The name holds it back more than you know. No EP or AD wants to put “The GIMP” on their software list for a project. I have to have a conversation with someone ensuring we’re good on all our licenses, and they ask, “What is this GIMP thing?” Answering it makes me sound like an unprofessional jackass. The company would rather just pay Adobe.

You just described letting developers dictate which OS you use…

One, let’s accept that there is a public domain, and cribbing freely from the public domain is A-OK. I can reproduce Michaelangelo all I want, and it’s all good. AI can crib from that all it wants.

AI can’t invent. People can invent: i can have a wholly new idea that no one has ever had. AI does nothing but recombine other existing ideas. It must have seed data, and it won’t create anything for which it has no initial input: feed it photographs only, and it can’t create a pencil drawing image. Feed it only black and white images, and it can’t create color images.

People do not require cribbing from sources. Give a toddler supplies, and they will create. So, we have established that there is a fundamental difference between the creation process. One is dependent on previous work, and one is not.

Now, with influences, you can ask, is your new creation dependent on the previous creation directly? If it is so utterly dependent on the prior work, such that your work could not possibly exist without that specific prior art, you might get sued. It will get debated and society’s best approximation of a collective rational mind will determine if you copied or if you created something new that was merely inspired by prior art.

AI can only create by the direct existence of prior art. It fakes invention. Its work has to come from somewhere else.

People have shown how dependent it is on its sources with prompts that say things like, “portrait of a patriotic soldier superhero” and it comes back with a goddamned portrait of Chris Evans. The prompt did not include his name, or Captain or America, and it comes back with an MCU movie poster. AI does not create. People create.

You don’t get to both ignore intellectual property rights of others, and enforce them for yourself. Fuck these guys.

The Other Shoe: the first recipient was Mitch McConnell, and his episodes lately have been during firmware updates.

Using Facebook on a mobile browser is horrible: the scrolling snaps all over the place. They’re awful, which is why i won’t have any Meta software on my phone.

I can definitely get behind an AI plugin that reliably rats out AI generated content; i will love that in my browser (as long as it, sigh, is not a privacy nightmare). But all the “be smart for me” digital assistants can go eff themselves. I don’t even use auto mode on my camera.

Working just fine for me…

I wonder if Firefox users are more likely to spoof their user agent setting? Probably not.

I’ll still use it. Compared to every other browser, it is the least disastrous regarding privacy.

Honestly, i don’t get why more folks aren’t enthusiastic about EVs. I got a used Bolt, and i love it. Much easier and cheaper maintenance, fewer moving parts to wear out, no gas prices drama… never buying an ICE vehicle again.

Seriously. Brand recognition like Twitter is the dream. It’s so strong, X will forever be known not as itself, but as “X, formerly Twitter”.

Hate this. Every time, I seem to guess wrong.

Guess I’m a robot.

I wasn’t a bad person in my 20s, but I was stupid and thought I was smart. There’s a lot to learn that you learn after a few years as an adult: you learn what’s important, and what’s just a waste of time. As you get older, you have fewer and fewer fucks to spare for the waste of time stuff.

People responding to the meme that needing cars isn’t evil, and is required for many areas, are missing the point of the meme.

The meme is complaining about areas we built that can exist as they are only if everyone owns a car. If we weren’t so consumerist, and if white people could better tolerate living near black people, we wouldn’t have so much of the population living in suburban areas where cars are so necessary. A lot more people would live in circumstances where public transport is more viable for them.

And, of course, some shade thrown at the car buyers who buy comsumptively-extreme cars to do piddling stuff in. The number of basic sedans that can be had with 200+hp engines, or F150 pickups with massive gas-guzzling engines, that only get used for surface road driving one or two people around, is pretty ridiculous.

The main wrong thing about the meme is that it’s assuming our situation was created specifically so that evil corporations could sell cars and gas… no, they’re profiting from, and exacerbating, the problem of white flight from cities. Most of the country’s problems come in large part from racism first, and then profiteering on top of that.