The silver lining is that the swift fan backlash, even the very unconvincing attempt at denial, are further evidence of how “AI” “art” has firmly established itself as synonymous with bad/lazy/inadequate/cheating the public. Which means actual artists are far from obsolete, If you can draw for real you’ll be in demand whenever someone wants actual quality in anything.

Since we’re never getting Winds of Winter anyway and they’ll have to keep cashing on calendars and guides and new illustrated editions, hopefully the backlash was big enough that they learned their lesson and will pay for actual art next time.

And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I’m sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—

Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.

Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”

Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.

Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously “AI” “art”, Like it’s bad generic souless fantasy “art” where you often can’t even recognise which character it’s meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they’d ever use “AI” and unsubtly blaming the hired “artist” (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn’t care about anything else than cost-cutting.

And behold, the publisher is on record saying they’d do exactly that:

Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.

Some of the fan backlash with samples of the “art”, if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.

Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don’t even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they’re “Illustrating”. Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there’s no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she’s wearing funeral black.

At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall

https://tabstack.ai/

can we cancel Mozilla yet

I’m actually tempted to move to NetBSD on those grounds alone, though I did notice their “AI” policy is

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core. [emphasis mine]

and I really don’t like the energy of that fine print clause, but still, better than what Debian is going with, and I always had a soft spot for NetBSD anyway…

" The ‘Big Short’ Guy Shuts Down Hedge Fund Amid AI Bubble Fears"

https://gizmodo.com/the-big-short-guy-shuts-down-hedge-fund-amid-ai-bubble-fears-2000685539

‘Absolutely’ a market bubble: Wall Street sounds the alarm on AI-driven boom as investors go all in

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/absolutely-a-market-bubble-wall-street-sounds-the-alarm-on-ai-driven-boom-as-investors-go-all-in-200449201.html?guccounter=1

computers were a mistake

yeah it sucks we can’t even compare real-world capitalists to fictional dystopias because that dignifies them with a gravitas that’s entirely absent.

At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus!*
* Results may vary. FreeTorture Corporation’s Torment Nexus™ can create mild discomfort, boredom, or temporary annoyances rather than true torment. Torments should always be verified by a third party war criminal before use. By using the FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ you agree to exempt FreeTorture Corporation of any legal disputes regarding torment quality or lack thereof. You give FreeTorture Corporation a non-revocable license to footage of your screaming to try and portray FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ as a potential apocalypse and see if we can make ourselves seem competent and cool at least a little bit

Uzumaki intensifies

More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple

Heck the AI/crypto stuff is awful but I would actually be interested in a RISC computer running a low-energy-use minimalistic OS that opts out of the Web by foregrounding Gemini protocol and dedicated apps for traditional, older Internet protocols (email, irc, telnet/ssh etc.)

Jesus fucking Christ.

I did paid work in Japanese translation once, I stopped because the ungodly amount of work wasn’t worth what they pay you. The tech people really have no idea what they’re breaking by moving fast here.

cos it implies that my overvalued salary as an IT monkey fo parasite companies of no social value is not because I sold my soul to capital owners, it’s because I’ve always been a special little boy who got gold stars in school

Anyone knows who’s (presumably) Tor from the “Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities” Youtube channel and what’s up with his ideological commitments? Somebody recommended me this video on some Wikipedia grifter, I was enjoying it until suddenly (ca. 23:20 ) he name-drops Scott Alexander as “a writer whom I’m a big fan of”. I thought, should somebody tell him. Then I looked up and the guy has an entire video on subtypes of rationalists, so he knows, and chose to present as a fan anyway. Huh. However as far as a cursory glance goes the channel doesn’t seem to bat for, you know, “human biodiversity”. (I haven’t watched the rat video because I don’t want to ruin my week)

back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.

cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to

Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”

Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.

The first couple Eko Eko Azarak movies. Grade-A B-horror Japanese schlock, main character is a Satanist witch teenage detective, more or less. Her goddamn name is Kuroi Misa (“Black Mass”), I love her so much. Perfect if you like brainless gore and non-irony-poisoned creepy movies for spooky week.

The movies are currently on Youtube in full. I’m also watching the 1997 TV series but after episode #3 you’ll need to speak Japanese. The movies are better than the series anyway (the first two at least, haven’t watched the others.)

Yeah I mean I am in favour that food should not be paywalled from the hungry and everyone who wants food should be able to just go to the food and eat it (i.e. I am in favour of a system that allocates resources according to need). I am not in favour that wealthy capital owners who already hold all the power in the world should be allowed to vacuum all the food into a hell blender that produces processed food product to try and impress investors into another round of funding for their food sucking machine. These are not the same thing.

I will deliberately avoid declaring the take to be in the public domain, just so that you can enjoy the street cred of your life of crime 🏴‍☠️

I’m a leftist who doesn’t support intellectual property. My solutions to intellectual property are 1) communism, or at least 2) basic income, in that order of preference.

Until one of the solutions to the problem of intellectual property is implemented, individuals should be allowed full sovereignity over their intellectual creations as they see fit. Personally all my intellectual creation is either public domain, or published under open, explicitly anti-capitalist licenses. But that’s because I have a day job and a safe economic situation. If an artist decides people should pay to use their stuff, people should pay to use their stuff. The consent of the creator is non-negotiable.

Capitalists are the enemy and I don’t give a flying fuck about capitalist intellectual property. My rule, grosso modo, is: if I pay to access this piece of art, does the money go to the creators, or does it go to some corporation’s shareholders? If the first, I pay, gladly. If the second, I sail the high seas. Sometimes when it’s hybrid (usually of the form “the artist gets peanuts and the capital owners get the lion’s share”) I will dig up the artist’s patreon or ko-fi or whatever, donate the price of the thing there, and pirate it, under the assumption that the patreon/ko-fi/bandcamp/etc. cut is smaller than the typical entertainment industry’s.

Peter Coffin is a fuck and his contrarian-ass pro-AI stuff deserves sneering to the full extent of sneerdom