mke
@mke@programming.dev
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 9 hours ago:
Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage.
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 10 hours ago:
No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.
I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.
Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve.
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 10 hours ago:
Yes, sort of. Thundermail addresses, apparently, or bring your own. From the linked article you’re commenting on:
Users can send and receive email using new Thundermail accounts they sign up for. The service will also allow using your own custom domain (e.g. your.name@yourdomain.com).
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 11 hours ago:
I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app.
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 11 hours ago:
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. It makes no sense to enshittify like Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 11 hours ago:
They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.
I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.
- Comment on If you're still on Reddit... 11 hours ago:
I’ve seen news that tumblr has changed/is changing, and they’re even implementing some form of activitypub (Fediverse) integration. I don’t have stakes here, just curious: does that change your position any, as an ex-user now on fedi?
- Comment on Why I recommend against Brave. 1 week ago:
Might be nicer if they just didn’t care.
Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you’ll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:
you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it
Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!
Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it
These were taken directly from the video. Throw in also some “stop inserting politics (that I don’t like) into tech” comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it.
I don’t think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.
To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is also a big fan of Brendan Eich.
- Comment on China announces plan to label all AI-generated content with watermarks and metadata. 2 weeks ago:
I think there was a similar idea in the USA with the COPIED Act, but I haven’t heard anything else about it since.
- Comment on You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results | This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode 3 weeks ago:
:( sorry to hear that. Out of curiosity, what app/UI are you using?
- Comment on You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results | This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode 3 weeks ago:
Not sure what I expected. For the equally curious with no foresight:
definitely a dildo with 4get stuck on it using sticky note
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 4 weeks ago:
If your goal is avoiding GenAI because you’re allergic to it, sure, but when the goal is to demonstrate support for creators over rich companies exploiting them, it’s a start. Being imperfect doesn’t make it useless.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
That can be AI depending on how broad your definition is, but it’s not GenAI, which is the main concern here.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
These same discussion happened with photoshop and “brush tools” why are those acceptable to make it less labor intensive, but this isn’t?
You’re missing the point. “This makes things easier” isn’t the problem, it’s more along the lines of “this is only possible by stealing the works of countless people, it will attempt to obviate their jobs, and make billionaires even richer.” People aren’t mad you want to work less, they’re mad you’ll make things worse, and won’t even bother to grasp how.
It’s more hypocrisy over purism, as you’ve so nicely pointed out.
Comparing GenAI to brush tools is extremely disingenuous, talk about hypocrisy.
- Comment on John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed 5 weeks ago:
Toxicity doesn’t “work fine,” it’s contagious and destructive. For projects, it slows progress. For communities in general, it reinforces bad behavior and pushes out newcomers, leading to more negative spaces, isolation, and stagnation, just off the top of my head. These were issues in older communities just as they are in modern ones.
I don’t see why we should abandon moderation for your benefit, at the expense of people who care.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
You can now run optimized open source diffusion models on an iPhone, and it’s been possible for years.
Games aren’t background processes. Even today, triple-A titles still sometimes come out as unoptimized hot garbage. Do you genuinely think it’s easy to pile a diffusion model on top with negligible effect? Also, will you pack an entire model into your game just for one instance?
I use that as an example because yes, there’s models that can easily run on an Nvidia 1060 these days. Those models are more than enough to handle incremental changes to an image in-game
Look at the share of people using an 1050 or lower card. Or let’s talk about the AMD and Intel issues. These people aren’t an insignificant portion. Hell, nearly 15% don’t even have 16GB of ram.
it’s probably the best way to get an uncanny valley effect in … a horror game, as the alternatives would be:
- spending many hours manually making hundreds of incremental changes
- hiring someone to do what I just mentioned
What are you talking about? You’re satisfied with a diffusion model’s output, but won’t be with any other method except excruciating manual labor? Your standards are all over the place—or rather, you don’t have any. And let’s keep it real: most won’t give a shit if your game can show them 10 or 100 slightly worse versions of the same image.
Procedural generation has been a thing for decades. Indie devs have been making do with nearly nonexistent art skills and less sophisticated tech for just as long. I feel like you don’t actually care about the problem space, you just want to shove AI into the solution.
I’ll call an open source model exploitation the day someone can accurately generate an exact work it was trained on not within 1, but at least within 10 generations.
Are you referring to the OSAID? The infamously broken definition that exists to serve companies? You don’t understand what exploitation here means. “Can it regurgitate exact training input” is not the only question to ask, and not the bar. Knowing your work was used without consent to train computers to replace people’s livelihoods is extremely violating. Talk to artists.
I know the researching ability of people has decreased greatly over the years, but using “knowyourmeme” as a source? Really?
I tried to use an accessible and easily understandable example. Fuck off. Go do your own “research”, open those beloved diffusion models, make your scary, then scarier images and try asking people what they think of the results. Do it a hundred times, since that’s your only excuse as to why you need AI. No cherry-picking, you won’t be able to choose what your rube goldberg painting will look like on other people’s PCs.
- Comment on John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed 5 weeks ago:
Content moderation primarily serves advertisers
Do you not think fighting toxicity and hate speech is a valid and important function of moderation that’s just as much or more for the sake of the people as it might be for advertisers?
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
It sounds like you gave up and expect everyone else to do the same.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions. Hopefully things won’t get that far. I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
That’s an interesting enough idea in theory, so here’s my take on it, if you want one.
Yes, it sounds magical, but:
- AI sucks at make it more X. It doesn’t understand scary, so you’ll get worse crops of the training data, not meaningful changes.
- It’s prohibitively expensive and unfeasible for the majority of consumer hardware.
- Even if it gets a thousand times cheaper and better at its job, is GenAI really the best way to do this?
- Is it the only one? Are alternatives also built on exploitation? If they aren’t, I think you should reconsider.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
Yours is the most captivating comment in this entire thread.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
This might be a little off-topic, but I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend of anti-AI discourse ignoring programmers. Protect artists, writers, animators, actors, voice-actors… programmers, who? No idea if it’s because they’re partly to blame, or people are simply unaware code is also stolen by AI companies—still waiting on that GitHub Copilot lawsuit—but the end result appears to be a general lack of care about GenAI in coding.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
The only reason people shit on AI currently is because expert humans are still far better than it.
Not it’s not! There are a whole bunch of reasons why people dislike the current AI-wave, from artist exploitation, to energy consumption, to making horrible shitty people and companies richer while trying to obviate people’s jobs!
You’re so far off, it’s insane. That’s like saying people only hate slavery because the slaves can’t match craftsmen yet. Just wait a bit until they finish training the slaves, just a few more whippings, then everyone will surely shut up.
- Comment on Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages 5 weeks ago:
The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
It is now “purist” to protest against the usage of tools that by and large steal from the work of countless unpaid, uncredited, unconsenting artists, writers, and programmers. It is virtue signaling to say I don’t support OpenAI or their shitty capital chasing pig-brethren. It’s fucking “organic labelling” to want to support like-minded people instead of big tech.
Y’all are ridiculous. The more of this I see, the more radicalized I get. Cool tech, yes, I admit! But wow, you just want to sweep all those pesky little ethical issues aside because… it makes you more productive? Shit, it’s like you’re competing with Altman on the unlikeability ranking.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X blocks links to Signal, the encrypted messaging service 1 month ago:
Joking for real, or seriously for real? The vast majority of people that used twitter are still using twitter. This applies to users in the united states, of course, but it especially applies to those in the entire rest of the world, where elon’s shit largely hasn’t crossed the culture/language barrier, or doesn’t matter to people.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 1 month ago:
I wouldn’t take a cybertruck if it was free
You’re being ridiculous, why would you seriously think that? That kind of internet opinion doesn’t hold up in real life. I would absolutely take a free Cybertruck, I’ve long dreamed of making my own car bomb.
- Comment on Steam Winter Sale Featured Deep Discounts - any recommendations? 2 months ago:
I wish there was something between World of Warships and Mr. Here’s Literal Hours Worth of Interactive Presentations to Learn my Bespoke Mechanics. I haven’t found the time, nor the strength, to have another go at it.
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 4 months ago:
Which marketing and better how, exactly?
Can anyone please point me an example of Bluesky marketing that isn’t word of mouth or large-event headlines on the news?
- Comment on ZUN considering moving his main account to Bluesky 5 months ago:
Not hoping for a miracle, but it’d be nice if some Japanese users followed him, even if only as a secondary account.
I believe Japan is the nation with the second most twitter users, so any chip at that foundation helps.
That, and I’d like to see more touhou artists venture beyond twitter.
