#move fast and break things

[myjetpack]

My cartoon for this week's New Scientist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gandersauce

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for<p>placehold://://er </p> my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in AUSTIN on MONDAY (Mar 10). I'm also appearing at SXSW and at many events around town, for Creative Commons and Fediverse House. More tour dates here.

It's true that capitalists by and large hate capitalism – given their druthers, entrepreneurs would like to attain a perch from which they get to set prices and wages and need not fear competitors. A market where everything is up for grabs is great – if you're the one doing the grabbing. Less so if you're the one whose profits, customers and workers are being grabbed at.

But while all capitalists hate all capitalism, a specific subset of capitalists really, really hate a specific kind of capitalism. The capitalists who hate capitalism the most are Big Tech bosses, and the capitalism they hate the most is techno-capitalism. Specifically, the techno-capitalism of the first decade of this century – the move fast/break things capitalism, the beg forgiveness, not permission capitalism, the blitzscaling capitalism.

The capitalism tech bosses hate most of all is disruptive capitalism, where a single technological intervention, often made by low-resourced individuals or small groups, can upend whole industries. That kind of disruption is only fun when you're the disruptor, but it's no fun for the disruptees.

Jeff Bezos's founding mantra for Amazon was "your margin is my opportunity." This is a classic disruption story: I'm willing to take a smaller profit than the established players in the industry. My lower prices will let me poach their customers, so I grow quickly and find more opportunities to cut margins but make it up in volume. Bezos described this as a flywheel that would spin faster and faster, rolling up more and more industries. It worked!

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/10/at-amazon-the-flywheel-effect-drives-innovation/

The point of that flywheel wasn't the low prices, of course. Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon's twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don't have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and captured the majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it "bezosflation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

We could disrupt Amazon in lots of ways. We could scrape all of Amazon's "ASIN" identifiers and make browser plugins that let local sellers advertise when they have stock of the things you're about to buy on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

We could hack the apps that monitor Amazon drivers, from their maneuvers to their eyeballs, so drivers had more autonomy and their bosses couldn't punish them for prioritizing their health and economic wellbeing over Amazon's. An Amazon delivery app mod could even let drivers earn extra money by delivering for Amazon's rivals while they're on their routes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

We could sell Amazon customers virtual PVRs that let them record and keep the shows they like, which would make it easier to quit Prime, and would kill Amazon's sleazy trick of making all the Christmas movies into extra-cost upsells from November to January:

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00007nmv9XSAQ/why-arent-all-the-christmas-movies-available-through-prime-its-a-pandemic-we-are-stuck-at-home-please-add-the-oldies-but-goodies-to-prime

Rival audiobook stores could sell jailbreaking kits for Audible subscribers who want to move over to a competing audiobook platform, stripping Amazon's DRM off all their purchases and converting the files to play on a non-Amazon app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Jeff Bezos's margin could be someone else's opportunity…in theory. But Amazon has cloaked itself – and its apps and offerings – in "digital rights management" wrappers, which cannot be removed or tampered with under pain of huge fines and imprisonment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Amazon loves to disrupt, talking a big game about "free markets and personal liberties" – but let someone attempt to do unto Amazon as Amazon did unto its forebears, and the company will go running to Big Government for a legal bailout, asking the state to enforce its business model:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-bezos-opinion-trump-market-liberty-97a7d8113d670ec6e643525fdf9f06de

You'll find this cowardice up and down the tech stack, wherever you look. Apple launched the App Store and the iTunes Store with all kinds of rhetoric about how markets – paying for things, rather than getting them free through ads – would correct the "market distortions." Markets, we were told, would produce superior allocations, thanks to price and demand signals being conveyed through the exchange of money for goods and services.

But Apple will not allow itself to be exposed to market forces. They won't even let independent repair shops compete with their centrally planned, monopoly service programs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Much less allow competitors to create rival app stores that compete for users and apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

They won't even refurbishers re-sell parts from phones and laptops that are beyond repair:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/108049/apple-repair-critic-louis-rossmann-takes-on-us-customs-counterfeit-battery-seizure

And they take the position that if you do manage to acquire a donor part from a dead phone or laptop, that it is a felony – under the same DRM laws that keep Amazon's racket intact – to install them in a busted device:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed

"Rip, mix, burn" is great when it's Apple doing the ripping, mixing and burning, but let anyone attempt to return the favor and the company turns crybaby, whining to Customs and Border Patrol and fed cops to protect itself from being done unto as it did.

Should we blame the paperclip-maximizing Slow AI corporations for attempting to escape disruptive capitalism's chaotic vortex? I don't think it matters: I don't deplore this whiny cowardice because it's hypocritical. I hate it because it's a ripoff that screws workers, customers and the environment.

But there is someone I do blame: the governments that pass the IP laws that allow Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants shut down anyone who wants to disrupt them. Those governments are supposed to work for us, and yet they passed laws – like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – that felonize reverse-engineering, modding and tinkering. These laws create an enshittogenic environment, which produces enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Bad enough that the US passed these laws and exposed Americans to the predatory conduct of tech enshittifiers. But then the US Trade Representative went slithering all over the world, insisting that every country the US trades with pass their own versions of the laws, turning their citizens into an all-you-can-steal buffet for US tech gougers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#necensuraninadados

This system of global "felony contempt of business-model" statutes came into being because any country that wanted to export to the USA without facing tariffs had to pass a law banning reverse-engineering of tech products in order to get a deal. That's why farmers all over the world can't fix their tractors without paying John Deere hundreds of dollars for each repair the farmer makes to their own tractor:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

But with Trump imposing tariffs on US trading partners, there is now zero reason to keep those laws on the books around the world, and every reason to get rid of them. Every country could have the kind of disruptors who start a business with just a little capital, aimed directly at the highest margins of these stupidly profitable, S&P500-leading US tech giants, treating those margins as opportunities. They could jailbreak HP printers so they take any ink-cartridge; jailbreak iPhones so they can run any app store; jailbreak tractors so farmers can fix them without paying rent to Deere; jailbreak every make and model of every car so that any mechanic can diagnose and fix it, with compatible parts from any manufacturer. These aren't just nice things to do for the people in your country's borders: they are businesses, massive investment opportunities. The first country that perfects the universal car diagnosing tool will sell one to every mechanic in the world – along with subscriptions that keep up with new cars and new manufacturer software updates. That country could have the relationship to car repairs that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade, when Nokia disrupted the markets of every landline carrier in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

The US companies that could be disrupted thanks to the Trump tariffs are directly implicated in the rise of Trumpism. Take Tesla: the company's insane valuation is a bet by the markets that Tesla will be able to charge monthly fees for subscription features and one-off fees for software upgrades, which will be wiped out when your car changes hands, triggering a fresh set of payments from the next owner.

That business model is entirely dependent on making it a crime to reverse-engineer and mod a Tesla. A move-fast-and-break-things disruptor who offered mechanics a tool that let them charge $50 (or €50!) to unlock every Tesla feature, forever, could treat Musk's margins as their opportunity – and what an opportunity it would be!

That's how you hurt Musk – not by being performatively aghast at his Nazi salutes. You kick that guy right in the dongle:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

The act of unilaterally intervening in a market, product or sector – that is, "moving fast and breaking things" – is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. Don't weep for the collapse of long-distance telephone calls! The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.

If Uber had been able to nuke the entire taxi medallion system – which was dominated by speculators who charged outrageous rents to drivers – and then been smashed by driver co-ops who modded gig-work apps to keep the fares for themselves, that would have been amazing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things

The problem isn't disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.

We need some disruption! Their margins are your opportunity. It's high time we started moving fast and breaking US Big Tech!

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/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

This is a shrewd a summation of the current coup in the United States and the crisis it is generating. Thoroughly recommend. American friends take note: It can and must be resisted if your country is to survive as a constitutional democracy.

- - - - - - - - - -

THE LOGIC OF DESTRUCTION - AND HOW TO RESIST IT

By DR. TIMOTHY D. SNYDER, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after.

In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate.

Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.

Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.

The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.

In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.

After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics.

For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.

They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted.

The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas.

If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree.

Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work.

Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong.

Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.

Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens.

Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution.

Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers, and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not.

Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken.

The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week.

Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.

And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner

Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.

As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

[shrinkrants]

President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.

[erik-even-wordier]

A word on the "move fast and break things" concept

A word on the "move fast and break things" concept. It comes from tech, as you probably know, and was very much the Amazon ethos. And I'm actually a fan of it, when it's deployed correctly. But it's now being used to justify malicious people doing reckless things in the stupidest ways possible, and that makes me mad.

So if someone in your life is under the delusion that Pres. Musk and his band of bros are just being "entrepreneurial" or "operating at internet speed" or whatever and the outcome will be glittering success, here's what "move fast and break things" is SUPPOSED to mean:

* Design and code products and features in an iterative way so that you can respond to customer/market needs quickly, vs taking forever to build something that might not even be relevant anymore once you're done. Launch something, get feedback, tweak or add to it, get more feedback, etc. This can be tricky to get right--we've probably all seen the definition of "minimum viable product" stretched to within an inch of its life at times--but I think it's a net good for companies and consumers alike.

* Understand when you have ENOUGH information to move forward responsibly, even if you might LIKE to have a little more. Analysis paralysis is real. (I can personally attest to this as one prone to it.) Certainty is seductive. But endless dithering over edge cases and what-ifs means no forward momentum. This also applies to over-reliance on consensus. You need your key stakeholders on board with your plan, but waiting for universal approval is a route to getting nothing done. When people ask how I succeeded for twelve years at Amazon, a company the average (and saner) employee leaves within eighteen months, my answer is that I learned how to navigate and even thrive in ambiguity, so that I could make decisions in fast-changing circumstances and take measured risks.

* Distinguish between one-way and two-way doors. Two-way doors are decisions that can readily be reversed if it turns out that when you moved fast, you broke something important. One-way doors are permanent, and a sign to slow way down. When I took those "measured risks," I mean I was also aware of when making a mistake would mean real damage to customers or the business--and thus potentially also to my own reputation--and proceeded much more cautiously.

Here's what it's NOT supposed to mean:

* Recklessness with foundational systems. For one thing, remember that it's a TECH maxim, meant to apply mostly to digital environments where code is easily deployed and rolled back. One of the teams I led at Amazon experimented with different kinds of email subject lines. If one of them had disastrous open rates, we could just pull it (or the algorithm would pull it for us). Yeah, it meant that tens of thousands of customers had received a mail from us that they didn't find useful. That's not great, because once you've trained a customer to ignore or even unsubscribe to your emails, it's really hard to get their attention back. But that was the price of learning. And it didn't HARM customers, or break their trust. And even in a tech environment, we would never EVER have played it fast and loose with, say, the system for storing customer data or managing employee benefits. The stakes are way too high, just as they might be with, say, safeguarding the nuclear stockpiles of the United States of America.

* Failure to plan. Even when you know you might break things, you try to anticipate those things in advance and have a mitigation plan. At Amazon we even tried to anticipate "dogs not barking," our phrase for unintended consequences that happen below the radar and so go unnoticed for too long. Did DOGE take the time to either ensure it wasn't firing HUNDREDS of mission-critical people or to have a fast rollback plan? Apparently not. (The nuclear scientists' email accounts were wiped as soon as they were fired, forcing HR to hunt people down one by one via personal accounts.) I also wouldn't consider these firings a two-way door. Even if your people come back to work, the experience of being fired (illegally, let's not forget) by a ketamine-addled billionaire who is ALSO operating illegally--and who the White House claims is neither the DOGE director nor a DOGE employee--won't fade anytime soon. The chaos and breach of trust are irreparable.

* Lack of coordination. Even in a rambunctious tech environment, teams did not take it well when some other team's code changes broke their stuff without plenty of advance warning. That's amateur hour, not to mention assholery. Before you fire the one locksmith for all of Yellowstone, maybe you give his boss a heads up and time to arrange coverage.

To be clear, I don't think Elon Musk and his band of young bros are TRYING to "move fast and break things" in the right way. Their goal is to destroy the federal government, not improve it, so they don't think they need to take any care. (Which is the Achilles heel of the whole Trump administration; instead of taking the time to ruin things in a legally defensible way, they proceed with all the finesse of thugs using Adderall as chaw and get smacked down in court, again and again.)

But they ARE banking on the public being dumb enough to believe that this is just how the wealthy, successful, super-ultra-modern tech class got that way. It's not true. So don't fall for it.

PS: also, THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT A BUSINESS AND SHOULD NOT BE RUN LIKE ONE. Would I like our government to be more agile and efficient? Absolutely. I think we all would. But a large bureaucracy will NEVER run like a corporation, and that’s not just inevitable, but desirable in some ways. Institutions are MEANT to be stable and predictable.

[bipedalseal]

Brett Schreiber, an attorney who has represented clients affected by the faulty software, said he anticipates another potential wave of litigation from Cybertruck owners.

“What we have seen perpetually with Tesla is the ethos of a tech company, wanting to push out product as quickly as possible, wrapped up in an automotive manufacturer, which should be far more intentional and thoughtful in producing vehicles,” he said. “This is not an app, this is a multithousand-pound vehicle hurtling down our roadways at high speeds.”

Source: What the Cybertruck’s many failures mean for Tesla. Written by Kari Paul. Published by The Guardian.

problems with modern engineering ^-^^

[fragariavescana]

So long as you are reasonably conscientious about backups and security, most broken linux systems can be restored to a known-good state within an hour. Therefore I heartily recommend fucking around and finding out.

The same cannot be said for buttholes.

i love reddit so fucking much

[macwantspeace]

Who knew accounting was complicated? Just like the default COBOL date entry where we got 150 year old folks getting checks [false], the Doggie Boys say a missing entry in one Code slot means "untraceable". But all the other payee, payment, date info is there. Article on daily kos is written by a guy who does business to government contracts.

[harebrainedmage]

When talking about AI content scraping, it's stuff like THIS that immediately shows the need for us to use data poisoning against these models. Reminder that corporations do not ask nicely for something unless they think that they can benefit in some way. If you have a little sign that says "Please don't scrape all of my content to use for your corporate overlords. UwU" there are ZERO consequences for someone scraping that data. You have no way of verifying that your data wasn't scraped. And legal recourse, even if it was theoretically possible at some future point, is meaningless with such a profound lack of evidence.

What you can (and should) do, is, if you haven't already, look into data-poisoning tools so that there are consequences for someone looking to profit off of the backs of other people's work. Below are links to Glaze and Nightshade, two tools from the university of Chicago that help screw up the image-generation models that're scraping artists' works:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/

These tools DO work, which is why you'll find tons of public-facing articles out there claiming stuff along the lines of:

"Data-poisoning isn't really a big concern, and like, we're TOTALLY going to figure out countermeasures for this guys. Source: Like, trust me bro."

But if you look at the research papers out there on the subject, it becomes clear that data poisoning incurs a substantial cost to the models that start swallowing the poison.

The only thing I have yet to find is a good way to data poison text without just putting random Chat-GPT nonsense in it. (I briefly considered using white-text on white-background at extremely small fonts, but this would screw up screen-readers. And I'm not aware of any other solutions that manage to be unobtrusive while also not screwing over disabled people.)

So if you're aware of any good methods, be sure to send some my way! In the meantime, start using glaze (and maybe Nightshade too) if you haven't already! Even if you're just reposting stock photos somewhere, or it's a photo of your dogs, or any other image you're posting! The more images you make into robot poison, the quicker these corporate stooges fold.

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

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[machinecreature]

i can so easily envision frank and mel treating a patient and him teaching her a technique and she does it perfectly and theres a "you did it!" "we did it!" moment and then they debrief about it alone and mel is still feeling warm and itchy in a good way, that specific way where she keeps feeling the ghost of frank's touch on her and so she just Kisses him but then pulls away embarrassed, "that was inappropriate" but then frank grabs her waist and kisses her again, better this time. and they pull away and look around thankful no one came in. and they are responsible and get on with their day but when the shift is over, well.... :)

[itwoodbeprefect]

one thing i have to hand to people online who leave reviews on obviously low budget westerns is that at least they don't complain that it's an obviously low budget western. it seems that i can't say this for some of the people leaving reviews on obviously low budget queer movies

[aquaticfreakshow-sys]

Too many people are dying around me lately.

[politicalantibody]

Less experts, more puppets. Hey MAGA! Tired of winning yet?

On a related note, now all of our (former) allies are going to have to seriously ramp up their defense spending, since America, owner of the world’s most powerful military, seems to be abdicating our self-assumed role as guarantor of the Free World. When the world is hovering on the edge of a tariff-driven recession, this will siphon more of each of our former allies’ GDPs away from expenditures that directly benefit citizens, and funnel them directly into the war industries. Perhaps this rebalancing was long overdue, but any change implemented this suddenly involves considerable disruption and risks.

You can’t eat a tank!

Also: Sudden changes are almost ALWAYS disruptive, and this is rarely a good thing. Incremental changes are generally a wiser way to proceed, in almost any field.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-reduce-4-star-positions-by-20-official-says-2025-05-05/?utm_source=reddit.com

"More generals and admirals does not lead to more success," Hegseth said in a video posted on X.

Moron! Goodbye expertise because expertise isn't success. Success is doing only what Trump wants

[thebluebygracieabrams]

when the competition is making me cry in 10 seconds and your opponents are my parents

[flintbian]

For some good news to mask the bad, my balcony garden is going really well. Everything has sprouted and it grows so fast. My potatoes have overtaken one corner entirely within a few weeks! The birds are now of course going after my tomatoes and strawberries, but it's a joy to watch things grow. I've wanted/planned this garden for years and it's so fun! The kale, spinach, and broccoli sprouts look like clover and grass, it's adorable. I'm planning on getting some more pots to plant the summer wildflowers in to attract more bees :)

[momentomori24]

Normally I don't like calling out specific names when it's a large number of people doing stupid shit but holy fucking shit I actually need Limus to log off and never breathe a word about anything Hazbin related ever again