Eccitaze
@Eccitaze@yiffit.net
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
This is gonna turn into the gamer version of “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” isn’t it
- Comment on Fallout London - I just can't anymore 1 month ago:
I gave up on it for now when the questline involving the NPC learning to write broke, and then I started crashing to desktop (without any logs anywhere, either in the Buffout directory or even in Windows’ Event Viewer) every time I left the Swan or fast traveled directly to it, even though traveling to another point literally fifty feet south worked just fine. And since there’s no logs describing the crash, I have no idea how to fix it.
I could probably fix it by uninstalling and re-downloading it again, but I have a goddamn data cap that my roommate already blows through every month with the fucking massive updates Fallout 76 has taken to pushing out, I have zero desire to download 60 GB of data (30 GB base game + 30 GB FOLON) every fucking time I sneeze wrong and make the game start crashing again. =|
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Fine, you win, I misunderstood. I still disagree with your actual point, however. To me, Intelligence implies the ability to learn in real-time, to adapt to changes in circumstance, and for self-improvement. Once an LLM is trained, it is static and unchanging until you re-train it with new data and update the model. Even if you strip out the sapience/consciousness-related stuff like the ability to think critically about a scenario, proactively make decisions, etc., an LLM is only capable of regurgitating facts and responding to its immediate input. By design, any “learning” it can do is forgotten the instant the session ends.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
The commercial aspect of the reproduction is not relevant to whether it is an infringement–it is simply a factor in damages and Fair Use defense (an affirmative defense that presupposes infringement).
What you are getting at when it applies to this particular type of AI is effectively whether it would be a fair use, presupposing there is copying amounting to copyright infringement. And what I am saying is that, ignoring certain stupid behavior like torrenting a shit ton of text to keep a local store of training data, there is no copying happening as a matter of necessity. There may be copying as a matter of stupidity, but it isn’t necessary to the way the technology works.
You’re conflating whether something is infringement with defenses against infringement. Believe it or not, basically all data transfer and display of copyrighted material on the Internet is technically infringing. That includes the download of a picture to your computer’s memory for the sole purpose of displaying it on your monitor. In practice, nobody ever bothers suing art galleries, social media websites, or web browsers, because they all have ironclad defenses against infringement claims: art galleries & social media include a clause in their TOS that grants them a license to redistribute your work for the purpose of displaying it on their website, and web browsers have a basically bulletproof fair use claim. There are other non-infringing uses such as those which qualify for a compulsory license (e.g. live music productions, usually involving royalties), but they’re largely not very relevant here. In any case, the fundamental point is that any reproduction of a copyrighted work is infringement, but there are varied defenses against this that mean most infringing activities never see a courtroom in practice.
All this gets back to the original point I made: Creators retain their copyright even when uploading data for public use, and that copyright comes with heavy restrictions on how third parties may use it. When an individual uploads something to an art website, the website is free and clear of any claims for copyright infringement by virtue of the license granted to it by the website’s TOS. An uninvolved third party–e.g. a non-registered user or an organization that has not entered into a licensing agreement with the creator or the website (*cough* OpenAI)–has no special defense against copyright infringement claims beyond the baseline questions: was the infringement for personal, noncommercial use? And does the infringement qualify as fair use? Individual users downloading an image for their private collection are mostly A-OK, because the infringement is done for personal & noncommercial use–theoretically someone could sue over it, but there would have to be a lot of aggravating factors for it to get beyond summary judgment. AI companies using web scrapers to download creators’ works do not qualify as personal/noncommercial use, for what I hope are bloody obvious reasons.
As for a model trained purely for research or educational purposes, I believe that it would have a very strong claim for fair use as long as the model is not widely available for public use. Once that model becomes publicly available, and/or is leveraged commercially, the analysis changes, because the model is no longer being used for research, but for commercial profit. To apply it to the real world, when OpenAI originally trained ChatGPT for research, it was on strong legal ground, but when it decided to start making it publicly available, they should have thrown out their training dataset and built up a new one using data in the public domain and data that it had negotiated a license for, trained ChatGPT on the new dataset, and then released it commercially. If they had done that, and if individuals had been given the option to opt their creative works out of this dataset, I highly doubt that most people would have any objection to LLM from a legal standpoint. Hell, they probably could have gotten licenses to use most websites’ data to train ChatGPT for a song. Instead, they jumped the gun and tipped their hand before they had all their ducks in a row, and now everybody sees just how valuable their data is to OpenAI and are pricing it accordingly.
Oh, and as for your edit, you contradicted yourself: in your first line, you said “The commercial aspect of the reproduction is not relevant to whether it is an infringement.” In your edit, you said “the infringement happens when you reproduce the images for a commercial purpose.” So which is it? (To be clear, the initial download is infringing copyright both when I download the image for personal/noncommercial use, and also when I download it to make T-shirts with. The difference is that the first case has a strong defense against an infringement claim that would likely get it dismissed in summary, while the cases of making T-shirts would be straightforward claims of infringement.)
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
That factor is relative to what is reproduced, not to what is ingested. A company is allowed to scrape the web all they want as long as they don’t republish it.
The work is reproduced in full when it’s downloaded to the server used to train the AI model, and the entirety of the reproduced work is used for training. Thus, they are using the entirety of the work.
I would argue that LLMs devalue the author’s potential for future work, not the original work they were trained on.
And that makes it better somehow? Aereo got sued out of existence because their model threatened the retransmission fees that broadcast TV stations were being paid by cable TV subscribers. There wasn’t any devaluation of broadcasters’ previous performances, the entire harm they presented was in terms of lost revenue in the future. But hey, thanks for agreeing with me?
Again, that’s the practice of OpenAI, but not inherent to LLMs.
And again, LLM training so egregiously fails two out of the four factors for judging a fair use claim that it would fail the test entirely. The only difference is that OpenAI is failing it worse than other LLMs.
It’s honestly absurd to try and argue that they’re not transformative.
It’s even more absurd to claim something that is transformative automatically qualifies for fair use.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Get a load of this maroon, they think LLMs are actually sapient! Thanks, I needed that laugh.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
FFS, the issue is not that the AI model “copies” the copyrighted works when it trains on them–I agree that after an AI model is trained, it does not meaningfully retain the copyrighted work. The problem is that the reproduction of the copyrighted work–i.e. downloading the work to the computer, and then using that reproduction as part of AI model training–is being done for a commercial purpose that infringes copyright.
If I went to DeviantArt and downloaded a random piece of art to my hard drive for my own personal enjoyment, that is a non-infringing reproduction. If I then took that same piece of art, and uploaded it to a service that prints it on a T-shirt, the act of uploading it to the T-shirt printing service’s server would be infringing, since it is no longer being reproduced for personal enjoyment, but the unlawful reproduction of copyrighted material for commercial purpose. Similarly, if I downloaded a piece of art and used it to print my own T-shirts for sale, using all my own computers and equipment, that would also be infringing. This is straightforward, non-controversial copyright law.
The exact same logic applies to AI training. You can try to camouflage the infringement with flowery language like “mere extraction of relationships between components,” but the purpose and intent behind AI companies reproducing copyrighted works via web scraping and downloading copyrighted data to their servers is to build and provide a commercial, for-profit service that is designed to replace the people whose work is being infringed. Full stop.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
They literally do not pass the criteria. LLMs use the entirety of a copyrighted work for their training, which fails the “amount and substantiality” factor. By their very nature, LLMs would significantly devalue the work of every artist, author, journalist, and publishing organization, on an industry-wide scale, which fails the “Effect upon work’s value” factor.
Those two alone would be enough for any sane judge to rule that training LLMs would not qualify as fair use, but then you also have OpenAI and other commercial AI companies offering the use of these models for commercial, for-profit purposes, which also fails the “Purpose and character of the use” factor. You could maybe argue that training LLMs is transformative, but the commercial, widespread nature of this infringement would weigh heavily against that. So that’s at least two, and arguably three out of four factors where it falls short.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Spoiler alert, but Rosebud was his sled all along.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
unique
“unique new IP right?” Bruh you’re talking about basic fucking intellectual property law. Just because someone posts something publicly on the internet doesn’t mean that it can be used for whatever anybody likes. This is so well-established, that every major art gallery and social media website has a clause in their terms of service stating that you are granting them a license to redistribute that content. And most websites also explicitly state that when you upload your work to their site that you still retain your copyright of that work.
For example (emphasis mine):
4.1 When you upload content to Fur Affinity via our services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license to use, host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, display (publicly or otherwise), perform (publicly or otherwise), distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and create derivative works of, that content. These permissions are purely for the limited purposes of allowing us to provide our services in accordance with their functionality (hosting and display), improve them, and develop new services. These permissions do not transfer the rights of your content or allow us to create any deviations of that content outside the aforementioned purposes.
Posting Content
You keep copyright of any content posted to Inkbunny. For us to provide these services to you, you grant Inkbunny non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use and archive your artwork in accordance with this agreement.
When you submit artwork or other content to Inkbunny, you represent and warrant that:
* you own copyright to the content, or that you have permission to use the content, and that you have the right to display, reproduce and sell the content. You license Inkbunny to use the content in accordance with this agreement;
- Copyright in Your Content
DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant DeviantArt a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content. Please note that when you upload Content, third parties will be able to copy, distribute and display your Content using readily available tools on their computers for this purpose although other than by linking to your Content on DeviantArt any use by a third party of your Content could violate paragraph 4 of these Terms and Conditions unless the third party receives permission from you by license.
When you upload content to e621 via our services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license to use, host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, display (publicly or otherwise), perform (publicly or otherwise), distribute, transmit, downsample, convert, adapt, and create derivative works of, that content. These permissions are purely for the limited purposes of allowing us to provide our services in accordance with their functionality (hosting and display), improve them, and develop new services. These permissions do not transfer the rights of your content or allow us to create any deviations of that content outside the aforementioned purposes.
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You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.
The permissions you give us We need certain permissions from you to provide our services:
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Permission to use content you create and share: Some content that you share or upload, such as photos or videos, may be protected by intellectual property laws.
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You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and other Meta Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want.
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However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a “license”) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.
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Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Meta Products or service providers that support those products and services. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point very clear: Every social media website and art gallery is built on an assumption that the person uploading art A) retains the copyright over the items they upload, B) that other people and organizations have NO rights to copyrighted works unless explicitly stated otherwise, and C) that 3rd parties accessing this material do not have any rights to uploaded works, since they never negotiated a license to use these works.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Bear in mind that training AI does not involve copying content into its database, so copyright is not an issue.
Wrong. The infringement is in obtaining the data and presenting it to the AI model during the training process. It makes no difference that the original work is not retained in the model’s weights afterwards.
You can train AI in a book and it will give you information from the book - information is not copyrightable. You can read a book a talk about its contents on TV - not illegal if you’re a human, should it be illegal if you’re a machine?
Yes, because copyright law is intended to benefit human creativity.
If you try to outlaw Automating this process by computers, there will be side effects such as search engines will no longer be able to index data.
Wrong. Search engines retain a minimal amount of the indexed website’s data, and the purpose of the search engine is to generate traffic to the website, providing benefit for both the engine and the website (increased visibility, the opportunity to show ads to make money). Banning the use of copyrighted content for AI training (which uses the entire copyrighted work and whose purpose is to replace the organizations whose work is being used) will have no effect.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Not just that, but to sell a product that by its very nature threatens the livelihoods of the same people whose labor and creativity is being used without permission.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages.
Like fuck it is. An LLM “learns” by memorization and by breaking down training data into their component tokens, then calculating the weight between these tokens. This allows it to produce an output that resembles (but may or may not perfectly replicate) its training dataset, but produces no actual understanding or meaning–in other words, there’s no actual intelligence, just really, really fancy fuzzy math.
Meanwhile, a human learns by memorizing training data, but also by parsing the underlying meaning and breaking it down into the underlying concepts, and then by applying and testing those concepts, and mastering them through practice and repetition. Where an LLM would learn “2+2 = 4” by ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of instances of the string “2+2 = 4” and calculating a strong relationship between the tokens “2+2,” “=,” and “4,” a human child would learn 2+2 = 4 by being given two apple slices, putting them down to another pair of apple slices, and counting the total number of apple slices to see that they now have 4 slices. (And then being given a treat of delicious apple slices.)
Similarly, a human learns to draw by starting with basic shapes, then moving on to anatomy, studying light and shadow, shading, and color theory, all the while applying each new concept to their work, and developing muscle memory to allow them to more easily draw the lines and shapes that they combine to form a whole picture. A human may learn off other peoples’ drawings during the process, but at most they may process a few thousand images. Meanwhile, an LLM learns to “draw” by ingesting millions of images–without obtaining the permission of the person or organization that created those images–and then breaking those images down to their component tokens, and calculating weights between those tokens. There’s about as much similarity between how an LLM “learns” compared to human learning as there is between my cat and my refrigerator.
And YET FUCKING AGAIN, here’s the fucking Google Books argument. To repeat: Google Books used a minimal portion of the copyrighted works, and was not building a service to compete with book publishers. Generative AI is using the ENTIRE COPYRIGHTED WORK for its training set, and is building a service TO DIRECTLY COMPETE WITH THE ORGANIZATIONS WHOSE WORKS THEY ARE USING. They have zero fucking relevance to one another as far as claims of fair use. I am sick and fucking tired of hearing about Google Books.
- Comment on Final Fantasy Creator Reveals Which Entry He Thinks Is 'Most Complete', and It's Not Final Fantasy 7 2 months ago:
Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.
I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models–IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It’s good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 2 months ago:
I’d give strange new worlds a pass as being better than Orville, but yeah, it’s definitely the exception to the rule.
- Comment on Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch 2 months ago:
What evidence is there that gen AI hasn’t peaked? They’ve already scraped most of the public Internet to get what we have right now, what else is there to feed it? The AI companies are also running out of time–VCs are only willing to throw money at them for so long, and given the rate of expenditure on AI so far outpaces pretty much every other major project in human history, they’re going to want a return on investment sooner rather than later. If they were making significant progress on a model that could do the things you were saying, they would be talking about it so that they could buy time and funding from VCs. Instead, we’re getting vague platitudes about “AGI” and meaningless AI sentience charts.
- Comment on YouTube creator sues Nvidia and OpenAI for ‘unjust enrichment’ for using their videos for AI training 2 months ago:
I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:
First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist’s entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice–the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else’s work.
Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn’t really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you’ll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There’s a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain’t because they find the subject interesting.
Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else’s style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it’s still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.
Fourth, there’s a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist’s style in order to leech off their success, it’s extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim’s livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist’s output.
And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people’s artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you’re claiming it’s your own original work. The only way it’s even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says “this is traced artwork for practice, here’s a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this.” Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it’s much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?
- Comment on Don't joke about daddy 3 months ago:
In the show just before these were taken, Omni-Man got in a fight with another hero named The Immortal, where The Immortal went for the eyes and tried to blind him by gouging them out. It definitely hurt him, but it didn’t work, and Omni-Man ripped The Immortal in half shortly afterwards. (He got better.)
- Comment on It's honestly good advice, but I much prefer original hardware when possible. 3 months ago:
The used game market is still insane, I’m seeing $20-30 for even shit-tier, obscure, normally worthless nes games. If you bought the console while it was new it’s still worth keeping, but absolutely just get a flash cart instead of subjecting yourself to the price gouging retro market.
- Comment on It's honestly good advice, but I much prefer original hardware when possible. 3 months ago:
It’s not just “worse” graphics. CRTs have little/no input lag, which is crucial for some older games like Punch-Out!.
- Comment on Cars Are Now Rolling Computers Now. So What Happens When They Stop Getting Updates? 3 months ago:
Or anywhere relatively rural. I just got home from a long weekend in rural Minnesota/Wisconsin, and there’s literally no viable way to run public transit out there in a manner that wouldn’t either be so restrictive as to be useless, or would lose so much money it would be first on the block for service cuts (and therefore become useless). I’m talking “town of 600 residents, most people live on unincorporated county land on a farmstead, and the only grocery store in a 50 mile radius is a Dollar General” rural. Asking these folks to give up cars is an insane prospect.
- Comment on Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016? 4 months ago:
Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.
For the love of God, Barack, don’t make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner, he’ll run for president to dismantle all you’ve built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.
Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there’s still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don’t, your legacy will be undone I’m under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.
Please, Barack, don’t let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there’s still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.
For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you’re still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don’t you’ll be grieving over the death of your entire country.
For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.
Barack, you can’t sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it’s too important to ignore, please!
I beg you, Hillary, don’t ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.
For fuck’s sake, Comey, don’t reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there’s nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.
This timeline could’ve been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.
- Comment on Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016? 4 months ago:
The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It’s possible Trump wouldn’t have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn’t have been the appetite to prosecute him.
As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it’s debatable how far he would’ve gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.
- Comment on Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016? 4 months ago:
Hoo boy, it’s a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn’t be in as much legal peril as he is now (it’s likely there wouldn’t have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn’t have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th–he was foreshadowing that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.
The world where Trump doesn’t attempt a coup isn’t very interesting, at least for this thought experiment–he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn’t try to run again (or loses in the primary because he’s a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of “statesmanship,” and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.
The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It’s highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.
In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he’s thwarted to the point where he doesn’t (or can’t) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all–it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it’s likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton–something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn’t her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015–the dominant force in the party.
Aside from that, the court wouldn’t be as openly corrupt as it is now. It’d be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn’t have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.
Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.
- Comment on I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity 5 months ago:
Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.
- Comment on Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software 6 months ago:
There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…
Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.
- Comment on Ah, Yes! AI Will Surely Save Us All! 6 months ago:
my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being “reviewed” by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao
- Comment on The Sega Dreamcast 6 months ago:
I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.
…yeah.
- Comment on The Sega Dreamcast 6 months ago:
Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.
Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.
- Comment on YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps 7 months ago:
Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.
The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. (“Punch the monkey and win a prize!” The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video–which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.
The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.
If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain–clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.