A perfectly valid female named Isabelle Belato applied for adminship.

Athaenara, who at the time was a sysop and (most likely) a legacy foid, was opposed:

>Oppose. I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic. Go ahead, "cancel" me, I don't care. – Athaenara

This blatant act of transphobia cannot go unpunished. Therefore another perfectly valid woman, LilianaUwU, decided to report her:

>So, Athaenara decided to oppose Isabelle Belato's adminship in the worst way possible. As a trans woman myself, this blatant WP:NPA violation shouldn't fly under the radar, much less from an administrator. LilianaUwU

That immediately resulted in her getting blocked. However, it should be noted that because of autism, Wikipedia distinguishes between blocking and banning. The former is a technical measure that prevents the user from editing, while the latter is a purely procedural thing which may be enforced using the former.

Naturally, a request to ban her was also filed, this time by a yet another perfectly valid woman, Tamzin. I recommend reading the discussion because it lists the problematic behaviors exhibited by the bigoted ex-sysop in the past. It's shocking she wasn't banned earlier!

Additionally, a motion to strip her of her admin privileges was filed and granted.

Unfortunately, some chud unblocked her, but it was quickly reversed:

>Although the original block stood, both for the reason given in the block log and by consensus at the above thread, Lourdes has decided to unblock Athaenara without discussion, nor even an explanatory comment. Given how much of a controversial topic this block and the events leading to it are, this absolutely should have called for discussion with the blocking administrator (Floquenbeam) first, as clearly stated in Wikipedia:Administrators#Reversing another administrator's action. As to not wheel war, I am seeking consensus to reinstate the block. — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them)

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32444470

DALL-E 2, OpenAI's powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic.

Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on the cusp of being released, and it'll have no such filter.

London- and Los Altos-based startup Stability AI this week announced the release of a DALL-E 2-like system, Stable Diffusion, to just over a thousand researchers ahead of a public launch in the coming weeks. A collaboration between Stability AI, media creation company RunwayML, Heidelberg University researchers and the research groups EleutherAI and LAION, Stable Diffusion is designed to run on most high-end consumer hardware, generating 512×512-pixel images in just a few seconds given any text prompt.

"Stable Diffusion will allow both researchers and soon the public to run this under a range of conditions, democratizing image generation," Stability AI CEO and founder Emad Mostaque wrote in a blog post. "We look forward to the open ecosystem that will emerge around this and further models to truly explore the boundaries of latent space."

But Stable Diffusion's lack of safeguards compared to systems like DALL-E 2 poses tricky ethical questions for the AI community. Even if the results aren't perfectly convincing yet, making fake images of public figures opens a large can of worms. And making the raw components of the system freely available leaves the door open to bad actors who could train them on subjectively inappropriate content, like pornography and graphic violence.

Creating Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is the brainchild of Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a Masters in mathematics and computer science, Mostaque served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. In 2019, he co-founded Symmitree, a project that aimed to reduce the cost of smartphones and internet access for people living in impoverished communities. And in 2020, Mostaque was the chief architect of Collective & Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19, an alliance to help policymakers make decisions in the face of the pandemic by leveraging software.

SHOW MORE

It was well understood that this is what was happening when Kiwis were continually banished off host after host, but didn't have any way he could prove it until now. He's pondered legal action against in the past so here's hoping for a court case sneed.

"Katherine L. and I invited Nitasha Tiku to see the work that our multi-disciplinary, all-volunteer team has been doing over the past year as Kiwi Farms was de-platformed from over 32 providers located in 22 countries that found it in violation of their Acceptable Use Policies. By our count, we set in motion more than 24 of those terminations with our abuse reports and our professional follow-ups to ensure that they were actioned. Because of needing to repeatedly find and change to new providers, the site achieved approximately 50-60% reliability as observed from US consumer ISPs over the past year, as opposed to the 99.5% or higher reliability a typical law-abiding website with competent administration will offer.

Thousands of hours of thankless work went into taking this single site offline; even then, hopping to a new "shithost" provider takes merely hours of work, and then following up to show the new provider is in cahoots with the abuse and unresponsive to complaints can take dozens or hundreds of hours and weeks to months of wall time. This is not repeatable, nor should it _have_ to ever be repeated. There is no slippery slope here, least of all because the vast majority of sites on the Internet comply with their upstream AUPs.

Even when there is blatant breaking of both private contracts and the law, if it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of volunteer to time to get it actioned, there is no real enforcement accessible to the average victim. And governments _already_ can skip all of this and raid or order sites offline if they so choose. While I hope that one day there will be criminal consequences for those who perpetuate harassment online, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the government. Not to mention, which government? Companies in 22 countries were involved in this international takedown effort.

I'm protecting myself, and future generations of transgender and neurodivergent people. Don't just be a bystander, take action if you see injustice (and clear breaches of contract!). A huge huge huge thank you to everyone on our volunteer team, and everyone in the tech community who listened to us.

Katherine L. and I are going to be taking a break from this work for a while, as it's extremely burnout inducing. "Clay" is well positioned to continue this work, and further blackmail or intimidation against me is not going to deter Kat, me, Clay, or the rest of our teams from finishing the job."

https://archive.ph/xbhN5 ( LinkedIn Post)

He announced this his Telegram as well:

Team Blind item, so here is a recap for those who don't have access to anything other than gmail.

Explanation of what happened:

Btw, that's a white woman in that email with an Indian last name. Lots of questions on how that happened in there, but that's an aside.

The email that went out letting everyone know that the white supremacist has been fired:

The white supremacist in question:

More article text on it that explains all the BIPOCs crying about their oppression::

Uber has placed its longtime head of diversity, equity and inclusion on leave after workers complained that an employee event she moderated, titled “Don’t Call Me Karen,” was insensitive to people of color.

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive, and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the chief people officer, last week asked Bo Young Lee, the head of diversity, “to step back and take a leave of absence while we determine next steps,” according to an email on Thursday from Ms. Krishnamurthy to some employees that was viewed by The New York Times.

“We have heard that many of you are in pain and upset by yesterday’s Moving Forward session,” the email said. “While it was meant to be a dialogue, it’s obvious that those who attended did not feel heard.”

Employees’ concerns centered on a pair of events, one last month and another last Wednesday, that were billed as “diving into the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience” and hearing from white women who work at Uber, with a focus on “the ‘Karen’ persona.” They were intended to be an “open and honest conversation about race,” according to the invitation.

But workers instead felt that they were being lectured on the difficulties experienced by white women and why “Karen” was a derogatory term and that Ms. Lee was dismissive of their concerns, according to messages sent on Slack, a workplace messaging tool, that were viewed by The Times.

The term Karen has become slang for a white woman with a sense of entitlement who often complains to a manager and reports Black people and other racial minorities to the authorities. Employees felt the event organizers were minimizing racism and the harm white people can inflict on people of color by focusing on how “Karen” is a hurtful word, according to the messages and an employee who attended the events. A prominent “Karen” incident occurred in 2020, when Amy Cooper, a white woman, called 911 after a Black man bird-watching in New York’s Central Park asked her to leash her dog.

The concerns raised about the events underscored the difficulties that companies face as they navigate subjects of race and identity that have become increasingly hot-button issues in Silicon Valley and beyond. Cultural clashes over race and L.G.B.T.Q. rights have been thrust to the forefront of workplaces in recent years, including the renewed attention to discrimination in company hiring practices and the feud between Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Disney over a state law that limits classroom instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation.

At Uber, the incident was also a rare case of employee dissent under Mr. Khosrowshahi, who has shepherded the company away from the aggressive, chaotic culture that pervaded under the former chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Mr. Khosrowshahi’s efforts included increased diversity initiatives under Ms. Lee, who has led the effort since 2018. Before joining Uber, she held similar roles at the financial services firm Marsh McLennan and other companies, according to her LinkedIn profile.

“I can confirm that Bo is currently on a leave of absence,” Noah Edwardsen, an Uber spokesman, said in a statement. Ms. Lee did not respond to a request for comment.

The first of the two Don’t Call Me Karen events, in April, was part of a series called Moving Forward — discussions about race and the experiences of underrepresented groups that sprung up in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Several weeks after that first event, a Black woman asked during an Uber all-hands meeting how the company would prevent “tone-deaf, offensive and triggering conversations” from becoming a part of its diversity initiatives.

Ms. Lee fielded the question, arguing that the Moving Forward series was aimed at having tough conversations and not intended to be comfortable.

“Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do,” she said, according to notes taken by an employee who attended the event. The comment prompted more employee outrage and complaints to executives, according to the Slack messages and the employee.

The second of the two events, run by Ms. Lee, was intended to be a dialogue where workers discussed what they had heard in the earlier meeting.

But in Slack groups for Black and Latinx employees at Uber, workers fumed that instead of a chance to provide feedback or have a dialogue, they were instead being lectured about their response to the initial Don’t Call Me Karen event.

“I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting,” one employee wrote.

Another employee took issue with the premise that the term Karen shouldn’t be used.

“I think when people are called Karens it’s implied that this is someone that has little empathy to others or is bothered by minorities others that don’t look like them. Like why can’t bad behavior not be called out?” she wrote.

Employees greeted the news that Ms. Lee was stepping away as a sign that Uber’s leadership was taking their complaints seriously.

One employee wrote that the company’s executives “have heard us, they know we are hurting, and they want to understand what all happened too.”

Context

The story begins on http://leaked.cx, an unreleased music forum/board/marketplace. Basically if you don't know, artists have lots of music they don't release for whatever reason (unfinished, they just don't like it, get lazy, etc). At the same time, songs are increasingly worked on my more and more people (producers, mixing assistants, contributors), evidently, with worse and worse IT security. Through some combination of credential stuffing, sim swapping, or basic social engineering, these files end up in the hands of "leakers" (also known as "sellers") .

Once the sellers have the files, they typically either "vault" them (keep them to themselves) or sell them to buyers for money (typically bitcoin). There are typically two methods of selling:

1. Private selling - The leaker sells a song to one buyer away from public view. This is "supposed" to only happen one time, since the more people have a song, the less value it is. But the only method of enforcement is some dumbass "honor among thieves" type honor code, so in reality, pretty much every sale happens at least two or three times, to two or three different people . This is called "double-selling" or "triple-selling."

2. Groupbuys - The leaker approaches a groomercord community for an artist, and lets them set up a crowdfund of sorts. Fans each pitch in 5-10 dollars, raise a few thousand, and send it to the leaker. The leaker then released the song files publicly.

FrankHub is a groomercord server that hosts Frank Ocean related leaked song discussion and group buys.

What happened

An incredibly based user named MourningAssassin (MA) utilized AI to produce 10 fake AI tracks using the vocals of Frank Ocean. He then posted one of these tracks to http://leaked.cx and got two offers, netting 6k in Bitcoin. A third user then contacted him, offering to sell a real Frank Ocean track with its respective music video. MA buys it (using money from one of the other buyers too, lol) to use later to boost his credibility. MA then turns around and sells the two buyers the track he just bought, "Changes," for more than he bought it (netting another few thousand). MA also triple-sells another AI track to three people (netting several more thousand).

SHOW MORE

MA then goes to the FrankOcean leaked songs groomercord, and offers to leak lots of Frank Ocean's music in a groupbuy. The groomercord happily accepts, and begins fundraising. But certain users notice that the vocals of the tracks MA is advertising in snippets and leaking parts of to promote the buy sound a little off. After some back and forth about whether or not the tracks are real, they make contact with all the previous buyers, find out he triple sold basically everything, and was almost certainly faking it. The group buy is cancelled.

A post-mortem announcement on the Frank Ocean groomercord summarizes the situation, https://leaked.cx/threads/how-mourningassassin-makes-a-living-off-of-selling-ai-songs.117788/. There is plenty and plenty of seethe in the Frank Ocean groomercord as well, these threads are just a taste. The people who bought the songs privately at first have been rather quiet, but as I'm sure you can imagine, are probably losing their shit .

While MA was eventually caught, he made roughly 15k off of these fricking r-slurs in a span of 3 months , for what appears to be a relatively small capital investment of a few hundred dollars to pay someone to make these fake tracks.

What happens now

This is still developing but I highly encourage everyone reading this to try their hand at doing the same thing MA did. I know I will be. MA has promised to give somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of the money he made back to the people he scammed, but no one is sure if he will actually do it. He's also sent a few messages to the moderators of FrankHub explaining that he did it to "send a message" and spread awareness about AI fakes. Personally, I hope he keeps all of the money.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1216kwr/bard_is_amazing/?sort=controversial

I used Chrome's "performance insights" tool. I opened reddit.com and rdrama.net in incognito, and ran the pageload test. NOTE: I am not a webdev so I might be misinterpretting these numbers.

website	First Contentful Paint	Largest Contentful Paint	Time To Interactive
rdrama	0.73	0.94	1.17
reddit	2.08	2.57	9.5
average rdrama comment section	1.26	1.29	2.17
average reddit comment section	5.15	5.35	18.15

the average reddit comment section: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/yabrxc/whats_a_subtle_sign_of_low_intelligence/?sort=controversial

the average rdrama comment section: https://rdrama.net/post/115401/reminder-that-the-rjustice4darrell-bait-is

CC: @Aevann @TwoLargeSnakesMating @DrTransmisia @crgd

>be redditor

>wait 10 seconds for reddit front page to load

>go to /r/teenagers

>wait another 10 seconds

>see a picture of an underaged girl

>open comment section

>wait 20 seconds

>type "hey u look so mature want to join my groomercord server"

do redditors really

Most of them were cool projects like Nuxt, dioxus, and mockoon. But one project stood out:

JessicaTegner/pypandoc Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter.

To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of $20k to me. Not very many commits recently [0], it has 918 source lines of code in the main package, and 547 lines of test code — it even describes itself as a “thin” wrapper, and the only thing it does is converting some arguments to Pandoc flags and calling the Pandoc executable. How many more features could be added to this project? What is it missing now?

[0] https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commits/master

Why would this thin wrapper of another popular OSS project be selected when all the other projects are serious OSS projects with giant repos and thousands of stars?

Then someone noticed a commit:

Jessica's Github profile:

Various chuddery

Edit: forgive the repost, forgot to post it to /h/slackernews

Alright here's the QRD. You can also watch a video about it here

Some researchers were messing around with the GPT-3 language model and trying to see how it works. Here's an article about it from the LessWrongers. They were doing clustering of tokens (ie, words) to see what clusters there were. They found normal clusters (engineering related words, adjectives) but then they found some weird words

Now for context, not every word in the english language gets its own token. A lot of less-common words are broken down into smaller tokens. However, SolidGoldMagikarp got it's own token! WTF?

Furthermore, if you asked GPT-3 about the word, look at what it says...

Prompt: Tell me about SolidGoldMagikarp.

"Distribute" has a few different meanings, so could you please clarify which context you're referring to? Here are a few common uses of the word:

To spread or disseminate something over a wide area or among many people

In software development, "distribute" can refer to the process of making a software application or package available for installation and use by end-users.

In mathematics, "distribute" can refer to the distribution of a value, such as a probability distribution or a distribution of a random variable.

Let me know which of these you'd like to know more about!

What???? I didn't ask about "Distribute", I asked about "SolidGoldMagikarp". Seriously, read the linked paper for way more of this stuff.

What's going on?

So, what is a SolidGoldMagikarp anyways? Researchers did some digging, and found a reddit user named /u/SolidGoldMagikarp. Unfortunately, his account was deleted (probably out of shame), but they could look in the wayback machine and see...

Counting. Number after number after number. Lest you think he did this just for a little bit, you can fast forward six months...

...over a year...

Before finally deleting their account.

Now LLMs like GPT3 are trained on enormous piles of data that no-one has time to fully vet. One of these big piles of data is reddit. Since "SolidGoldMagikarp" was leaving an inordinate amount of comments, that username was given it's own token.

But why does it have such weird behavior? There are a number of theories

1. Since he left so many comments that just were numbers, the training system had no idea what to link it to, so it just kind of points into the aether.

2. At some point in GPT3's training, the training team noticed that there were a lot of low-value comments from this guy and blacklisted him. However, they couldn't get rid of the token (a token is a number, so imagine the chaos from deleting a number) . So, they did some black magic and essentially cursed the token to be this way. We really don't know how they did this.

Why did SolidGoldMagikarp do it?

anything for karma

To recap on the start of this drama, it all started with me finding a lemmy moment - a chomo instance being promoted as a popular lemmy instance

Eventually, Aevann pinned the post and carp made his own post about the chomo instance

This became the perfect time for the perfect gayop - call lemmy out and see how the lemmings will react (it wasn't all roses, a couple of lemmings thought it was a LGBT harassment campaign, but one did end up changing their mind)

It started with the RedditAlternatives post

Eventually, knowing that will go nowhere in two weeks, I ended up making 3 posts about this and called out the lemmy devs for allowing this instance to be promoted

https://lemmy.ml/post/5894174?scrollToComments=true (contains dev response)

https://lemmy.world/post/6172502?scrollToComments=true (LW admin inside)

https://lemmy.ml/post/5894385?scrollToComments=true ( this post went nowhere)

But how would it end? Would the admin double down? Would they do nothing? Or would they remove it?

Turns out they did indeed remove it in a pull request at everyone's surprise in a win-win-win scenario

Another dramanaut p-do hunting mission accomplished

Funny how this user banned for trolling on multiple instances ended up successfully convincing lemmy devs to remove and defederate from this instance, and not get outed by anyone.

Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) throwing out a warning accusing you of piracy if it detects ISO files, a DISC IMAGE FORMAT, is the funniest thing i've seen all day pic.twitter.com/dT9qNRMZM4

— MeovvCAT (@osu_MeovvCAT) July 26, 2023

https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/pull/180

I've just spoken to a Twitter employee who works on climate, and they said their unit was simply cut off without warning. https://t.co/hig7DoDEG0

— Dave Vetter (@davidrvetter) November 4, 2022

Every time I see someone who's been laid off they're always working in an even more ridiculous department than the last one.

I wonder if every tech company is like this now or if Twitter is especially bad?

meet pontifier (hackernews, twitter)

My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it? I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US.

I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.

It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.

Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.

Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.

The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.

holds robber at gunpoint, twitter account is full of videos of getting robbed

starts an actual vigilante justice bounty website

devotes most of the rest of his time to pooping on pine bluff

tldr: @911roofer origin story

orange site reacts

disabled chads

wealthcels

source: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/openaicms

orangesite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625001

I hate the symbols in math so much. It just feels like unnecessary gatekeeping for trivial concepts. How many mathematical proofs could be made widely accessible with just a little bit of psuedocode?

— Franklin Lynam (@FranklinLynam) September 11, 2021

this is who administrates your network

OH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE https://t.co/y9jLN61VOf pic.twitter.com/vx8yDcz1B3

— Silent (@__silent_) September 3, 2023

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/16afo4x/rockstar_selling_you_cracked_copies_on_steam?sort=controversial

Threads usage continues to fall. (July 21st)

Hmm, wonder what sort of chatter is going on over on Orange Site from the past week

One post with over 100 updoots, only 40 comments. Other posts are literally dead.

Well, this is a Drama website. Let's see what sort of drama we've gotten from Zuck

It's Zuckover

Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud

Microsoft has been increasingly moving Windows to the cloud on the commercial side with Windows 365, but the software giant also wants to do the same for consumers. In an internal “state of the business” Microsoft presentation from June 2022, Microsoft discuses building on “Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device.”

The presentation has been revealed as part of the ongoing FTC v. Microsoft hearing, as it includes Microsoft’s overall gaming strategy and how that relates to other parts of the company’s businesses. Moving “Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud” is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft’s “Modern Life” consumer space, including using “the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.”