PixelJones

@PixelJones@mindly.social

Technologist, coder, interested in tech/culture intersection, pixel art, pulp art, idea films
#Futurism #Tech #Coder #PixelArt #PulpArt #VintageNeon #Neon #AIArt #Magic
https://mindly.social/@PixelJones

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PixelJones, to random

Why has there been no crackdown on corporate Price Fixing?

Here's one reason: "Collusion Laundering"

Companies are using 3rd party Pricing Algorithm software to hide coordinated price-fixing and judges (through ignorance or corruption) are shrugging and saying "Oh, gosh, if a computer is involved no wrongdoing is possible."

Give me a break. Collusion is collusion, whether done by carrier pigeon or computer algorithm.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-banality-of-price-fixing

Jedigirl, to random
PixelJones,

@Jedigirl Worse, how the CEO of my large, 99% IT-based company which transitioned to all remote during COVID for 2 years with narry a hiccup then declared 100% back-to-office & when asked why said (dead seriously), "If Elon Musk thinks it's time to go BTO then it must be the right thing to do."

Uh, sure, man but to paraphrase every exasperated parent ever, "So, if all your tech bro, man-child billionaire friends decided to jump off a $40 billion bridge in their Teslas would you do that, too?"

PixelJones, to random

This the best "Advent" calendar I've seen this year, a countdown of all the works becoming Public Domain in the next 30 days including these (!):

Peter Pan,
Winnie the Pooh
Buster Keaton's last silent film
Micky Mouse (finally!)
Yeats, Cole Porter and more...

Each day's post offers great context & insight about the works becoming a part of shared culture.

https://publicdomainreview.org/features/entering-the-public-domain/2024/

LALegault, to Israel
@LALegault@newsie.social avatar

Today is the annual day of remembrance for the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine.

Now the world watches as does it to .

.

PixelJones,

@LALegault

This I learned Today: In 1933, Stalin decided to punish uppity Ukraine ("the breadbasket of Europe") by confiscating all their produce, made hiding food punishable by death and then blockaded the border.

The result: 4 million Ukrainians died by intentional starvation. This slow genocide makes Nazi gas chambers seem humane in comparison.

No wonder Ukrainians have little tolerance for Russian claims to their country.

https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor

PixelJones, to USpolitics

In 4 minutes, Thom Hartmann lays out 40 years of Republican strategy in a nutshell.

Run up deficits and cut taxes during Red administrations and then cry about "overspending" and high taxes during Blue administrations.

It requires no governance, no delivery of new programs, no solutions, just cut and complain, rinse and repeat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xM0WZwoM8g

PixelJones, to news

Who/what killed newspapers?

Craig of Craigslist fame is widely blamed for decline of newspapers. The argument (which I also believed) goes: Craig killed classified ads that paid for news. Therefore, Craig killed newspapers, journalism, civilization.

Craig, though, cites this pretty persuasive study showing three different ways that larger trends steadily drove the decline, before & after Craigslist & the Internet came along.

https://baekdal.com/monetization/the-updated-and-scary-circulation-and-revenue-figures-for-newspapers/

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Margie's Candies, Chicago, IL, 2015.

Several more pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/21135096034

PixelJones,

@mattblaze
Gorgeous B&W of a Chicago landmark. It's hard enough to capture the richness of in color but you managed to really bring this scene to life without the crutch of color. Really great.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A thing I feel writing Python is that visually decoding exceptions (the primary form code errors come in) is too much cognitive work, and there are things the interpreter could do to help.

Consider this (long, verbose!) extension trace. Only the pink circled part is important. The interpreter can't know that; that's AI-complete. But the interpreter could know which lines are "my code" and which are "library code", and color-code the background. Then I could just scan for the final "Me" line.

PixelJones,

@mcc
Amen, to that.

Also, IDEs could hide a lot more of the "noise" like replace "some/super/long/path/source.py" with "source.py" that expands when we click or hover.

Likewise, "Some method(long-typed-parameter-list)" could be just "Some method(...)" that we can expand as needed.

Less junk to wade through would get us to fixes faster.

PixelJones, to random

(Reposted from @augieray w/ a minor, clarifying graphic change)

PixelJones,

@augieray

As Wikipedia shows, the truth is slightly more nuanced than the simple graphic suggests. Namely, the assault weapon ban was lifted AND the gun industry used that as an excuse to go hog wild promoting AR-style weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban

PixelJones, (edited )

@augieray I love everything about your post (so much that I shared it on my other socials.)

I wasn't trying to refute it but support it & responding to https://mindly.social/@CoastalCoasting@universeodon.com w/ the Wikipedia article.

As a bonus, the Wikipedia graphs strongly indicated (to me) that the ban worked but the surge in violence after it was lifted was fueled by the gun industry opportunistically hyping AR weapons, putting millions of killing machines in the hands of people, some crazy enough to use them.

PixelJones, (edited ) to science

Huge life-saving breakthrough: The first Malaria vaccine has cut deaths in kids under 5 by 13%. The results of this huge trial (hundreds of thousands vaccinated already) could mean that more than 60,000 children could be saved per year in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

@delfuego , for helping me correct my initial hasty post.]

https://www.science.org/content/article/first-malaria-vaccine-slashes-early-childhood-deaths

PixelJones, to apple

Terrific reporting (in no less) by Stephen Kent calling out the long line of Western media "cancelled" by .

The latest being who walked away from when they wanted to silence an episode about and Chinese surveillance.

Award-winning films that China has tried to erase from history:

Brad Pitt's "Seven Years in Tibet"
Martin Scorsese’s "Kundun"

As Stephen says, "This has got to stop" and we should all watch "forbidden" movies.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2023/10/26/jon-stewart-apple-tv-show-canceled-china-government-censorship/71298946007/

PixelJones, to webassembly

Holy cripes! This project could revive an entire lost generation of interactive content built in (thousands upon thousands of beloved titles.)

For any youngins': Flash was tech that brought playful, app-like interactivity to the web before mobile apps even existed. Unlike choppy, low-res pixel graphics of the day, Flash delivered butter-smooth vector animation meaning all those forgotten apps will scale to HD screens, no jaggies in sight.

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

"Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives."
Really, Apple?
Jon Stewart’s Show on Apple Is Ending https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/business/media/jon-stewart-the-problem-ends.html?smid=tw-share

PixelJones,

@jeffjarvis Here's a un-paywalled article in The Verge about it:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23924549/jon-stewart-apple-ai-china-cancel

PixelJones, to Israel

terrorist acts are appalling but vengeance is no excuse to recapitulate a Holocaust on innocent Palestinians.

"We as American Jews believe that 'never again' means never again for anyone, and that includes Palestinians"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/jewish-americans-protest-gaza

PixelJones, to LLMs

Are AIs/ racist? Two true answers:

  1. Results ARE racist! For example, researchers found it impossible to get an generator to produce a picture of a black doctor treating white patients.

  2. Code/algorithms are NOT racist but blindly follow the statistics of datasets they're trained on.

So, the problem is that right now is purpose-built to deliver stereotypes, clichés that most closely conform to their datasets.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/race-statistics-and-the-persistent?fbclid=IwAR1_bhlheZakIrAgnz5GNyzRTGE-cA7mSC9t7g2BRAzAJ62t1Nkza5CVkOI

PixelJones, to aiart

Terrific opinion piece on why the Copyright Office was wrong about

I agree that if your prompt is a simplistic, zero-effort "beautiful fairy girl" then that should be an un-copyrightable mechanical work. On the other hand, if you've crafted & tweaked a 300-word prompt over 100 iterations for an hour, I don't see how that wouldn't be considered a work of human creativity & deserving of copyright.

(The article doesn't address "style theft" at all, though.)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/opinion-dont-exclude-ai-generated-art-from-copyright/

PixelJones,

@CodexArcanum Interesting idea! I'd think that should be true but, as of now, US copyright has said nobody holds a copyright on .

They think this protects human creators but your scenario shows how that could end up harming them by giving free-range to completely derivitive works.

siderea, to random

It is incredibly frustrating that the only thing more stupid than Patreon is all the alleged Patreon substitutes that clearly don't even understand what Patreon does.

Pro tip: Patreon has no meaningful competitors, and also it sucks, so there's a huge opportunity for somebody to kick sand in its face and take its lunch money. But to do that you would have to understand what actually Patreon does that is worth it to creators to allow Patreon to take 5% of their proceeds (and then pass on to them a second 5% in payment processing fees).

PixelJones,

@siderea Terrific thread on why Patreon serves artists so well but it (or a smart competitor) could be even better.

(Siderea, it would be nice if you used /1, /2, /3 ,etc. post numbering. I wasn't sure at all this was a long thread from your first post. I'm glad I clicked to find out.)

ned, (edited ) to random

I don't know how many times it needs to be said. Supporting workers and worker pay is always good for the economy. Supporting anti-worker, pro-capitalist policy is always bad for the economy. Period. Workers are the backbone of the marketplace, not ownership.

PixelJones,

@Voline @ned @mhoye
That's what is broken. For 50 years the "Friedman Doctrine" has sold the idea that delivering shareholder value is the one and only legitimate goal of CEOs and boards.

Any labor improvements, environmental or social considerations are immediately suspect or, at best, thought of as cute PR stunts. If the stock goes up as a result, great. If not, the investor pitchforks come out & any "soft" CEO is run out of town.

That's why we need mandatory worker stakes in companies.

creativecommons, to ai
@creativecommons@mastodon.social avatar

As part of our ongoing community consultation on generative #AI, CC has engaged with a wide variety of stakeholders, including artists and content creators, about how to help make generative AI work better for everyone.

Today, we’re publishing an open letter from over 70 artists who use generative AI.

Read the full letter and selected comments from signing artists: https://loom.ly/UVY3jnI

PixelJones,

@doug @creativecommons

, in general, isn't "wholesale abuse" of anything. Exaggerating it's effect won't slow its adoption or encourage the ethical frameworks around it artists legitimately need, specifically:

  1. Ability for living artists to opt out of image datasets.
  2. By default, art tools should not allow prompts using living artists' names.

BTW: Even if zero living artists' work was in datasets, AI art would still be a powerful tool & change artists need to adapt to.

PixelJones,

@doug @creativecommons

If was based only work of artists dead a hundred years would you regard it's output "theft?" From whom? Who would be harmed?

If I sample your art for colors & then use that palette in my work is that theft? How about general composition? How about a character's pose?

Artists have been sampling & borrowing & paying homage to & remixing prior art constantly for 1000 years. Art didn't die. Photography didn't kill art. Unique visions always win.

PixelJones,

@doug

I harp on dead artists b/c people conflate the "theft" of and the "threat." Even if all "theft" of living artists was taken out of it, the "threat" to artists remains.

I'm with you & want artists paid & don't want or envision a world where artists are obsolete. Still, artists will have to lean into their human perspective & distinctive creativity.

Just like "functional" portrait artists & lithographers lost work to photography, artists just phoning it in will have to adapt.

davep, to random

I tried donating blood today. Never again, I'll tell you. So many questions! 'Why do you want to donate blood?' 'Whose blood is it?' 'Why is it in a bucket? '

PixelJones,

@davep

LOL. Loved it so made it more visual.

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