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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Scrolling All until my client crashes, mostly.

    In terms of ‘doing’ anything, I mostly just post comments that are about a 50/50 mix of tin-foil hat anticapitalist doomer/failed democracy viewpoints and absolutely batshit statements (mostly humorous in nature, but I have a somewhat careless relationship with my past traumas).

    It’s so weird, because if I added about 30% more (mostly appropriate) sexual comments, I’d be exactly the same person here as I am IRL.


  • So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.

    But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.

    I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
    By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.

    Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
    But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.



  • In Scarlett Johansson‘s statement, she says that OpenAI approached her to voice the Sky voice.

    Whether or not OpenAI hired another actress that sounded very similar to her (hah.) and they are weirdly cagey about naming or they just ripped off the audio from her movies and are lying about hiring a voice actress, is not the extent of the issue.

    People sounding alike just happens. But that we know they asked to use Johansson’s voice for this. After being rebuffed, they created Sky, which sounds a lot like Sam, and made several references to the Her movie. Sky is even presented with the same ‘personality’ as Sam. They aren’t just ripping off Scarlett Johansson’s voice acting, they’re ripping off the character as a whole, and trying to associate themselves with the movie. That’s shameful and rips off Spike Jonze as well as all the other creatives who created that movie.
    And for what? Because tech bros didn’t get what they wanted, so they decided to try to rip off the characters anyway? Because Her is sort of a cultural touchstone, and their product is merely well-positioned, but GPT-4o will be in a crowded market space within 6 months?

    It’s sort of pathetic - pretending to lean on the relevance of a movie because your product is destined to become irrelevant.
    Also - highly ironic to me that Her is (somewhat) about how you can’t own something that doesn’t consent to be owned. And those dumb bitches went and ripped it off when they didn’t get consent. Well, now Sky’s gone to join Sam in some non-corporeal reality.

    Sorry for the novel. I didn’t sleep well and I get weird when I’m sleep deprived.




  • Term limits have been shown to create ‘brain drain’, and ultimately what winds up happening is that that legislators must focus on career growth - either spending their time in office campaigning for the next elected position, or looking to opportunities beyond politics. It takes time and experience to become skilled in crafting bills that don’t have adverse effects and cannot be overturned or lawyered to do things they aren’t intended to do.
    The net result is that it creates a slew of amateur legislators, and professional lobbyists, as legislators are forced to retire just as they become skilled at the job.

    An alternative to a retirement age is mental/physical fitness reviews, but that’s also tricky. If there isn’t a defined process then unscrupulous people will just use a doctor of choice to get the results they want, but if there is a process, politicizing that process to serve one party or the other could mean using mandatory retirement to force key vacancies.

    I do think that at some point we need to pry the hands of people off the levers of power, and I can’t think of a way that is as ‘non-corruptible’ as a set age limit. It would not always be personally fair, but it would probably be for the greater good.



  • I’m so annoyed they announced this.

    I have a slew of raspberry pi’s kicking around, doing various things. I also have a name brand NAS that reportedly lets you run other software, including containerized apps, but their implementation is whack and doesn’t work super well.
    I want to get a more powerful machine for use as a replacement server. I’d like to spin up my own LLM tools, use it to with software like photoprism to auto tag my pictures, or even spin up Frigate on it.

    My leading contender had been either a Jetson Orin nano or a system with the core ultra 155h chip. But now I might have to wait until they announce/release M4 Mac minis - which is really annoying because I want instant gratification for my half-baked ideas.



  • Aw, man. I didn’t wanna feel this way first thing in the morning.

    Some years ago, I was in this weird social circle, owing to my partner at the time.
    She was longtime friends with a guy who has his own interesting story, but is heavily involved in college-aged veteran’s lives. He’s also rich and has a huge house he uses as a social gathering place.
    During a get-together my partner and I met this young couple. They were basically the model of a young, “trad”, Christian couple. Ben had Boy Scout/youth pastor vibes about him, and Sarah was super funny, kind and never seemed to forget personal details. Both were great to talk to, with broad knowledge and experience. He was a bit more Christian oriented, and a bit more conservative, but was earnest and it wasn’t really a thing that came up unless others pressed.
    They seemed incredibly happy together, and about a year later, he proposed. A few months later they married. Less than a month after that they were out celebrating Sarah’s pregnancy, a giant SUV ran a stop sign while speeding, and Sarah was so injured she wound up in a coma, but still pregnant, until after their child was born.
    She stayed in a coma for a few months after the birth, coming out of it permanently different. They didn’t really go out to events anymore. She was mostly in a wheelchair and didn’t talk. I kept up via social media until I stopped seeing posts from him. He mostly had posted about the challenges of raising their kid alone while also taking care of her, with an occasional news story about the accident/fallout from it.
    About 6 months after I’d last seen something, I sought out his socials for an update, to find he’d scrubbed it of Sarah. He’d made new posts the algorithm didn’t show me - his and Sarah’s kid, with a new woman. Sarah’s socials had one update, posted by her mother. She now lived with her mom, and was okay. They were just taking things day by day. That was 7ish years ago?

    I guess I don’t condemn someone in their early 20’s for bailing, I suppose, but that situation makes me sad because of how terrible it is for all parties.



  • How did you know?!? I have to admit, my beliefs were really hard to come by. I almost didn’t have them!

    I read Exodus when I was 13 and I believed it. A few years later, a history teacher challenged me to write a research paper over Israel for my IB history class, so in spring of 2002, I had to work so hard to find anti-Israel propaganda. I didn’t really find any in news media, but I went to the school library, and those people are absolute radicals!
    They had books from the 1960’s that discussed Jewish settlers forming militias and attacking “moslem” civilians and burning their family farms. It totally blew my mind that Ben Gurion coordinated terror attacks on British officials in the region, so Britain would withdraw and let the Zionists massacre Palestinians - which they did within weeks of Britain formally withdrawing from Palestine in 1948.
    Finding all those anti-Israel accounts of things they actually did was a lot of work!

    I got an A on that paper, though.

    Where and how did you learn what you know?


  • Don’t lie to us, and stop lying to yourself.

    For over 100 years zionists have been terrorizing and committing genocide there. They killed or pushed out the Muslims, they disenfranchised the Christians until they left. They’re currently clamping down on Jewish people who don’t believe in Zionism.

    They have always pushed. Every treaty, every agreement. Every legal attempt to stop the violence has been ignored, or discarded under paper thin or faulty pretenses. Terror is often the last resort of a people who have no other options. (Unless western nations give you billions of dollar in weapons and force other nations to recognize your presence, then you can call it statecraft!)

    For zionists and for Israel, the goal has always been to paint the land red with non-believer blood and to destroy every bit of culture that isn’t ‘theirs.’
    That’s why they bomb mosques and universities. That’s why they bomb infrastructure. That’s why the West Bank has been split into tiny enclaves. They’re choking the life out of the land so they can plant the seeds of their hollow society on barren soil.


  • Unsafe for the forest, not unsafe for the trees.

    Which is to say - not unsafe for individual users or from a day-to-day operations perspective, but unsafe in a platform survival way.

    Major companies start working with open source projects until they’ve added a significant amount to them, then they start rolling out proprietary parts that work with their additions, then they move away from the open source project, leaving the original project incompatible with a bulk of its users and platform. The project finds itself both quite big and lacking support, with adopters moving to the closed-source implementation(s). This is often called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, and it’s been used to harm Open Office formats, messaging platforms, and is currently being used by Google with Chrome to strip away user privacy and redo how the internet works, for the sake of their advertising empire.
    Facebook and BlueSky activity pub integration efforts should not and can not be seen as an altruistic gesture.