Andrew (making toys)

@scott@social.linux.pizza This is the first good reply I've gotten to this post. The car replacing cablecars and trains made our society measurably worse.

Movies from 1931 include:

• Dracula
• Frankenstein
• M
• Little Caesar
• The Public Enemy
• City Streets
• City Lights
• Monkey Business
• Pardon Us (the first all talking Laurel and Hardy feature film)
• Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
• Mädchen in Uniform (among the earliest surviving films to depict lesbians)
• Three Hitchcock films
• The Champ
• Tabu

And a bunch of others.

In this particular case, we were in nuance territory. The person in question was writing music and performing vocals and then generating parts and exporting stems from a generative AI music imitator to produce something they considered a prototype or sketch of the finished track. That, on the surface, doesn't sound all that different from me firing up garage band and sticking an autodrummer behind a track I wrote, or using a vocoder for vocals, or playing to a drum machine. and I imagine that some folks, myself included when I first encountered this argument, might struggle to articulate what makes it different. Resource utilization, certainly. Trained on stollen labor, for sure. Those are problems, but they aren't the biggest problem I have. The biggest problem that I have is that Suno and tools like it are trying to replace the act of making music. They are only being positioned as music creation tools for individuals for as long as it takes them to get good enough that most people can't tell the difference, and the people using these tools are paying for the privilege to train that machine. When the training is done, the people get cut out, and the market get flooded with slop that's good enough that most people will struggle to recognize it. (This is already happening. It will get worse.) Garage band can't spit out a song without human interaction. Suno can. It's the difference between human-machine augmentation and machine automation.

So yes, there are things called AI that I think are fine, because they help me do a mechanical thing faster (transcription, rotoscoping) and can be run on my local machine, and mostly aren't powered by stolen creative labor. But these things are fundamentally different from what (in my experience, most) people mean when they say AI. What (in my experience, most) people are railing against is Automated Slop Generation trained on the output of real people. Image generators, music generators, text generators. "Tools" designed to mimic human creativity and produce something that is designed to trick people. Generative AI is a machine for producing something that seems plausible for a given input. That's all it can do, and that's what makes it dangerous.

Today, I got to visit a wonderful Asian market, eat some Malaysian food, and wander through a makers market and art exhibit. Then we drove home, and then to our makerspace. She opened the kiln and started cleaning pots while I assembled action figures and started working on packaging design, promotional materials, and store displays. Then we drove back home, walked into our bookstore, and priced and organized pottery and toys while listening to a concert performed by now distant friends, as taped live several years ago, and now broadcast through our cable network and streaming platform. This, I recognize, is something of a charmed life.

In 2027 we get 1931 in the US for everything but recorded sound. (For recorded sound, we'll get 1926, which I'll get into later or tomorrow or something) 1931 is a fascinating year for the US. We're in the midst of the great depression, things are bad. But it also puts us firmly in the early days of the modern era of cinema.

It's probably possible to use a generative audio application in a human augmentation way, but the tools that exist right now are clearly intended to automate the people out of the creative process and, as far as I can tell, any use of these applications serves to further that goal. So even if you can over look the stollen creative labor (and you shouldn't) or the runaway resource utilization (and you shouldn't) and the obvious economic fraud (and you shouldn't) in the name of agency or accessibility, I think it's important to reckon with the fact that access to these applications today is predicated on their eventual use in place of human produced music tomorrow.

I bring all that up, because it's an argument I see over and over again, it's one of the places (perhaps the only place?) for nuance in this conversation and I've seen that point abused and dismissed on both sides of this conversation. Some folks who I otherwise agree with seem to hold that anything that gets bundled under the label AI or that involves ML is inherently evil and wasteful (I disagree) and other folks who I generally disagree with seem to hold that, because there are things labeled AI or ML that aren't evil and wasteful, there thing must therefore be okay (I disagree!)

All of that to say, when you eventually encounter someone who treats probabilistically generative software as if it is a part of their creative process, remember that they are planting the seeds of their own undoing.

Not to go all "clocks striking 13" but Orwell wrote about this shit.

Oh! I also saw a highschool performance of a A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me.

Now the tv is playing violet's score and re-titling of Filibus the mysterious air pirate (episode two). We really do get to do some cool shit.

Well, that's one of the things that make it dangerous anyway.

I'm excited about this one.

Right now, she's pricing her latest creations and putting them on the pottery shelf at the bookstore. Which means I have a few minutes to myself in the bookstore, so I'm watching new ellijay television. So far I've caught an episode of This Is Ellijay, a New Clear Lawn Chairs performance, and Just Dance by Hurly Burly and the Volcanic fallout.

@DoctorDeathray@retro.social I have plans for more of this kind of thing, when the studio is ready and you have the bandwidth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox This is a "paradox" that I just stumbled across on wikipedia. It says, basically, that traffic gets better when public transit gets better and gets worse when public transit gets worse, and is otherwise essentially unaffected or only negatively impacted by improvements (or degradation) in the quality of roads. If you want traffic to get better, build trains.

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party I can't remember if I read the screaming clock. I remember The Talking Skull and Terror Castle very well, and I know I read a lot more of them, but I read Terror Castle several times as a kid.

Y'all I'm so proud of my wife's pottery. Take a look at some of her recent work.

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party In english too. I wonder how different the Bangla series is from the English series, and how different those are from the German series. It looks like there are Many more books in the Bangla series and the German series.

Sony is removing physical discs to kill the third party video game store, and to exert more control over game preservation via DRM, and to further consolidate and control the ability to lend/re-sell games. It's blatant anti-consumer behavior. Apple killed the headphone jack when they bought beats, to force all apple users to buy their new "hi-fi" blutooth headphones. In the process. They tried to kill a universal, century old format. They tried to planned obsolescence one of the only genuinely universal formats we've ever had.

Hey!

Do you have a favorite book on Chinese history, politics, media, or culture that:

• is available in English
• is not written from a US centric or Western centric POV
• is not imperialist propaganda?
• is approachable by a casual audience?

I'm specifically looking for studies on Chinese literature, but also just generally looking to learn more about China and the culture and people of China with a minimal amount of the kind of hangups that come with most books about China available in the US.

We really loved those shows, and got a lot out of them. And we've got this great new toy, and nowhere to show him off! So, this is Kumiai-Ki, the Mighty Union Machine. He fights on behalf of Amazing Workers United against evil billionaires like Geoff Bozo and Elmo Tusk. He's hand made, by me, in north GA. He's made in a retro 3.75" style, inspired by the Shogun Warriors figures of the 1970s, and he's looking for a home. https://www.mountaintowntoys.com/kumiai-ki-the-mighty-union-machine/

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party This is the series that, in the US at least, was billed as "Alfred Hitchcock's"? I *loved* those as a kid in the 90s. They were exceptionally hard to find when I was a kid, so I'm very surprised to hear that they were available internationally. I'm discovering now that there were 200 additional books in the series produced for the german market! Do you remember them well? Did you have a favorite?

I've seen Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III, and Taming of the Shrew. I've seen Romeo and Juliet ... three or four times, maybe 5 if you include film, and I've been in it once. (I was Mercutio) I've never seen Twelfth Night, but I've played Sebastian once (in an adaptation) and Antonio in a straight performance. I saw Julius Caesar with the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern as a highschooler. I've only seen taming of the shrew on film, and I've done table reads of a couple of the parts, but I've never performed it or seen it live. I ... I swear I've seen Richard III, but I honestly don't remember when or under what context, so maybe I'm lying.

I've assembled 75 kumiai-ki toys this week. Our mighty union of mighty labor union mechs is growing stronger by the day. Packaging will be done soon!

So, first, who the hell am I? I've been doing web stuff since I was like 8? I started building websites professionally at 16 or so, and then slowly bounced my way around the tech industry from 18 to 35, working as a developer, a sysadmin, a support tech, ops, an SRE, and then a bunch of leadership titles that were all mostly meaningless. And while all that was going on, I've been running web services for the public, this mastodon instance, multiple peertube instances (including the one for our cable network), and a bunch of other shit. I've worked in data centers. I've worked on teams dedicated to efficiency. I left the tech industry around the time they were bowing down to AI, and now I make toys. That is to say, I know what I'm talking about. (mostly, sometimes, when I can remember what things are called.)

I'm just so tired of this Regression to the Mean in every aspect of society. Can't have interesting looking buildings, too hard to re-sell. Can't have fun colored cars, fleets only want black or white or grey. Can't have any personality, personalization, human curation, have to trust the algorithm. Can't have art, gotta have statically generated slop.

Alright, so I've worked in a couple of datacenters. They were huge, they needed absolutely overblown power and water hookups, and they were mostly built in former farmland or other rural stuff at the edge of suburban areas. The one I spent the most time in was across the street from US-EAST. It was one of 12 DCs on that road, and there were at least three other roads in that area that had at least as many. They were average size for datacenters, but that meant they were Huge buildings. The one I worked in had ... maybe 25 people working inside it on any given day, and that was on the high side. These things mostly don't have many people working inside them.

Man, whoever facebook bribed to get this settlement definitely didn't get enough for how hard they sold us out.

How many Shakespeare plays have you read?

Am I correct in my understanding that both the internet archive and the EFF posted something pro AI this week?

Absolutely fascinating to hear that the 7 up series will be concluding, 63 years later, with 70 up. If you're not familiar with British television (and maybe obscure British television? I feel like I only know about the series because of my work in video art, and not because of TV) 7 up was a documentary series that started as interviews with 14 random seven year olds, and became a series of interview's with those same 14 kids ever seven years as they aged. That crew, of course, is now 70. The original director is gone, but the 14 people were interviewed once again, and a new director is bringing the series ot a close. Apparently, one of their number passed away shortly after shooting his last interview, solidifying the idea that this will be the end of the series.

(Apple failed. My laptop still has a headphone jack. My current phone does not, and the one I ordered to replace it also doesn't. I was willing to make that sacrifice because they have full physical keyboards. I chose my battle. But consumer phones with headphone jacks are making a return, because the demand is still very present. Sony will fail too. Either because consumer demand will force them to start shipping physical games again (or, more likely) consumer demand will cause them to abandon the playstation platform entirely. Then we get to have this fight with Valve, where we've already ceded so much ground.)

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Could still be file system indexing. That used to *wreck* one of my machines, and I never figured out why.

@computerywar@infosec.exchange dice are complicated, but if you don't need casino quality there are dozens of us shops that will make them. This seems exaggerated and sensationalized, and largely like a marketing ploy. Shame, really, I know so many much more interesting board game makers based in the US.

I spent my childhood alternately deeply relegious and entirely agnostic. I spent a lot of time listening to religious music, and especially "Contemporary Christian" and "Christian rock" Occasionally one of those tracks will worm it's way back into my head and I am filled with resent.

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Is it spinning rust?

Hey! Do you do youtube or peertube videos (or a podcast) about pop-culture, toys, video games, cartoons, or labor organizing? Are you interested in a free review copy (digital or physical) of one of our gameboy color games? Or early access to one of our upcoming cartoons? Or a little press kit of our handmade toys and comics, including #kumiai-ki the Mighty Labor Union Mech? Hit me up!

I've never encountered an actually revolutionary technology that people had to be forced to use.

I watched one youtube video about greek mythology and now my recs are like 25% "history" videos with fascist undertones. Point me towards some history youtubers that aren't monsters?

SAMURAI PIZZA CATS

@grmpyprogrammer@yac.grumpy-learning.com How weird do you want to get? Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, Deepin, Pantheon, Sugar, i3, Sway, Budgie, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Openbox... ROX is probably still out there, I used to run FVWM, but that was 10 years ago.

@adhdeanasl@beige.party in my last corporate gig, I said to our exec team "I'm not interested in assigning blame. If a small mistake can take down the system, the system is broken." They let me go.

Hello Sharks, I'd like to present to you today the future of computing. I call it Stephen. Stephen is an intern. You submit prompts to Stephen, in the form of Jira tickets. Stephen then asks lots of questions, and then delivers something almost, but not entirely, unlike what you requested. We're asking for 1.2 billion dollars for 30% equity, so we can scale Stephen.