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tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

PSA for visual artists:

Nightshade is out!
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/

Nightshade is an ML-poisoning algorithm that causes models trained with treated images to malfunction. Use in conjunction with Glaze to protect your work and give a big "fuck you" to the capitalists stealing your shit for their own profit.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

If you're worried that your images have already been scraped for training, be aware:

Training sets tend to be metadata-and-URL-only; nobody actually packages and distributes terabytes of (often copyrighted!) image data,

So, if you replace existing images with nightshade+glaze, any new models will receive the altered payload.

toridas_,
@toridas_@wandering.shop avatar

@tess is there a similar way of protecting writing from LLMs?

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Proud to be on Marc Andreessen's enemies list

Tag yourself, I'm "tech ethics"

LeslieBurns,
@LeslieBurns@legal.social avatar

@tess For those playing catch-up... when a venture capitalist says it (whatever "it" is) is good for us and regulating it is bad for us, the ONLY "us" involved is the super wealthy. For the rest of us, normal folk us, it's likely to be as good for us as a heaping serving of polonium pudding.

https://www.404media.co/marc-andreesen-manifesto-says-ai-regulation-is-a-form-of-murder/

mattblaze,
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

@tess Count me in as another tech ethics killjoy, with a side order of social responsibility, trust and safety, and risk management, too.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

If your EVs aren't selling maybe that's because you're making giant fucking trucks and SUVs and hyper-expensive luxury sedans and the kind of people who want EVs mostly just want a compact car for getting to work and running errands.

Just sayin'.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Also, like, a lot of people who want EVs live in cities and denser environments where it's expensive to live and a pain in the ass to park and maybe your $100K electric monster truck doesn't fit with their lifestyle.

Stop trying to make EVs that appeal to the kind of people who would rather be rolling coal in a modified F450.

natureshelperokanaganhighlands,
@natureshelperokanaganhighlands@mastodon.world avatar

@tess well, GM does make a sensible sized Bolt that is not a bad car, after a long drawn out battery problem that saw most bolts with new batteries installed under warranty!

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of Mastodons

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Related:

antiproton,

@tess I'll say one thing, I miss the original web. It was so much fun back in the day. I think this is one of those cases we're nostalgia is actually correct lol

I don't know what we're going to build going forward, but I hope that it's lovely and not for the rich

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

iRobot facing "death" because it only has 46% of the market is bonkers to me; capitalism has forgotten what to do with a mature company.

"We sell vacuums to half the population" is no longer a valid business model, evidently.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

fifilamoura,
@fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe avatar

@tess This is the origins story for the start of the robot takeover. First iRobot goes bankrupt, the app gets discontinued, then the chatbots hook up with the Roombas who are sending messages out into the digisphere that go unanswered until....

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Has anyone (other than me) proposed making bottom-posting the default when quote-boosts are implemented?

Bottom-posting is IMO the difference between "hey look at this" culture and "yes, and..." culture. It's a small difference, but I think it frames conversations in a very different way.

aeva,
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@tess I see plenty of bottoms posting on here all the time just fine without quote posting though.

Joking aside, I'm very against mastodon introducing a twitter-style quote dunk verb, but I could see a context-preserving "boost this entire thread / reply chain up to this post" verb working out just fine so long as the ui is able to collapse it down in a reasonable way.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

We've build a solid social media platform here. We don't have to go down the road of "just mindlessly reimplement everything the exact way that Twitter 2022 did it". We can be deliberate in what we copy and where we choose something different.

I came around on quote boosts pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean we have to implement them the exact same way that The Old Platform did. (We can! It should just be a deliberate choice!)

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Given that the streaming services are now permanently memory-holing shows for tax write-offs, it becomes a moral imperative to pirate these shows (if only for archival purposes).

Headline: "Paramount+ Cancels Second Season of Star Trek: Prodigy, Will Remove Series from Platform"

https://www.tor.com/2023/06/23/paramount-cancels-star-trek-prodigy/

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Too many people worked too hard on these shows and movies for them to be gone forever.

Even shows I watched as a kid can still be found somewhere. Now a show that doesn't do blockbuster numbers in its first season gets wiped from existence as if it had never been made.

We're losing pieces of our cultural heritage just so some billionaire can line his pockets with money he could never hope to spend.

max,
@max@smeap.com avatar

@tess Also, I hope we don’t forget in all this that these services getting this freely marketed as “tax write-offs” are sort of winning the PR spin. This isn’t about saving tax money (there’s no streaming catalog taxes!) this is about residuals and royalties owed to labor.

Hopefully I’m not the only one noticing CBS Viacom announcing this in the middle of a labor strike sure sounds like an evil negotiating tactic. They are telling some of their striking staff they are fired.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Even acknowledging the dick-measuring (figurative and literal) and strutting about from these absurd billionaire manchildren lends credence to the core ideas of the current hypermasculine neofascist movement.

I do not care about Musk's hog, or how ripped Zuckerburg suddenly is, or who would win in a fight. Men with unlimited money and free time can surely mold their bodies to whatever ideal is fashionable to their most base worshippers.

The only valid reaction to any of this is derision.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

I don't think people realize how buying into this shit - even in a "wow look at the monkeys fight!" kinda way - subtly legitimizes the way people like Andrew Tate see the world.

I say this as an idiot meathead myself.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

It's also why I've decided to stop referring to these tools as "Elon" or "Zuck". They're oligarchs who own half the fucking country, not my dumb Internet friends who get into too many fights.

Every time we get these ridiculous stories it takes our attention away from the damage they're doing.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Just saw a post that contained the line: "most of the people on Mastodon are here for ideological or privacy reasons"

I want to be clear: I'm here to talk to cool people and shitpost.

I do care about features, because they make it easier to talk to cool people and shitpost.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

"Average Mastodon user only here for ideology or privacy" factoid actualy just statistical error. average mastodon user just here to talk shite. Linux Georg, who lives in cave & has over 10,000 tech opinions each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

ekis,
@ekis@mastodon.social avatar

@tess I think I'm doing it wrong, I'm here to spread communist propaganda.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

If you told me a year ago that right-wingers would be upset because a football team from red state middle America beat a football team from San Francisco and one of the players on the winning team was a straight white man who was dating a famous, conventionally attractive straight white woman country singer...

I would believe you, because the Right is irrational and conspiracy theories don't have to make sense.

But it's also a useful demonstration of how fascism eventually comes for its own.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

You know what? I'm gonna say it louder for the folks in the back:

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT WRITING SOFTWARE THAT MAKES US BETTER THAN ANY OTHER WORKERS.

Tech Workers Stop Thinking We're Somehow Not Workers Like Everyone Else Challenge 2023 (difficulty: quite easy, actually)

kevinteljeur,
@kevinteljeur@mastodon.online avatar

@tess @michelle I always think, we’re one Carrington Event away from having a glut of idiots who are useless at practical work.

flameeyes,
@flameeyes@mastodon.social avatar

@tess or how I usually say "You can't program the world to suit you" https://flameeyes.blog/2020/11/24/you-cant-program-the-world-to-suit-you/

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Gonna say it again because it's important: negative sentiment about the economy isn't about macroeconomic numbers like employment rate or median wage; it's about the perception of precarity.

The gigification of work, difficulty in finding and affording housing and health care, thrash between remote and mandatory in-office work, and frequent layoffs are making people feel less secure, even if their average purchasing power hasn't actually declined.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

This slaps.

Indigenous people really just said, "our people need housing; fuck your zoning laws".

https://macleans.ca/society/sen%cc%93a%e1%b8%b5w-vancouver/

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

As far as I can tell, the pronunciation of the development is something like /sʌˈnˀɔ.qʷʼ/, which is delightful because they've managed to include at least two sounds and three phonological elements not found in [General American] English.

NilaJones,

@tess

'To Indigenous people themselves, though, these developments mark a decisive moment in the evolution of our sovereignty in this country. The fact is, Canadians aren’t used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw. After decades of marginalization, our absence seems natural, our presence somehow unnatural. Something like Sen̓áḵw is remarkable not just in terms of its scale and economic value (expected to generate billions in revenue for the Squamish Nation). It’s remarkable because it’s a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city.'

Bam!

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

I'm seeing some people posting shit like "help your family this Thanksgiving by logging onto their computer switching their default browser from X to Y" and: PLEASE DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS.

Do not switch them from Edge to Chrome. Do not switch them from Chrome to Firefox.

Literally, these are different software environments with different features and access to different data, and if they suddenly cannot log into their bank because they saved their password in Edge, you have just fucked them.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

It's okay to be an evangelist for good technology.

It's okay to turn off a feature like motion smoothing on their TV where there's really no downside.

But going and changing the software they work with in a way that will affect their workflow materially is not cool. It's the kind of weird "I know better than you" consent violation we see all too often from people here on Mastodon.

(I've also heard of people switching out Windows for Linux and I hope those people enjoy their eternity in hell.)

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

@dragonsidedd you jest, but I've been in office cultures where not locking your screen was an invitation for your peers to fuck with your computer, just to teach you a lesson.

I made it very clear that if I ever forgot to lock my screen they were welcome to lock it for me and leave a note, but if any of them touched anything other than the Windows and L keys I would break every single one of their fingers.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

If you see someone spouting bigotry on this platform,

Do:

  • file a detailed report
  • block them

Do not:

  • argue with them on a public thread so that I see bigotry that targets me in my feed

I understand that "drawing out the poison" is sometimes necessary to get a good report, but these tools usually have pretty incriminating post histories.

tess,
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Unfortunately it looks like the migration from Reddit to lemmy has brought some trolls and bigots along with it.

That's fine. We know how to deal with racists, antisemites, and queerphobes here. When rats come into your house you don't swordfight them - you kill 'em or toss 'em outside.

dpscifi,

@tess how do you block? All I see is "Mute", which i assume removes that person's comments from my feed but that might just be a visibility thing.

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