How? What country is going to jump at the chance to take in a 70 year old immigrant?

Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn’t go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we’d have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a “gen z bad” post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.

Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place

I don’t know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, ‘hey, that’s not fair’. I don’t think that’s sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.

Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.

My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.

“Those people are snowflakes”

• Person that twitter is currently making every effort to court and cater to

Following the theory that the leadership at twitter actually hate the users and are decimating the platform on purpose for the lols, maybe the outcome you suggest is the plan.

Part of me believes this theory, because it’s hard to imagine how someone even with the explicit stated purpose of destroying twitter could have topped the recent developments. It’s almost as if what they’re trying to do is embarrass and degrade the users.

I don’t know anything about anything, but part of me suspects that lots of good funding is still out there, it’s just being used more quietly and more scrupulously, & not being thrown at the first microdosing tech wanker with a great elevator pitch on how they’re going to make “the Tesla of dental floss”.

They exist. Inform yourself on the Internet Research Agency, one of Russia’s state sponsored troll farms. A handful of their activities are well documented in factual records. ‘Dems’ weren’t crying about it, every rational person who doesn’t want foreign interference and disinformation flooding our spaces is concerned about it. This should not be a partisan issue whatsoever.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

True. And unfortunately certain privacy measures can make it easier to digitally fingerprint you as a user. Also my mind is still blown since I learned about canvas fingerprinting. EFF.org describes it as follows:

Canvas fingerprinting is invisible to the user. A tracker can create a “canvas” in your browser, and generate a complicated collage of shapes, colors, and text using JavaScript. Then, with the resulting collage, the tracker extracts data about exactly how each pixel on the canvas is rendered. Many variables will affect the final result. These include your operating system, graphics card, firmware version, graphics driver version, and installed fonts.

These settings are different from one computer to the next. But they tend to be consistent enough on a single machine to clearly identify a user.

Fair point. However, we still run in the same professional circles & there would be blow back. The fraud thing offends my core values on fairness, but its easier for me to leave it weighing on my conscience, than report it and stay up at night wondering if it will come back to bite me in my professional life and make it harder to keep a roof over my head and food on my table. It’s a shitty situation.

Uncarbonated liquids are dead simple to titrate, it’s true. For a carbonated product like beer, it’s actually a much more complicated problem than it seems. The amount of foam you get on a keg pour of beer is effected by a lot of variables - how clean the lines are, how cold the lines are, how long the lines are, the diameter of the lines, whether you’re using beergas or co2, how old the beer is, if it’s keg conditioned or force carbonated, how recently the keg was moved into refrigeration, how cold the beer itself is, if it’s the first pour of the day or if the tap has been running frequently, the mechanical design of the faucet, the temperature, cleanliness, shape, and size of the glass it’s going into, and more. It’s really fiddly business, I can’t see how a push button system could take everything into account and render less wastage than a human operator with a feel for the system. Draft systems are voodoo, ask me how I know.

Anyway companies typically have an unrealistic expectation of what draft wastage ought to be. I would advise any bar to expect something like 15% wastage at minimum on professional draft equipment, more if they’re using bargain grade hardware anywhere in the system, but ownership doesn’t want to hear that.

Managed a shop for over 10 years and took on duties to the point that the owner was only there for a few hours a week in the morning to check emails. The store did record business during the early covid days, and never closed the doors for a single day. The staff was stretched thin, stressed, and everyone was working like crazy and a bit nervous about health because we had a couple older guys working with us and nobody knew the harm profile of covid at that time. The owner bought expensive store improvements (with profits, and fraudulently claimed federal covid benefits) instead of paying the staff, or even saying thanks in any way. See ya!

I want to report them for the fraud thing, but I’m the only one who knows about it aside from the owner, so they’d know it was me who reported it.

Black lights

Nice.

All sweeping generalizations are bad!

I’m not ‘standing up’ for anything in particular and I don’t mean to express anything here as an outcome that I want, I’m just thinking out loud and wondering where this all goes.

I understand that you really dislike AI, and feel that what AI makes and what humans make will always and forever be categorically different in some important way. I can see where you’re coming from and a fruitful debate could be had there I think. I’m less sure than you are that AI can be tamed or bottled or destroyed. I think it’s something that is here to stay and will continue to develop whether we like the outcomes or not. As open source AI improves and gets into the hands of the average person, I don’t see how it’s possible to put effective limits on this technology. Geriatric politicians won’t do it, this is painfully obvious. Complaining (or advocating, which you could note I have not done here) in a small corner of an obscure comment thread on an obscure platform won’t make a difference either.

I get the sense that you believe there is a moral responsibility for everybody commenting in an online forum to call for the complete destruction of AI, and anything short of that is somehow morally wrong. I don’t understand that view at all. We’re musing into the void here and it has absolutely no effect on what will actually occur in the AI space. I’m open to changing my mind if you have a case to make about there being some moral responsibility to wave the flag that you want to wave, on an online forum, and that wondering aloud is somehow impermissible.

Sure, and I think the kinds of things that you mention might come to pass. But for the record I didn’t say that I thought it was good. It’s just a direction I think these things could go. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. The view that AI will remain in the background, or merely solve problems that we already have solutions for, or cannot possibly bear on the character and influence of human creativity, I think underestimates the possibilities for change that this still very young technology could bring. That’s all I’m saying, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

“Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” by advisers who had never run diagnostics, Reuters quoted a source as saying. Advisers offered tips to customers on how to increase their mileage by changing driving habits

Holy shit, can you imagine being told this by your vehicle manufacturer when requesting a service appointment?