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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think this is a misunderstanding of how most of the AI that feed into workflows work. Most of them don’t dynamically re-train live based off how users are using them. At least not outside of the context of that user/chat instance.

    Most likely what these and others are doing is to download pre-trained open source AI datasets thrn and run them locally so they aren’t restrained by any of the commercial AI’s limitations on what they will and won’t output to users. I highly doubt there’s enough material out there to truly train a new AI model on only explicitly racist material. This is just a bunch of assholes doing prompt engineering on open source models running locally.



  • Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

    The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.


  • As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

    There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

    Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

    I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

    Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

    More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.



  • This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.

    They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.

    If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.

    Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.

    Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.



  • Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!

    There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.

    Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.

    It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.

    This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.

    By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.

    I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.




  • My guy, your posts are particularly hard to follow, and you are very very quick to jump to the conclusion that you’re somehow being targeted and under attack. It’s no surprise that people aren’t responding to what you think is appropriate for them to respond to.

    You’ve gone out of your way to provide extra info about irrelevant details: Why does the particular flavor of git you use matter at all to this conversation beyond the fact that you self host, why does it matter that you are on github as well when we are specifically discussing things you believe were sourced from readme.mds you have self hosted?

    Meanwhile you don’t give many details or explanation about the core thing you are trying to discuss, seemingly expecting people to be able to just follow your ramblings.

    Edit: After having re-read your OP, it’s less messy than I initially thought, but jesus christ man you need to work on arranging your points better. It shouldn’t take reading your main post, a few of your comments, and the main post again to get your point: “AI data scrapers appear to treat readme files as public data regardless of any anti-AI precautions or licensing you’ve tried to apply, and they appear to not only grab from github bit also from self-hosted git repositories.”


  • These concepts are not mutually exclusive. You can be right about AI considerably overstepping boundaries and still be exhibiting classic signs of paranoia issues, which OP is.

    Their immediate response to people not reacting to this post and their comments is to immediately jump to the idea that they’re being targeted by their designated enemy. That’s not particularly healthy.

    I’m worried that AI is becoming the new gangstalking for tech aligned people predisposed to disprdered thinking.


  • Just like the “tesla hyperloop” or whatever they’re calling it, it’s not about innovation. It’s about keeping his brands in the public eye as a form of marketing. Even if on a logical level we all know it’s horseshit, it still keeps himself and Tesla salient.

    He can afford to burn an incomprehensible amount of money on stunts for outcomes most people would consider inconsequential.

    I’m not saying it’s 4D chess, it definitely isn’t. He’s not particularly intelligent in that way. That said, I do think there are some very simple reasons for him to do this that go beyond his absolutely insane delusional ego.

    He has enough money that he can continue funding whatever he wants regardless of public opinion. He literally exists at a level where any press is good press as it keeps him fresh in peoples’ minds.





  • On android I use Revanced. It patches the official Youtube app (patches are open source) to greatly expand the base functionality and offer a lot more customization of the UI.

    For me the best features are ad block, sponsorblock (skips in video sponsored segments), and complete excision of shorts from all aspects of the app.

    It also works on Youtube Music, effectively allowing free premium (just don’t get the local downloads of your most listened tracks to help save data, but I have unlimited anyway).