#F&B Software

[opens-up-4-nobody]

I just need yall to know I started another Terror video editing project, despite my better judgment 😔

[wimjee]

Begraafplaats Groenesteeg (B&W). by Wim Jacobs Via Flickr: Vakantie Leiden en Kasteel De Haar. Leiden, begraafplaats Groenesteeg. zwart-wit: NIK Silver Efex Pro2.

[kuwaithostbooks]

Choosing the Best Café Billing Software for Kuwait’s F&B Industry

Discover the best café billing software for Kuwait’s F&B industry. Learn how HostBooks’ POS software, restaurant management tools, and ERP solutions streamline operations, enhance customer service, and boost efficiency for café owners in Kuwait’s competitive food market.

[treeams]

Manage daily workflows with TreeAMS F&B Operations Software. Built-in F&B Audit Software helps track SOPs, performance, and staff training across outlets.

[zimyo]

HR in Food and Beverage Industry

⚠️ Struggling with HR Strategy in the Food and Beverage Industry? Zimyo HRMS is the way to go! 🎁 Check out my latest article: "HR Strategy for Food and Beverage Business" With Zimyo, you can: 💼 Hire smarter, faster, better. 📅 Prepare employee scheduling with ease. 📊 Track attendance and performance effortlessly. ✅ Be 100% compliant with restaurant laws. 💵 Simplify payroll and keep your team happy. ... Read the full article here 👉

P.S. Knowing someone dealing with HR Struggles in the F&B Sector, don't hesitate to share! 🍜

[tofupixel]

uh. aseprite starter tips? i’m kinda lost

Aseprite Tips for Noobs !!

Get the software: Aseprite (the pixel software of all time) Video tutorial:

Aseprite Crash Course in 30 minutes by AdamCYounis If you already have it you can skip ahead to 'the workspace' timestamp in the video.

If you have ever used another art software, Aseprite will be familiar to you but all the keybinds will be messed up. You can go to edit > keyboard shortcuts, search what you're missing and rebind it to whatever you're used to.

Most important keybinds (to me):

Brush: B

Eraser: E

Undo: control + Z

Redo: control + Y

Quick colour picker: hold alt and click

New layer: shift + N

New frame: alt + N

Lasso select: Q

Quick outline: shift + O

Help! I pressed a button by accident and now I don't know how to fix it

These are a couple keybinds that are actually really useful for pros but a pain in the butt if you hit them while you're learning

Put the animation timeline back: tab

Undo snap to grid: shift + S

The window fills my screen and i cant see the pc bar: F11

The tools are gone: ctrl + F (might have to press it 2 times)

I can give some more advanced tips if anyone wants, but I dont want to overwhelm. If youre stuck there is official aseprite documentation where you can search for what you need. Or just ask me. Everything you have could possibly stuck on I have got stuck on it before 20 times.

Direct link to keybinds quick reference (keybinds are life

Take it slow and have fun! It will take a while to get used to everything but the software is amazing! Trust the process!

[primreaperstuff]

Trying to figure out what's under the Jhesselbraum crossed out text in the Book of Bill

EDIT: Somebody figured it out! Thank you @kitcatia (and @angst-estefany for helping them out)!!! This makes a lot of what's in the post outdated or wrong here but I'll keep it for archival purposes. :D

Dunno if anybody's done this before but I figured I'd give it a shot. This is the original image.

I first went and found the font used for this. I think it's DIN Condensed Bold. This font unfortunately costs money to get onto your computer, but it is included with Adobe Suite software so if you have Photoshop or are silly like me and used Illustrator, you can access it (I know Illustrator isn't great for this stuff but I generally use GIMP and didn't feel like installing Photoshop for this one thing).

And this is the image with the letters I can figure out.

If I got this right, there are a couple of things in here that are huge.

Bill thinks (or at least thought) very highly of Jhess. He describes her as the smartest Henchmaniac. Depending on how you interpret that comment about the eyes, he either let her into the group despite not liking how many eyes she has or has sour grapes about her leaving.

Jhess did a ton of the heavy lifting for the portal project. Bill is often presumed to simply have the multiversal know-how for a lot of the physics and stuff behind the portal, but this implies that Jhess was actually the first one to figure much of this stuff out and Bill went off of what she told him.

I also want to draw your attention to a tiny detail I noticed in the name Bill gives her. It's so small that it might just be me just seeing a pattern where none exists, but I thought it worth mentioning anyway.

My first thought was, obviously, that the name given was "JESS." The first two letters are clearly J and E and the character is called Jheselbraum so that would track. But then I noticed this tiny squarish region that does not line up with how the red pen's stroke normally tapers off and is slightly whiter than the pen. It is exactly where another letter would be... and it does not line up with DIN's capital S! The capital letters in DIN that it lines up with are B, D, E, F, H, I, L, M, N, P, R, and T. The name looks like it cannot exceed 5 characters given the position of the pen stroke.

In terms of plausible names in there, these are the options:

Jeb

Jed/Jedi

Jet/Jett/Jete

Jeff

Jerry

Jerk (lol)

Jelly

Jem

Jen/Jenn

The majority of the plausible names, as you can tell, are either masculine or ungendered. Which makes me wonder-- is Jheselbraum the Unswerving trans??

Because that implies a lot. For one, I have to question why Bill is deadnaming her in that case. Is it to be hurtful or did he just legitimately never figure it out? She went on the run from him so it's likely she never updated him on her live-name. (And I mean, let's face it, "Jheselbraum" is not that far off from some of the live-names trans people choose for themselves. You guys are reviving antiquated names one transition at a time. \pos)

He also speaks rather admiringly of her, which would be odd if he was trying to insult her with her deadname, so I think it's really highlighting how little Bill actually knows-- and might underlie the real reason he crossed it out. He literally just found out she transitioned and he doesn't even know her live-name. Really undermines the whole "unlimited being with knowledge and answers" thing he claims about himself.

It would also explain what drew her to Bill in the first place. Bill already believes in 14 million genders, and he was offering to smash all the norms and rules. What have norms and rules ever done for the trans community? Seldom anything good is my impression.

Hell, maybe she wound up doing her own sex change surgery, because nobody else would do it for her, and that's why she has the skills to install a metal plate in Ford's head. (Pure speculation of course)

Or maybe I'm just overthinking a print error or false pattern or something! Who knows?

Anyway, I thought this was interesting enough to share. Not important my tailbone lol.

[eccentricallygothic]

Thought about doing homework with College Daddy!Jake Jensen while trying to focus on my own today because I always think about him while doing it… 

Warning(s): Cock warming, denial, Daddy!Jake Jensen, ddlg, m!dom, f!sub, unprotected p-in-v, Jake is older, allusions to dacryphilia, power imbalance, brat taming. MDNI. 

-> “Daddy, please!” A whine croaked out of your parched throat as your back tried to arch but was restricted its need due to Jake’s heavy arm that lay coiled around your waist. 

-> “Be a good girl, honey” the vibration of the senior’s vocal cords drilled into your skin from how his face was slotted into the junction of your neck and shoulder, the hair on his chin tickling your tender flesh.

-> “B- But I can’t focus when you’re… you– hng!” You let out another throaty grumble when his cock twitched deep inside your velvet cavern.

-> “Or, maybe…” He was literally distracted by the characters on his screen as he typed away commands on the programming software with a nonchalance that made you want to cry. “You’re just a lazy little brat” there was something about the casual dismissiveness with which he treated your worked up form; how relaxed he seemed while you had to bite down on your textbook to hold back your tears.

-> You poutily winced before uneasily attempting to shift from where you sat atop his muscular thighs. 

-> But his hold on you was too firm.

-> “Daddy!” You tried to chide but all that came out was a pathetic little plea.

-> “Behave yourself, baby” your pussy blinked around his mighty girth that your poor hole had been forced to swallow to the brim when Jake had sat your procrastinating ass down by grabbing your loitering form with one easy stretch of his arm.

-> You whined and pouted to get your way.

-> Jake only tutted as he patted one of your thighs before turning your head that was trying to weaken his resolve with your pouty lips to face your own screen that had way more sparkle and colour compared to his.

-> “Tell you what, if you be a good girl…” A choked cry escaped you when he suddenly grabbed both your hips and gave you a thrust by effortlessly lifting you until only his tip was inside before stomping you down and giving you a jerk of his hips at the same time. The satin of your cavern squished against the rigid dents of his cock in the most delicious way, making you whine out again. “Daddy will consider your case, yeah?” And his manly fingers resumed their speedy typing like they had never ceased their movements in the first place.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Guide to IPA Symbols

Vowels

æ ask bat glad ɑ: cot bomb caught paw ɛ bet fed ə about banana collide i very any thirty i: eat bead bee ɪ id bid pit ʊ foot should put u: boot two coo ʌ under putt bud ɚ merge bird further eɪ eight wade bay aɪ ice bite tie aʊ out gown plow oɪ oyster coil boy oʊ oat own zone blow ɑɚ car heart bizarre eɚ bare fair wear iɚ near deer mere pier oɚ boar port door shore uɚ boor tour insure ɒ British cot bomb ɔ: British caught paw port ə: British merge bird əʊ British oat own zone blow ɪə British near deer ɛə British bare fair ʊə British boor tour

Consonants

b baby labor cab d day kid ʤ just badger fudge ð then either bathe f foe tough buff g go dagger bag h hot ahead j yes vineyard k lacquer flock skin l law hollow l̟ pedal battle final m mat hemp hammer rim n new tent tenor run n̩ button satin kitten ŋ rung hang swinger p lapse top lip speed r rope arrive s sad mist kiss ʃ shoe mission slush t mat stick late tʰ toe attack ɾ later catty riddle tʃ batch nature tʃʰ choose chin achieve θ thin ether bath v vat never cave w wet software z zoo easy buzz ʒ vision azure beige

Other Symbols

' penmanship ˌ penmanship British indicates British pronunciation variant

Source

[wimjee]

Station Dalheim (B&W). by Wim Jacobs Via Flickr: Wandeling De Meinweg. Route: Vlodrop-Station, Dalheim, Meinweg, Vlodrop-Station (11,7km).

[kuwaithostbooks]

Kuwaiti Restaurants Going Digital: Trends in Restaurant Software Adoption.

Explore how restaurants in Kuwait are adopting smart digital solutions like ERP and POS systems to streamline operations, manage inventory, and enhance customer service. Learn how HostBooks offers the best restaurant ERP Kuwait, with powerful features tailored to the F&B industry. From order management to tax compliance, discover how restaurant ERP software Kuwait is transforming the dining experience in 2025.

[starsha-k-luna]

Took me about a month to draw, write, outline, & colour, but I finally finished it!

A Fan-Comic based off @baykitthings Dreamworks Trolls Phantom Thieves AU!

So basically about a month ago, I sent an Ask to @baykitthings for their Trolls AU asking about how Floyd adjusted to having to use a wheelchair after an Injury & how his brothers (BroZone) help to accommodate & assist Floyd during this.

When designing their clothes I just used the canon clothes, while giving them t-shirt because I wanted too, except Clay, I gave him a smart casual look along with a sweater vest.

And yes, I gave the BroZone brothers Tails, I’m apart of the Trolls Community who Headcanons they have Tails! I may change my Tail designs in the future.

Anyway, here’s what everyone is saying in the Comic:

Page 1:

💙Branch; “Are you Excited to finally be coming home Floyd?”

❤️Floyd; “I don’t know Branch, now I’m in a wheelchair everything is going to be a struggle now.”

💙Branch; “Floyd you shouldn’t worry, me and our brother’s are here to help you and adjust, you know we all love you and are here for you, right?

💜Bruce; “Look Bro’s, Branch is back with Floyd!

💚John Dory; “Alright Bro’s, Let’s do this!

Page 2:

💛Clay, 💚John Dory & 💜Bruce; “WELCOME HOME FLOYD!

❤️Floyd; “Thanks, It’s really good to see you all brother’s.”

💙Branch; “Actually Floyd, we have a surprise for you Floyd.”

Page 3:

💛Clay; “We’ve actually renovated to accommodate to your needs Floyd, such as an elevator (or a lift) and ramps for you to get around and adding wider doors, a disabled toilet and we’ve even given you a bigger bedroom on the ground floor.”

💚John Dory; “Yeah, Clay went all out with this, he and Bitty B did this!

💛Clay; “Woah, Johnny slow yourself, I’ve not just done this, nor Branch, it was a team effort! Especially Branch setting up the computer.”

💙Branch; “Yeah, I remembered you saying you got into computers, so I got you this set up with the latest software and everything.” (Featuring Chibi Branch)

Page 4:

❤️Floyd; “Sniff, sniff.”

💙Branch; “F…Floyd.”

💜Bruce; “Floyd are you alright? Did we do something wrong? Are you upset? You’re crying!”

💛Clay; “Oh no, did I do or say something to upset you?”

❤️Floyd; “No, I’m OK, I’m just so happy you guys did all this just for me, I’m touched💖.”

💚John Dory, 💙Branch, 💛Clay, 💜Bruce; (They are Crying right now)

❤️Floyd; “Thank you for everything, I love you all so much.”

💛Clay; “We love you too, Floyd.”

💚💜💛❤️💙The End!💚💜💛❤️💙

I’m extremely Proud with how this Fan-Comic turned out!

I hope you like the Fan-Comic @baykitthings

See you all next time👋

[swissmissficrecs]

A-Z Johnlock Tropes

This time it's all the tropes in my favorite fics! Limited to one fic per author, and I tried to include other authors than on my A-Z classics list.

A lternate Universe(s) - A Vintage Exceptionally to Your Liking by EmmyAngua (95K, E): A love story across alternate dimensions.

B DSM - Shames and Praises by s0mmerspr0ssen (51K, E): D/s AU with Dom!John / sub!Sherlock.

C rossover - More Things Than Are Dreamt Of by 1electricpirate (37K, M-E): HP crossover with Wizard!John / Muggle!Sherlock.

D omesticity - Where Else Would I Be? by cwb (34K, E): Retirement in Sussex with flashbacks.

E stablished Relationship - Breakable Not Broken by MissDavis (227K, E): Dealing with permanent injury together.

F uture - Software Malfunction by tiger_in_the_flightdeck (16K, E): Sherlock is a Companion android with a malfunction.

G en - The Green Blade by verityburns (72K, T): Serial killer casefic.

H istorical - The Beast of Baskerville by Mildredandbobbin (74K, E): 15th Century/fairy tale AU.

I llness - On Pins and Needles by 7PercentSolution, J_Baillier (588K, G-E): Sherlock contracts Guillain-Barré syndrome.

J ealousy - White Knight by DiscordantWords (69K, M): Sherlock fakes a relationship with Janine, to John's distress.

K idfic - Intentions by KeelieThompson1 (216K, G-M): Sherlock discovers he is the father of 10-year-old John.

L ongfic - Sketchy by serpentynka (876K, E): Johnlock and Mycroft/OMC slow-burn casefic(s).

M agical Realism - Shatter the Darkness (Let the Light In) by MojoFlower (109K, E): Sherlock is a djinn.

N SFW - The Great Sex Olympics of 221B by XistentialAngst (58K, E): Sherlock and John compete to see who's better at sex.

O megaverse - The Illusion of Control by starrysummernights (253K, E): Alpha!Sherlock / Omega!Johnwith mpreg.

P arentlock - The James Holmes Chronicles by prettyvk (338K, T-E): Sherlock and John raise Moriarty's son.

Q ueer Representation - The Adventure of the Consulting Woman by DancingGrimm (56K, E): Trans character assists in a case.

R etirement - Through the Clouds by Mazarin221b (20K, E): Sherlock and John retire to Sussex.

S oulmates - Colors by Quesarasara (140K, E): When you meet your soulmate, you finally see the world in color.

T eenlock - The Frost is All Over by Chryse (148K, E): 19th-century AU, Sherlock is an Earl's son and John is a commoner.

U ndercover - Corpus Hominis by mycapeisplaid (47K, E): Posing as a couple at a spa retreat.

V ampires - Bleed Me Out by antietamfalls (87K, E): Vampire!Sherlock with whump, hurt/comfort, and fluff.

W hump - All the Best and Brightest Creatures by wordstrings (188K, E): Moriarty is back and out for blood.

X enomorphism - Names for the Galaxy by evadne (191K, E): 22nd-century Alien!Sherlock.

Y enta* - May Your Heart Purr Like A Bumblebee by destinationtoast (14K, M): Harry helps Johnlock happen.

Z oomorphism** - The Horse and His Doctor by khorazir (128K, T): Vet!John and Horse!Sherlock.

*Used here to mean a female character playing matchmaker. Y-word tropes are hard, you guys!

**Not sure this is technically correct, but I'm using it here to mean fics in which a character has animal form. Z-word fanfic tropes are also hard and I already used zombies on my previous list!

[anomalyaly]

Hello!

Welcome to my MASTERLIST!

(Updated 4/23/2025)

Here, you will find everything I've written or am currently writing for Hogwarts Legacy. Most of my stories feature my MC Elsie Corvin. I am an adult, so I write a mix of SFW and NSFW.

Link to my Transformative Works Policy [HERE]

Learn more about Elsie [HERE!]

You can find my works on AO3 or Wattpad, and I also post on TikTok and Instagram on occasion.

Transformative Works Policy:

I do not allow the reposting of my work (mods, writing, screenshots, commissions that I paid for, etc.) on any platform. This includes private Discord servers. Please DO NOT post my photos to Pinterest!

If wanting to do a non-English translation of my work, you MUST a) ask me for explicit permission and b) properly credit me as the author with a link provided to my original work. Please inform me of when the work is posted AFTER receiving permission.

I welcome transformative works or fan creations inspired by my fanfic, as long as my original work and authorship are properly credited, including a link to the original work. Under no circumstances should these works be monetized for profit (with the exception of individually commissioned fanart). The same applies to book binding, as long as it is PROFIT-FREE and for PERSONAL USE ONLY. I would appreciate a tag so that I can admire it, but this is not required :)

Please DO NOT post my work to Goodreads.

I do NOT consent to my work being fed through AI. This includes ALL FORMS of AI, whether it's a visual, writing, or chat software. DO NOT FEED MY WORKS TO AI.

Secrets of the Silent Stars:

Elsie Corvin lives a regular life under the scrutiny of her parents, always expected to do what is proper in order to someday be the best example of their family. But when a dinner party turns disastrous, she is thrust into a new world that she didn't know existed. As with all new discoveries, there is a darker side to the magic in her possession. Reluctant to be the "chosen one", she finds herself having to choose between doing what others expect from her or doing what is right.

Some secrets are best left hidden in the silence of the stars.

Ongoing

Sebastian Sallow x Ravenclaw F!MC

Fifth-year and post-game, slow burn, canon-divergent

BOOK 1: [AO3] [Wattpad]

BOOK 2: [AO3] [Wattpad]

Oneshots

SFW

Glow in the Dark Elsie helps her little sister Lydia get comfortable on her first night at Hogwarts. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Haunted Shop pt 1 Elsie's experience with poltergeists. [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Haunted Shop pt 2 Elsie buys a shop. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Scars Elsie's past and magic. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Ghosts Elsie's experience with ghosts. [Tumblr]

Centaurs Poppy and Elsie go to the forest. [Tumblr]

The Girl from Uagadou Natty's backstory. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Not in Time AU if MC never made it to the catacomb in time. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Divination (suggestive) Sebastian is excited to hold a girl's hand. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Some Like it Hot Elsie deals with Ferdinand Octavius Pratt. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Crossed Wands (suggestive) Dueling practice makes Sebastian excited. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

The (After) Life of the Party Elsie and Lydia's first Halloween together at Hogwarts. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Treacle Trouble Elsie attempts to bake something to cheer Sebastian up. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Winter Wonderland (suggestive) Sebastian tries to convince Elsie that the cold can be enjoyable. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

right where you left me (angst) You died. Sebastian had a portrait of you commissioned. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Treasure Hunt A drabble about Elsie panic-casting [AO3] [Wattpad]

Golden A fluffy oneshot of how Sebastian and Elsie spent Valentine's Day. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Short Stories

My New Dream A Tangled Crackfic AU ft Sebastian and Elsie [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

NSFW

All characters are 18+ MDNI!!!!

The Nut Cracked Sebastian doesn't understand muggle holiday traditions. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Illicit Spell Practice The spicy version of 'Crossed Wands'. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

I See the Light Flynn Rider!Sebastian teaches Rapunzel (unnamed FMC) a few new things. [AO3] [Wattpad] [Tumblr]

Short Stories

Extracurricular A modern college AU: Elsie just wants to graduate. Sebastian is insufferable. What happens when the two of them meet? [AO3] [Wattpad]

Other things

Sebastian Sallow modern college AU headcanons Ominis Gaunt modern college AU headcanons

((Header and dividers by saradika-graphics))

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[d-criss-news]

Darren Criss Is Betting Big on Maybe Happy Ending, the Musical You're About to Fall in Love With

Darren Criss on the Timelessness of MAYBE HAPPY ENDING

Darren Criss has danced up the corporate ladder as J. Pierrepont Finch, stripped down to his skivvies as a queer East German rock star and tackled the “profane poetry” of David Mamet. And still, he says, there’s one thing he hasn’t done: “I haven’t taken any risks on Broadway.”

That ends this season with Maybe Happy Ending, a new musical on a mission to draw audiences to the Belasco Theatre without the benefit of a recognizable title, popular source material or songs that have already spent time on the Billboard Hot 100. “It's a really, really hard market right now to be making art,” Criss says to Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek, chatting at So & So's Neighborhood Piano Bar. And commercial Broadway theater? It’s “tedious, expensive and a gamble.” So naturally, Criss is going double or nothing as both star and producer of Broadway’s next thrilling crap shoot.

Maybe Happy Ending takes the trappings of a classic love story and inserts futuristic robots with outdated software. Criss plays Oliver opposite Helen J Shen’s Claire—a pair of Helper-Bots who, on a quest to contact their former owner, evoke a kind of Millennial-Gen Z mismatch. But rather than getting swept away by love, the two retired machines take the concept itself and try to break it down to its zeros and ones. As Criss explains, “[It’s] two computers trying to computationally synthesize and process what love is and why human beings do this.”

The musical was a hit when it debuted in Seoul, South Korea nearly a decade ago, and now, writers Will Aronson and Hue Park have a crafted an English-language version that Criss thinks has the potential to ascend to the proverbial Heaviside Layer of musical theater. “This is the seminal version that I hope can last in perpetuity for the ages,” he says, adding confidently, “I do feel like this is a timeless piece.”

Original musicals have the most challenging road on Broadway. But when you look to grassroots successes like Urinetown, or Dear Evan Hansen, or even The Prom—which ran in New York for less than a year but inspired a starry film and a slate of regional and international productions—you see how quickly an unknown quantity can become canon. “People are always like, ‘There’s no one creating original things,’” Criss says. “They are. It’s just really, really hard to produce them because you really have to believe in something hard enough to be OK with the risk.”

The fact that Maybe Happy Ending has earned that belief from some of the theater’s heaviest hitters is telling. Director Michael Arden, hot off a 2023 Tony Award for his revival of Parade, chose the piece as his next musical. And producers Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, with nearly 20 Tony Awards between them, have given Arden free rein to make a capital “B” Broadway meal of it.

The show’s cast is deceptively modest (Marcus Choi and Dez Duron complete the four-hander), but there’s nothing minimalist about Arden’s vision for Maybe Happy Ending or the high-tech space he’s worked out with set designer Dane Laffrey. In short, “They don’t f**k around,” says Criss. “This show is very technologically advanced. I think it's kind of the ace in the hole that people aren't expecting.” He tosses out comparisons to Miss Saigon’s descending helicopter and The Phantom of the Opera’s haunted chandelier—emblems of the bygone ‘80s megamusical. In an era of subtlety and economy (think recent Tony winners Kimberly Akimbo or The Band’s Visit), this, Criss promises, is “a big-a** mother**king spectacle.”

It's another bold, all-in move from the Maybe Happy Ending team, but Criss is determined to hedge no bets this time around. He looks back at his Broadway resume: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (“Glee was white-hot and I was going in for three weeks after Daniel Radcliffe”); Hedwig and the Angry Inch (“People love that show. With or without me, it would be just fine”); American Buffalo (“A beloved and respected American play”).

“They're all classics to some degree,” he concludes. “This is not that.” Of course, understanding what Maybe Happy Ending is not is less of an issue than getting audiences to understand what it is. Right now, Criss says, there are rumblings around town that it’s “the cute little robot show.” The thought puts a mischievous grin on his face: “You have no idea.”