can’t pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what’s popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture – insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

But.

If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won’t solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

Pronouns, what?

My homie in Cthulhu, I guarantee you that trans folks are among the most ready to stand up for a group of people who’ve had their basic humanity denied by a vicious regime eager for a scapegoat.

Not quite how digital signatures work, but not far off from a likely scenario once issued keys start getting compromised and used to spread convincing images for a short period before being invalidated. Your uncle on Facebook: “They said this image was authentic yesterday, and now they say it isn’t! Who is making these decisions?!”

I did this once just to drive 2 blocks on totally empty streets. After 30 seconds, I had my passenger open the window and see if I was good on their side. Shit was terrifying. I can’t imagine doing it on a legit commute. You gotta convince yourself you’ve got 8-inch solid unobtainium plot armor to do that.

Look, I’m just setting my rent according to an analysis of the current market rate for similar properties.

Yes, that analysis is provided by the same company that does estimates for the other properties.

No, I’ve never heard of “price fixing”. Look, your avocado toast is super expensive and it’s cuz the government gave you $600 three years ago so PAY MY MORTGAGE ALREADY YOU EASILY REPLACEABLE COW IN A PEN.

Hey man, I can do some competition any time I want. Just lemme do a little more central planning first.

Joe Biden: Were there not an Israel the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4962369/user-clip-joe-biden-israel-usa-invent-israel-protect-interest-region

It’s a reference to this: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/palestine-and-israel-brief-history-maps-and-charts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.

Assistive technology is the creation of a new device that assists a person in completing a task that would otherwise be impossible. Some examples include new computer software programs like screen readers, and inventions such as assistive listening devices, including hearing aids, and traffic lights with a standard color code that enables colorblind individuals to understand the correct signal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2020/09/08/could-elon-musks-neuralink-be-a-game-changer-for-people-with-disabilities

Disabled people are likely to have had their attention piqued by Musk reiterating that, in the first instance, Neuralink would be looking to “solve important brain and spine problems.”

In fact, throughout the presentation, several chronic and life-limiting conditions were cited as being potentially treatable by Neuralink — ranging from blindness, spinal cord injuries, memory loss, brain damage and even depression.

The company’s first round of clinical trials will focus on patients with spinal cord injuries.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-start-human-trials-brain-implant-2023-09-19/

…Neuralink said, adding that its initial goal is to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

ETA:

I have no interest in defending the muskrat or his dystopian vision for this technology. I’m just a developer who gives half a shit about making accessible software, so I want people to know what that means.

I hadn’t really formed an opinion on this article specifically, but… If I had spinal damage? I might consider signing up for the monkey-killer chip too. A shot at getting my body back might be too enticing to resist.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

How does your ISP have anything to do with port forwarding, or wired vs. wifi?

Futurama called it “Bachelor Chow”.

That’s two things.

Yep. Same problem we have with AI use of free-to-view literature and art. The author’s intent is often to invite others to participate in a collective effort, and start an ongoing conversation where works can be shared back and forth and everyone improves as a result.

Corpo use of FOSS — and especially ML training on free-to-view works — often takes the fruits of the collective effort and then sprints directly away from the community, refusing to participate and sometimes even wrapping a thin for-profit layer around the free underlying tools.

In the case of AI, this for-profit wrapper is so comprehensive and so thoroughly obscures any reference to the source material that not only can it replace the original communities very effectively, but it denies any ability to navigate through to the original communities even if you wanted to.

There will never be anything more illustrative of the limits of human intellect than the fact that a master logician famously argued that:

I ought to do XYZ because there may be an omnipotent being that rewards doing XYZ

…and did not immediately think:

I ought not to do XYZ because there may be an omnipotent being that punishes doing XYZ

People have a fucked-up understanding of voting in the US. You are not voting for the person you agree with. You are voting for the person you’d rather negotiate with.

If you actually care beyond the aesthetics of whether you did the cool thing or not, you have to think about the function of what you’re doing and not just whether it feels good.

Seize the means of computation.

Most creators that have in-video sponsors also have Patreons with sponsor-free feeds.