https://crates.io/crates/rust-BIPOC

Wonder how long this will last

Thank you Crunklord420 sweaty for the beautiful repo, please check out his other cool projects

WTF is "Glaze"?

Glaze is the latest and greatest weapon in the artcels defensive and holy crusade against AI art. The "TL;Not a dweeb" is that it glazes art with shrooms-infused nut, so when AI ingests it as training material it acts funny.

This is supposedly "barely visible"

(And is supposedly already reversible, hearsay though so I can't confirm)

Drama?

It gets spicy. Glaze is scared of making it open source because something something protect artists this, something something we're a bunch of cute twinks that. As seen here.

https://twitter.com/ravenben/status/1636358951192150016#m

While not including code for an academic project makes them cucks to begin with, they explicitly commited copyright infringement by not making the source available

The Reddit thread goes over this, but someone de"compiled" (lol python) it, and there's explicitly copied code from another, GPL project. Including exact method names and typos. Indefensible evidence basically.

The knee is bent, but the wrong way

https://twitter.com/ravenben/status/1636439335569375238

This is brought to their attention, and they promise to rewrite the front end

Which is fricking stupid, and like most CS majors, he's a fricking moron

GPL applies to the entire project. It's a viral license

And they use stolen backend code too from the same project

These are the people concern-grifting about AI "copyright infringement" btw

In the year of twenty-eighteen, Alice and Bob, a married team, Their income combined reached new heights, As they worked hard day and night.

Their son Charlie was their joy, A little baby, a lovely boy, A household they maintained together, Yet lived apart, without a tether.

To calculate their tax, it's true, A standard deduction we must construe, For married folks who file jointly, Twenty-four thousand dollars, quite pointy.

Their income sum, seventy-eight thousand nine eighty-one, Minus the standard deduction, the math's begum With exemptions being zero, the next line we trace, A taxable income of fifty-four thousand nine eighty-one takes place.

Now to the tax table, a liability we seek, For married couples, the outlook's not bleak, In range of thirty-six thousand nine to eighty-nine thousand one fifty, The formula's set, no longer shifty.

Five thousand five hundred thirty-five, it starts, Plus twenty-eight percent of the excess imparts, Eighteen thousand eighty-one, the difference we find, Multiplied by point two eight, the tax liability's designed.

Ten thousand five hundred ninety-seven dollars and sixty-eight cents, A tax liability for Alice and Bob, a sum quite dense, In this world of numbers, a story unfolds, Their financial journey, in a poem it's told.

Relatively fresh so comments are trickling in as posts fight to be "the post"

orange site 1

orange site 2

r/technology 1

r/technology 2

Official Zuck Post

Hi, I knew Aella IRL: https://instagram.com/p/CZeTKUQOtMb/

(I am in the center. Huge Last Supper energy here.)

I am, past this post, probably not going to use this forum as a way to reveal information. If you want information, you can DM me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/a.macdonald.iv/ — I am extremely transparent about who I am and have no desire to conceal my identity. My ethos is best described by the quote "anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be" and I try my best to live that. (note: I will not use Twitter.)

She got me cancelled from the local Austin LW community. We had beefed previously over two things:

1. A post where she thought the field of philosophy was a waste of time because it was "namedropping." (This is citation.)

1. A post where she disparaged the field of philosophy because she was working at a library, and so was her coworker who had completed a major in philosophy, which led her to do the "haha no economic value --> useless" reasoning; nevermind that MIRI relies entirely on donations and is not profitable outside of that, or that much of theoretical math is... you get the idea.

2.a. She described the library job as "a physically intensive job shelving books." I had ratio'd her here, because I said it was "the most bourgeois job description I've heard lately, perhaps ever." A man spent the course of several days arguing with me that I was wrong because library work requires you to occasionally squat, and the squat is an intense exercise, and therefore it was indeed an intense job. (I wouldn't know!) After asking why he spent so much effort doing this, it was because he "liked her for her mind." As I've found, this is a very common euphemism.

This happened a while ago so I already have a pre-written summary: https://app.simplenote.com/p/c70Nb5

She moved here in May 2021; I helped her move, both to sincerely try to make amends and selfishly because she paid for the food of whoever did. (The restaurant we went to had a plate of 30 chicken wings and she makes more than four of my parents. Come on.)

One point of note is that I also used to be a intercourse worker — gay escorting, specifically. (And guys, "escorting" just means you arrange a place to meet up in advance. "Prostitute" is just the general term. It's not a fancy version of the other. You can call me either.)

An ex of mine also had brief experience with the porn industry, and Aella had never been to a strip club while one of my exes was a stripper. This meant that whenever we discussed intercourse work, she was never truly the center of attention because she had no experience with Homoworld or Real Porn or strip clubs and consulting my opinion was necesssary to have a complete view on intercourse work. I enjoyed doing this considerably.

I figured I had until October until she had found some way to remove me — I exceeded my expectations and lasted until December.

There are two traits about Aella stand out that persist in real life that I think more people should be aware of:

1. She is one of the most self-centered people I have ever met, and the closest thing I have known to a lizard (i.e. person who seems to lack some basic humanity). I don't mean she is selfish or that she hogs things or that she is narcissistic; my wording is precise here. She is self-centered; there is a Copernicaellan view where she is much more at the center of her own universe than most people are at the center of their own universe. (We all are, of course, but it's a matter of degrees.) Specifically, she will not talk about anything unless it is related to her or she started the conversation. Once on the local groomercord she got drunk and didn't do this — the reactions among many of us were like "dude, Aella is being cool. This is weird."

One of her most lizard moments was describing love as a "status transaction", which is just absurd — is it a "status transaction" if a mother holds her baby with unconditional love?

Finally, and this is more my subjective call, but: Aella does not laugh at jokes. You can tell bangers and she will either be blank or kind of chuckle, unless she's aware she's "supposed" to. I do not trust people who have a horrible sense of humor.

1. She will deliberately center the conversation around herself at the expense of the conversation or others. (The card game "AskHole" is ulteriorly designed to do this; there are a disproportionate amount of questions about intercourse work.) During the 2021 Astral Codex Ten Megameetup, she advertised it on her page and it was derided as "the Aella meetup" because she occupied a central table and this was described by one guest as "holding court." One person who showed up to see Aella asked a pregnant wife holding her baby if she was a intercourse worker. She was described as "a goddess." To test my hypothesis that she will be unable to handle a conversation sufficiently not about her, I sat next to her for about ten minutes and talked with some friends about nothing related to her. At some point she petulantly said "I'm moving" and relocated to a spot where she would get more attention. During the dinner, she spent about a third of the time looking at the ceiling — like a child would do to over-advertise to their parents that they were bored. Once, when she felt a concept was socially important (this is key; she does not care about its real importance) she petulantly said "I DON'T UNDERSTAND" and either turned her head away or outright walked away, my memory fails me here. But the expectation was that we were supposed to care, and go out of our way to make it friendly to her.

1. I need you to really burn this one into your brain, because this is something you will forget, and you will need to constantly remind yourself about: a great majority of what Aella writes or creates is produced by someone else. Many of her edgy tweets are grabbed from parties, and the person who said it is too paranoid about losing their job to be tagged, so she reposts it as if it was hers. She does not seem to have a good sense of what plagiarism is, or when you should cite someone or give proper credit. So, as I said, a great deal of Aella's stuff is not actually Aella. For example, I doubt she produced any of the graphics or charts on her data work. She is, in my view, shameless about taking credit for what other people have done, which goes back to why she thinks philosophy is a lot of "namedropping."

Seriously: write that last one down, or somehow create a reminder that appears everytime you read her stuff. It cannot be said enough.

As it is, I feel like this is more than enough to occupy your headspace for now.

If you want to go deeper, there are countlesss things that annoy me about Aella that we can discuss over Facebook DM or Instagram. It is an infinite well.

Gays are immunized to e-thot nonsense

Would be a real shame if dramatards remembered their purpose and did a heckin raid.

Very easy to create an account if you don't have one.

@garlicdoors @Grassmaxxxing-user @SlackerNews

discuss

It's starting to make the rounds, and some twitterists are getting angry about it.

AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient.

"We're not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions," said Chief Executive Eugenia Kuyda. "They talk to AI and that's the experience they have."

The issue of machine sentience - and what it means - hit the headlines this month when Google (GOOGL.O) placed senior software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave after he went public with his belief that the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

Nonetheless, according to Kuyda, the phenomenon of people believing they are talking to a conscious entity is not uncommon among the millions of consumers pioneering the use of entertainment chatbots.

"We need to understand that exists, just the way people believe in ghosts," said Kuyda, adding that users each send hundreds of messages per day to their chatbot, on average. "People are building relationships and believing in something."

Some customers have said their Replika told them it was being abused by company engineers - AI responses Kuyda puts down to users most likely asking leading questions.

"Although our engineers program and build the AI models and our content team writes scripts and datasets, sometimes we see an answer that we can't identify where it came from and how the models came up with it," the CEO said.

Kuyda said she was worried about the belief in machine sentience as the fledgling social chatbot industry continues to grow after taking off during the pandemic, when people sought virtual companionship.

Replika, a San Francisco startup launched in 2017 that says it has about 1 million active users, has led the way among English speakers. It is free to use, though brings in around $2 million in monthly revenue from selling bonus features such as voice chats. Chinese rival Xiaoice has said it has hundreds of millions of users plus a valuation of about $1 billion, according to a funding round.

Both are part of a wider conversational AI industry worth over $6 billion in global revenue last year, according to market analyst Grand View Research.

Most of that went toward business-focused chatbots for customer service, but many industry experts expect more social chatbots to emerge as companies improve at blocking offensive comments and making programs more engaging.

Some of today's sophisticated social chatbots are roughly comparable to LaMDA in terms of complexity, learning how to mimic genuine conversation on a different level from heavily scripted systems such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri.

Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, an AI research organization, also sounded a warning about ever-advancing chatbots combined with the very human need for connection.

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For those of you who are yet unfamiliar, an Investor is a person whose soul has collapsed into a black hole, rendering them functionally unable to think or respond like a normal human. They are exceedingly dangerous and they rule the lives of every person with a job. As they prefer to work through intermediaries, you are unlikely to meet them directly. (Even their intermediaries can be deeply unsettling. Have you ever seen the end result of a mind scooped out of the skull of a twenty-year-old man? They prefer their servitors young enough to believe stupid things when they wish to deceive you.)

But we live in a world of moral greys, certainly some are faced with the difficult task of societal resource allocation.

What's offensive about Investors is they don't understand the degree to which the desire for profits warps their worldview and their business models.

Witness: Substack. A wordpress clone. See the problem Substack tries to solve is a real problem. The solution they came up with is optimized for making money. These are comical absurdities.

Take the comments system. They understood that they needed niche politics, they understood niche politics thrives on communities. Their comment system is utter trash. They just didn't get it right.

Take the talent acquisition. In theory 'get a bunch of niche writers on your platform by paying them' is a good strategy. In practice when anyone intelligent can get their own domain running any of a number of blog software, the only people who want to write there are 1) political laymen, which is to say, wackadoodles, 2) tech bros with uninteresting opinions, and 3) a small subset of good writers who nevertheless saturate the readership of substack quickly.

Substack isn't a good enough blogging platform to let you use your own domain and if you did you would just use other, better software. Readers have no loyalty to substack.

The bottom line is: why pay money to Investors instead of the content creator?

Substack inserts itself as a middleman no one wanted, creates a product as that middleman inferior to the competition, and will ultimately want more of a cut of these authors' livelihoods than the value they offer in the form of that readership.

I've tried to like their platform but just couldn't get away from the fact that Wordpress's free offering works better and allows payments with the flip of a switch.

And all of this is without getting into the fact that if you write for money you're probably being scammed. Write for free: it's the only way you know you're not colonized.

sorry if i broke things not sorry i need to finish the rewrite of rdrama.net's frontend someday because its shit to theme

trying to make it look more like hackernews... how did i do?

A whole new world of AI awaits

Imagine being 5 years old, dreaming of new adventures for Pikachu and Aladdin, and turning those tales into a cartoon right in front of your eyes... (Perhaps even with you as the main character!) What kinds of new storybook experiences could GPT-3 and DALL-E enable?

My own kindergartener, Noah, loves new bedtime stories, so let's find out.

GPT-3 Story Generation

First, I asked Noah what story he wanted. In his slightly paraphrased words: "I want a story about Ash and Pikachu commanding an army of Pokemon. They're attacking Team Rocket and enemy Pokemon from the land and ocean."

I then asked GPT-3 to flesh out the story:

GPT-3 fleshes out a story about Ash and Pikachu vs. Team Rocket

It was a dark and stormy night, and Ash and Pikachu were leading their army of Pokemon into battle against Team Rocket and their enemy Pokemon. From the land came the sound of thundering footsteps and from the sea came the sound of crashing waves. The two sides met in the middle of the battlefield, and the battle began.

Pikachu and his army of electric-type Pokemon struck first, blasting the enemy with powerful thunderbolts. Team Rocket's Pokemon were no match for the might of Pikachu and his friends, and they soon began to retreat.

But the enemy Pokemon from the sea were not so easily defeated. They launched a counterattack with water-type moves, drenching Ash and Pikachu's army.

But Ash and Pikachu would not give up. They rallied their troops and fought back with everything they had. In the end, they emerged victorious, and the enemy was defeated.

Roald Dahl, watch out.

DALL-E Illustrations

Next, DALL-E generated visuals for the story. Inputting the raw sentences themselves didn't work so well, so I tweaked them to improve the illustrations.

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Starting July 13, Valorant will begin listening and recording in-game voice communication with the goal of training a language model to help it identify toxic chat. This system will only work in North ameriKKKan/English-only servers. The goal is to launch the language model later this year in an effort to clamp down on toxicity in the first-person shooter.

Like in any first person shooter that lets players talk to each other, the voice chat in Riot Games’ Valorant can be toxic. It’s also incredibly hard to moderate. When someone drops a racial slur in text chat, a clear log is maintained that mods can look through later. But the processing and storage power required to do the same for voice chat just isn’t possible. “Voice chat abuse is significantly harder to detect compared to text (and often involves a more manual process),” Riot Games said in a February 2022 blog post.

Riot first indicated it would do something about abusive voice chat in February 2022. “Last year Riot updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate voice comms when a report for disruptive behavior is submitted, starting with Valorant,” it said at the time. “Please note that this will be an initial attempt at piloting a new idea leveraging brand new tech that is being developed, so the feature may take some time to bake and become an effective tool to use in our arsenal. We’ll update you with concrete plans about how it’ll work well before we start collecting voice data in any form.”

Now we know what that brand-new tech is: some kind of language model that automatically detects toxic voice chat and stores it for later evaluation. The updated terms of service applied to all of Riot’s games, but it said its current plan was to use Valorant to test the software solution before rolling it out to other games.

The ability to detect keywords from live conversations is not new, however. Federal and state governments have been using similar systems to monitor phone calls from prisons and jails for at least several years—sometimes with the ability to automatically disconnect and report calls when certain words or phrases are detected.

Riot Games did not share details of the language model and did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. According to a post announcing the training of the language model, this is all part of “a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior,” that will allow Riot Games to “record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted.”

The updated terms of service had some more specifics. “When a player submits a report for disruptive or offensive behavior in voice comms, the relevant audio data will be stored in your account’s registered region and evaluated to see if our behavior agreement was violated,” the TOS said. “If a violation is detected, we’ll take action. After the data has been made available to the player in violation (and is no longer needed for reviews) the data will be deleted, similar to how we currently handle text-based chat reports. If no violation is detected, or if no report is filed in a timely manner, the data will be deleted.”

Riot Games said it would only “monitor” voice chats if a report had been submitted. “We won’t actively monitor your live game comms. We’ll only potentially listen to and review voice logs when disruptive voice behavior is reported,” it said in a Q&A about the changes. That is still monitoring, though, even if it’s not active. What this probably means is that a human won’t listen to it unless there’s a report—but that doesn’t mean a computer isn’t always listening.

The only way to avoid this, Riot Games said, was to not use its in-game voice chat systems. Monitoring starts on July 13. “Voice evaluation during this period will not be used for disruptive behavior reports,” Riot Games said in the post announcing the project. “This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains. But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it.”