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- Comment on King Charles hopes nature film will 'inspire' viewers 2 hours ago:
‘Hopefully someone with power will watch my documentary and make positive policy changes for the environment’, lamented the literal king.
- Comment on A cartoonist's review of AI art, by Matthew Inman 21 hours ago:
Stable Diffusion? The same Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images which claims they used 12 million of their images without permission? Ah yes very non-secretive very moral. And what of industry titans DALL-E and Midjourney? Both have had multiple examples of artists original art being spat out by their models, simply by finessing the prompts - proving they used particular artists copyright art without those artists permission or knowledge.
Stable Diffusion also was from its inception in the hands of tech bros, funded and built with the help of a $3 billion dollar AI company (Runway AI), and itself owned by Stability AI, a made for profit company that is itself valued at $1 billion and now has James Cameron on its board. The students who worked on a prior model (Latent Diffusion) were hired for the Stable Diffusion project, that is all.
I don’t care to drag the discussion into your opinion of whether artists have any ownership of their art the second after they post it on the internet - for me it’s good enough that artists themselves assign licences for their work (CC, CC BY-SA, ©, etc) - and if a billion dollar company is taking their work without permission (as in the © example) to profit off it - that’s stealing according to the artists intent by their own statement.
If they’re taking CC BY-SA and failing to attribute it, then they are also breaking licencing and abusing content for their profit. An VLM could easily add attributes to images to assign source data used in the output - weird none of them want to.
In other words, I’ll continue to treat AI art as the amoral slop it is. You are of course welcome to have a different opinion, I don’t really care if mine is ‘good enough’ for you.
- Comment on A cartoonist's review of AI art, by Matthew Inman 1 day ago:
Thanks. I edited
- Comment on A cartoonist's review of AI art, by Matthew Inman 1 day ago:
Collage art retains the original components of the art, adding layers the viewer can explore and seek the source of, if desired.
VLMs on the other hand intentionally obscure the original works by sending them through filters and computer vision transformations to make the original work difficult to backtrace. This is no accident, its designed obfuscation.
The difference is intent - VLMs literally steal copies of art to generate their work for cynical tech bros. Classical collages take existing art and show it in a new light, with no intent to pass off the original source materials as their own creations.
- Comment on A cartoonist's review of AI art, by Matthew Inman 2 days ago:
All of that’s great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial LLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the LLMs that comfui uses as a backend.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to ‘generate’ art that they’ve taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it’s all running locally on open source LLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that’s what… a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I’m happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
- Comment on Steam, Riot Games hit by disruptions: massive DDoS attack suspected 2 days ago:
I played a few DoTA games with friends while this was occurring and twice during gameplay approximately 10 seconds of play experienced some server-side lag for everyone in the game - there were moments of confusion that rapidly passed. Steam ops team did well.
Truly a tremendous impact and a fantastic use of the attackers time and resources.
- Comment on Renewables overtake coal as world's biggest source of electricity 3 days ago:
Oh yes, also ‘wind turbines need oil lubricant’ - checkmate environmentalists.
Never mind that they use a tiny fraction of the fossil fuels of a gas or coal plant.
‘Any step towards reducing fossil fuels is completely pointless if it uses even a tiny shred of fossil fuels’ is some deeply stupid logic that they keep falling back on.
- Comment on Motion sensors in high-performance mice can be used as a microphone to spy on users, thanks to AI — Mic-E-Mouse technique harnesses mouse sensors, converts acoustic vibrations into speech 3 days ago:
Sadly no. The only way is to come up with countermeasures.
- play music through speakers while using mouse
- leave rumble gamepad playing demo of game on desk
- put vibrator set to ‘random pulse mode’ on the desk
- Comment on Renewables overtake coal as world's biggest source of electricity 3 days ago:
Every right winger today: lies!
- Comment on Big Brother just got an upgrade. Starting December, Amazon’s Ring cameras will scan and recognize faces. Don’t want to be in their database? Too bad — walk past a Ring and your face can be stored... 3 days ago:
Nah Ring cameras will just toss police to your door because you look loosely like a person of interest in a case.
Good think police visiting houses doesn’t lead to the death of innocent people on the regular.
- Comment on Crunchyroll Faces Cancelation: Why Anime Fans Are Choosing Piracy After Latest Update 4 days ago:
What makes you think that relabelling Palestinians as ‘innocent people’ to prevent Netanyahu and his fascists from their Doublethink redirection of genocide to only be relevant to Jews but not Palestinians would work? They would immediately reframe ‘innocent people’ as Hamas-embedded terrorist supporters - they already do it. The better action is to call out the truth (Israel is committing genocide) and say it loudly as much as possible, one of many benefits is that businesses and artists and people don’t actually want to be associated with a genocide and we’re seeing that impact daily.
When people say “Israel is committing genocide” they mean the government of Israel, it is implied. It is silly to extrapolate it to blame for every man woman and child in Israel. Just as it would be silly to pin it down to only Netanyahu when he is the PM of far-right government with thousands of people directly supporting and enabling his actions, and is Israel’s longest serving prime minister - voted in multiple times by clear majority in elections, so while only he and his government are accountable to their actions, a large swathe of Israel is responsible for him being there.
Just as when people say “the USA has just bombed Iran unprovoked” they clearly mean the current government of the USA has taken this action - not just Trump, and also not some kid playing basketball in Philadelphia.
- Comment on Crunchyroll Faces Cancelation: Why Anime Fans Are Choosing Piracy After Latest Update 4 days ago:
Appalling.
P. S. When I tried to open your link, it failed and sent me to the MSN front page, i removed some variables/identifiers at the end of URL and that seems to work:
- Comment on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets 6 days ago:
How do you know? 😑
Please link a single news source showing Signal app was part of a pedophile bust - should be easy if its got poor encryption that can be backdoored by authorities.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Obama should have partially nationalized any banks that wanted a bail out. Banks are an essential service so there is no reason the govt should not get involved.
Want $2 billion? US govt gets $2bil in stock of your bank. They were absolutely over a barrel and would have taken the deal.
- Comment on Its all bots, isn't it? 1 week ago:
Tfw billionaires outsourced making music, drawing art, talking shit on the internet and all other creative interests - and still we gotta go to work and do all the drudgery every day.
Build something useful you resource parasites.
- Comment on How do you secure your home lab? Like, physically? From thieves? 1 week ago:
Haven’t seen anyone say this so I will: if your home isn’t Fort Knox or a billionaire bunker, then presume it will be broken into. If they don’t steal your shit, they might just smash it for funsies. If you’re running home lab, you probably don’t have the money to turn your home into Fort Knox, but even if you did you’d probably be better off removing the need:
- back important data up to another site automatically: Friends house, family, cloud, etc. Preferably far away.
- encrypt everything that’s got private data on it, both onsite and remotely.
Then you don’t have to worry about theft or damage or fire. Congrats, you’re doing better than probably 50% of businesses-grade setups.
- Comment on Does more expensive phones have better reception? 1 week ago:
Not a great example of the improved reception of metal frame phones, because it was the iPhone 4 that lost reception quality significantly when it was held on the metal sides and your finger/hand happened to be near the lower left corner. This was a perfectly natural way to hold the phone and most impacted left-handers.
Apple famously responded by saying “you just need to not hold it like that”, rather than admitting an engineering mistake.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 1 week ago:
Cool. Power to you - we clearly have differing tastes. OP was on the fence and asked for an opinion so I gave mine, not sure who else I’d be speaking for. Now you’ve given yours, so they’ve even wider opinions 👍
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 1 week ago:
Go ahead. Watch it. 🤷🏻
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 1 week ago:
If you’re a fan of older Star Treks it’s bad, real bad. I watched until the end of season 2 with my partner and had to bail. Everyone above has given good reasons why, I’ll add one I haven’t seen: the lead actress (Soneqa Martin-Green?) overacts Michael Burnham. She overdramatizes almost every scene, to the detriment of the believabolity of the in-universe world, I tried to overlook it but found it grating. I told my partner that half-way into season two, and she responded that she doesn’t really see it. Then about five seconds later Burnham is raising her voice to a senior officer and on the verge of tears over nothing… a minor misunderstanding. Partner laughs and goes, “ok yeah I see it”.
I’d rewatch Enterprise 100 times over ever watching Discovery again, and Enterprise is probably my least favourite pre-2010 Trek, if that helps you.
- Comment on Kremlin bans fuel exports until the end of the year as Russia’s supply is disrupted by Ukrainian drones 1 week ago:
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 1 week ago:
The difference is that passworded zip files are used to distribute malware regularly. For a few reasons such as they’re very simple to use (malware creators are often lazy) and they can be generally be unpacked with preinstalled libraries or programs on the OS. A random encrypted file will require a DLL or runtime that can unpack the blob, and antivirus engines find that kind of stuff packaged together very sus.
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
Thanks for the effort digging. This does not actually point out any game doing it in particular though, and it’s actually a perfect example of a working antivirus picking up a suspect file (a password protected archive) in a game’s install tree.
This is from Aug 2024 and could even be from one of the games that distributed malware. Its absolutely something that Steam should be blocking/flagging for manual review, and a huge red flag that any developer would use this as a tool for distributing their game content.
- Comment on Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name? 2 weeks ago:
I’d be happy they made the effort to try.
A name is just the noise another person makes to get your attention or address you. If they make the wrong noise - it’s not gonna work as well.
- Comment on Australians are moving to Tasmania to escape climate change, but the island state is not immune 2 weeks ago:
Feels like we’re discussing two different things here.
These people are moving to escape climate change of heat in Queensland. But the article discusses a wider trend of people moving to Tas to escape the longer term effects of climate change - which I am pointing out, is impossible.
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
Good it is not when the recommendation from security experts and reporters is to avoid any Steam games with low numbers of installs / reviews and betas from small companies. That’s where we’re at now.
bleepingcomputer.com/…/verified-steam-game-steals…
Nobody reviews game code, as game code is not supplied, only binaries with their relevant resources. There are many security providers that would be able to provide better service that whatever Valve is doing - but who knows, because they keep tight-lipped about it every time there’s an issue, and just patiently await their defenders to hand-wave any concerns.
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
It literally contained a known version StealC malware in its payload, and had basic python scripting with the Telegram bot code and access tokens left visible to researchers (very bad OSINT). This was not sophisticated scripting, nor novel malware, just some script kid that sourced the whole setup on Telegram. The malware would easily have been captured by a competent security company’s automated scanner.
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
Citation please for any indie dev using passworded zip files to lock game content. That would be a pretty dumb approach given all retail security suites / antiviruses will flag a password-protected archive as suspect by default (because they’re so commonly used in the past to distribute malware).
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
All they’re expected to do is pay for upstream providers to scan their submissions (eg third party security providers), no need to hire new staff. This is the fourth instance publicized this year! They should communicate regarding issues like OPs - but like usual, it’s crickets.
- Comment on Block Blasters: Theft of $32k in crypto from a stage 4 cancer patient due to valve’s incompetence in allowing malware on their platform 2 weeks ago:
They’ve already missed four instances of malware this year that have been publicly reported. How many have other storefronts missed?
I don’t see why asking them out to improve is an unbalanced response or unfair, given the enormous budget they have and the market dominance.
