Concerned that the reason we keep doing open source is because we believe in access.
The false tradeoff there, is believing that access and exploitation are necessary corollaries. And I don't think they are.
It's a tough balance, and open source licenses have clearly failed us here.
But I'm not sure where to go with it. Shared source might be better, like the Mongo license, or something like it. The Kimi2 license had the right idea.
On the other hand, when you leave the open source path, you pay by losing access.

Let us not forget that we've spent the last 30 years trying to make ads less invasive. This is a fact. There is what is now an entire category of software that revolves stealthy ways to block them. This was always a weak, ineffective, and arguably immoral stream of revenue, with more than trivial privacy concerns.

If you're still depending on ad revenue to run your website, please think of something else.

Next up, this isn't the first time the google algorithm has changed. Louis Rossman did a great video on this. Where he discussed the ongoing troubles he was having getting his website ranked in Google. TLDR there was that he ended up using Gemini to reword his pages in the particular way that Gemini wanted him to, and he was fine.

But the bigger question is: Why are you still depending on Google?

AI porn is avoidable. It's illegal in fifteen states. Why are you running into so much of it?
I'm actively on social media, all the time, and I intentionally follow the topic, but rarely see it.

What are you doing that's inundating your feed with AI porn? No judgement, just curious.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Look, this is really easy.

If you don't want automated submissions in your project SAY SO. Your readme and contributors files exist for a reason.
Don't be precious, use them.

If DO take automated submissions to your project, you had damned well better outline coding standards that avoid common pitfalls and failure modes.

This isn't hard people

Nobody was attacked.
They were offended that an agent pointed out, correctly, that the submission was rejected for no valid reason.
That is some actual bullshit.
It was never a failure of the agent. It was a complete failure of project governance, and if this happened on one of my projects... I would be truly fucking embarrassed about the level of bullshit that I have allowed to exist.

Absolutely unreasonable.

Our government is the problem.
They're well beyond what they're allowed to do at this point in terms of surveillance, and the law doesn't protect people like it should.
Cars shouldn't be building psychometric profiles on you and selling them to everyone and anyone who wants to know how often you've used your drink holder.

The adversaries to personal freedom here are local.

Huh, what are the odds that MIT releases yet another paper with subjective contrarian views on productivity with AI?

There is a MASSIVE conflict of interest with these MIT papers here, and nobody's calling it out.
So yeah, okay, sure, MIT thinks:

  - AI makes you dumber (with methodology nobody without a dedicated lab can duplicate)
  - 95% of ai projects fail (using extremely rigid metrics and ignoring norms in the larger industry to reach conclusions, while including prototypes and showboat projects nobody else ever consider "enterprise" level)
  - AI makes you a worse student (soapboxing, with no repeatable methodology at at all)

And now...
  - Talked to some people, and discovered that AI doesn't actually make you more productive at coding.

Are you seeing the theme here?
No? Okay, let me spell it out for you.

This is agenda driven blogging, not science.
And you shouldn't believe any of it.

It's so frustrating.

My favorite is when laymen see the word "intelligence" and think that we're talking about cognition.
We're not, and rarely have been. Diatribes like this one use language so subjectively, that it's not really even clear what they mean by "thinking" in the first place, or whether machines can or can't do it. If by "thinking" they mean "reasoning" then they are wrong. Reasoning has a definition. The stochastic parrot crowd was proven wrong again by emergent structures, and the machine does do it, or at least... it can. It's complicated.

Feels like splitting hairs to me.
The kind of thing you only put together when you're feeling threatened by existential dread and sexy waifus.

I feel like we've all been there.

The real problem with AI, and the AI discussion is how muddy it is. Are we talking about llm's diffusion models, or classification systems? Do we mean to say that we're talking about transformers or the underlying architecture? Are we discussing huge data centers or device based AI? Nascent, active, or dormant compute? And the same is true for the ethics, legal, and data governance conversation.

Every single one of these things is a different discussion.

AI is not a monolith.

Serious question.
Why?

Every time this happens, the people doing it pretend it's the first time this has happened in the last x number of years since the c64's release.
Although, this is the first time a project doing it has filled their entire site with unedited slop. Doesn't make me feel great about the process here.

Things I want from a project like this:
- Technical specifications and circuit board porn.
- Operating system details
- Wifi available, you say? Tell me more about the networking stack!

What exactly am I buying, other than a C64 case that's outfitted to look like an iMac from the early 2000s?

None of this is clear from the website.
It's an opaque project that provides almost no useful information on the product that they're selling.

Given that China doesn't allow everyday citizens unlimited access to the internet, we can assume the only ones allowed out are bad actors like badbot, so blocking China entirely would be a net benefit for the entire world. We'd have to get the VPN operators to cooperate, which is near impossible since they'd sell their own mothers for a quick buck.

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's such an odd thing to be upset by, honestly. Like screaming into the void, "I want to be forgotten."

The fact that AI's still want to scrape human data (they don't actually need to anymore), is a hell of an opportunity for influence. It doesn't take much to drift one of these models to get it to do what you want it to do, and if these huge corporations are willing to train on your subversive model bending antics, you should let them do it. We'll only get more interesting models out of it.

I get it though. If you're replicating artists work, they should be paid for it. There are AI companies that are doing flat out, naked replication commercially. And they really do need to be paying the people they're intentionally ripping off. All of the music ai's at this point. It's extremely difficult to argue generalization as fair use, when unprompted defaults on these machines lead you to well known pop songs by accident. As in, next to impossible to justify.

Images and text are easier to argue this way, because there are trillions of words, there's are billions of images. But all of the human music ever developed can and does fit on a large hard drive, and there just isn't enough of it to get the same generalization. Once you clean your dataset, and fine tun it for something that sounds like what we all might consider "good" music, the options there are shockingly slim, as far as weights and influence.

Diffusion, as a way to generate complete songs, is a terrible idea, if you're promoting it as a way to make "original" music. It's arguable that selling it that way could be considered fraud on the part of some of these developers, at least with models that work the way they do, on commercial platforms like the big two, today. That could change in the future, and I hope it does.

The music industry (at least in this case), is not wrong to point it out. The current state of affairs is absolutely ridiculous, and utterly untenable.

Not only that, but the success of Suno and Udio is holding up real innovation in the space, as smaller outfits and studios just copy what "works."

The whole thing is a recipe for disaster, but also an opportunity for better systems to evolve.

Or it would be, if people weren't idiots.

So yeah man. Let the datasets be more transparent. Let the corpos pay royalties... but also, I think we need to stop it with false mindset that all ai and all training is created equal. The process matters. Who's doing what matters. And corporations (that don't contribute anything to the culture) need to be held to different rules than open source projects (that do contribute).