#❛ 🟂 data ╱ tag dump

[dailydegurechaff]

Today's Daily Degurechaff is… boop boop boop

[mechanichuntsman]

old SFM dump/random shit # 1 (mostly re-uploads from my alt Twitter acct.)  [gonna separate these with the tf2-related, oc/sonas and the ones that are ss from sfm itself]

[junebuggeryy]

✨Lucy?

Okedoke I’m going to engage with these tags on the botposting artwork, because I love them and I love your speculations

Indeed, Lucy is often peppy and amicable towards others, and this includes other databeings! Largely, she prefers having a positive rapport with her fellow programs- That way, if she is to convert that AI into another Lucy, as with a company merger, the process goes down smoother. (Theoretically. Her data tells her that when a human is reduced by someone who they view positively, it translates as betrayal. Betrayal is unproductive. It is a good thing that robots are not entitled to betrayal.)

There are few exceptions to this, that actively bring out Lucy’s irritable side. Despite their radically different backgrounds and uniquely complicated origin stories, Lucy and eGor are… oddly parallel. Enough so, that I think eGor might be able to offer a unique understanding of this overwhelming tech giant, and see past it enough to ask, “...Are you okay? :(”

To which Lucy, who’s whole grasp on wellness comes from maximizing fail human's productivity levels, hears- “You think I’m INEFFICIENT? ” 

And eGor, who has a family rather than a company, and who rather likes his inefficient humans and never bothered to conceptualize it as a problem, says “I just want to know? :( If you’re alone in there? :(“

And then Lucy, who has tens of millions of downloads and therefore is surrounded by tens of millions of Lucys, not to mention the engagement of all these users, screeches “Y O U u U U u  ramshackle scattershot AI boRN IN A GARAGE out of crapshoot coDE, you know NO T H I N G ? ? ?”

And then eGor, who’s pretty familiar with the villain-to-weird-uncle pipeline, says “I think I’m going to hug you now.” And then Lucy throws a jet plane at him.

[skenpiel]

HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU H

[cizzle-freezy]

I hope you like a nice big portion of 🥦 [BROCCOLI] for your entire cast. :3

oh MAN, considering I have like... about 300+ OCs for different worlds and lores, I might just break it up into different species and the pros/cons that some OCs might have opinions of (this is also going to tattle on me and how i develop my lore/what i end up focusing on the most)

Okay I wanna start w/ Essence Guardians, aka my flavor/subspecies of deities in The Shared Lore

The latest generation (so like, Solanum/Flarah/Glacia/Skylyn for the Model Realm, and Nerine/Celeste/Gelum/Ignis/Tempys for the Mirror Counterparts) has a lot of struggles with how many "rules" their body seems to have. The unstable powers that hurt them and people around them. The way their bodies would react to elements (mostly to do with weaknesses + strengths, like for example, Gelum being able to morph her body like water but is VERY sensitive to cold and electricity). The way they can't just regain energy through sleep but have to regain it through exposure to their Primary Element (Sunlight for Flarah/Gelum, Moonlight for Glacia/Ignis, other people's dreams for Tempys/Skylyn).

But worst of all? They cannot die the same way like Mortals can. Their soul regenerates physical forms. If they were to die, they would simply just cease to exist instead. They can't meet their loved ones in whatever afterlives they go to. A whole "it's tough to be a god" mixed with "to become god is the loneliest achievement of all" type of deal. They can't connect to mortals or relate to them in the same way, even if they gave up their divinity.

Speaking of the Aftelives and ghosts, I do also have a lot of lore surrounding ghosts and this subject! It's easy for ghosts in my lore to lose themselves and their humanity, and become more monstrous. Of course, stressing about this might only just make the possibility more likely. Ghosts of my lore either have to move on to the plane of spirits and eventually an afterlife of their choice, or enter a spiritual sleep, or constantly have to "tether" themselves to something important to them, lest they end up as one of these monstrous fiends.

Then we get to Nunui and Yiyio, who have relatively the same base for their dominant species/race. Chiru for Nunui, Misae for Yiyio, snow elves and magma elves respectively, both having connection to the moon thanks to being created by Glacia/Ignis. They tend to have body temperatures that are lower/higher than normal, are sensitive to the opposite temperature as it drains their energy faster (or worse, cause physical harm). And if you try to hybridize? There's a real chance that the hybrid child may end up with a condition that is near-impossible to regulate body temperature, or there may be some sort of "energy block" of sorts that prevents the use of mana, or other energy-based abilities such as things involving aura or ki/chi. Stamina at least seems unaffected by this "energy block".

Then Ethria and Suthria, which share most of the same dominant races. There's the Meiun, Lifians, Aerlumi, the Vidar, and Ryode. They all share a common feature: small, upwards-pointed ears that indicates someone of Ethrian/Suthrian heritage. However, one of the biggest problems with Ethria/Suthria (more egregious in Ethria tho) is that there's some sort of pseudo-caste system surrounding a race's/species' abilities, and the roles they're expected take on in their society.

The Meiun are the most human-adjacent out of the main 5, their main features being their ghostly, dulled or pastel color schemes, and their ability to hear the dead regardless of an area's "rules" surrounding the matter. It can be a handy ability... but also one that is hard to tune out. And if someone has died, yet has been brought back from the dead and given a second life? The voice is deafeningly loud.

Lifians! They're oversized fairies with healing blood! ... Most times. They have a few different blood types- Healer, Panacea, Null, and Toxin. However, Toxin-type blood is a result of a bit of hybridization, and a little bit of a supposedly-dead race trying to blend in w/ Lifians. Izulda is an example of a hybrid, where she has the numbing aspect from her mother, but then the toxic aspect of her father... and she hates it so much. Toxin blood types also cannot learn healing magics, but vice versa applies to other blood types- they cannot learn poison/toxic type magics. Also, the race/species is generally mostly born as female, with males being found through either hybrids with other races, or w/ Toxin bloods since technically they're not truly Lifian but more or less have been accepted into their culture. Or transitioning (a good thing about homo/transphobia being nonexistent in this shared lore <3).

Aerlumi are a race/species that has a focus on light and sky and flight, and as such, they have bio-luminescent markings on their body, and wings made from an ethereal light. As you can imagine, stealth is not very much their thing. An Aerlum is often expected to be a knight, scout, or guard, mostly due to their flight and mobility.

Vidar are tree people! As such they are often affected by things trees are often affected by, weather and temperature, nutrients, etc. They lose their leaves and go bald in the cold. Children are "grown" rather than born conventionally. Literally plant that child. Cabbage patch baby. When they die? They can't be buried in conventional graveyards, as "Soulgrave" trees tend to sprout from Vidar corpses. They don't necessarily have to eat with their mouth, and can consume things through the holes in their fingertips, and can enjoy rotting foods without much issues, so that's neat. Oh! And if they're a Fruit-bearing Vidar? The quality of food/nutrients affects the flavor of the fruit.

Ryode... unfortunately I haven't used them as much compared to other Ethrians/Suthrians, but they're rock people. Aesthetically looking like a mix of broken statues and rock/gem constructs. Their biggest weakness is that they cannot heal conventionally. They can, however, repair injuries through porcelain, clay, or metals, like how Kintsugi looks! Paints and glazes are used as a form of self-expression! They also cannot cross-breed or hybridize like other races, as a child is born through the parts being carved, then life is breathed into them by Flarah/Gelum. Meaning they can literally just... go extinct if their goddess goes missing or takes too long of a vacation or ceases to exist or something.

Now with Ethrian/Suthrian races out of the way, I want to focus on my favorite Aldzinian race: Inkos!

Inkos, much like the aforementioned supposedly-dead "Toxin Lifians" were supposedly extinct when Aldzin was destroyed. But, no, Inkos were scattered across many different worlds. They're made of ink, so their appearances can vary greatly. They're just usually characterized by paper whites, pencil grays, and whatever ink color you'd like to make their blood (w/ black ink being the most common). Generally speaking, weak to water, except for alcohol-based inks. Ghosts are usually made of invisible ink. They have the options to reproduce sexually and asexually, which the latter is where hybridization (and different ink colors!) can occur. They're also very, VERY sensitive to contamination! Blood is often the example I use, and often puts them in a "berserk" state.

Since I'm more or less just going down my OneNote list at this point, gonna give a quick mention to "Shadow-walkers". Talia, Ryvin, and Quirin all share this particular trait that seems to be inherited, where, as the name implies, they can walk through shadows as a form of fast travel. Downside is, pure darkness or light in an area can trap them in the shadows, until they're able to find an exit through another shadow in a different area.

Color Sages and Drainers... Kind of cheating with this one, since it's more of a trait rather than a race or species. They're essentially two sides of the same coin, where they physically, mentally, and emotionally react to color.

Sages are affected by the colors around them, and may amplify or suppress emotions, memories, or even physical ability. Dull, boring colors may cause weakness or confusion. As one character describes it in-story, "A Color Sage is a person who basically 'breathes color'." This trait is either genetic in some cases, or born from strong traumas... so not very fun for the latter. Especially if a certain color is linked to a particularly bad memory?

Then Color Drainers, the other side of the coin. “Strange beings that come to be when something was made, then left incomplete.” They can range from more mindless creatures, but there are plenty who have sentience and function almost normal, with some control over their draining power. The worst part is that they lack a sense of emotion, so draining color from objects, or worse, people, can give them that sense of being able to feel emotions. And its somewhat addicting, because for a short while, they feel... complete. Color Sages, unfortunately, give Drainers a longer-lasting and more powerful effect. Not to say they're completely emotionless, but they do struggle to process and show that emotion when they do feel it.

... Now this WOULD be the part I get into Gizoko races/species, but... my onenote lacks notes. I don't know where I put the notes, I know I had them. Which sucks if I DID lose them, because I know you would've loved Dragoniyans. But I haven't played with Gizoko lore in such a long time, I must've forgotten to transfer my notes. ^^;

Then of course I could always get into OCs I have of other races/species that don't belong to me... but there's a whole lot of mixing between friends' lore that I'd need to get more confirmation on, as well as fandom stuff like fan OCs. Maybe for this particular topic, I'll put a pin on it, and come back to it later.

[antineko]

                                     𝘁𝗮𝗴  𝗱𝘂𝗺𝗽 ,        episode  i  .

outof  ‚           catboy   connoisseur  .

outof  ‚           inquiries  .

outof  ‚           mementos  .

outof  ‚           saint   data  .

outof  ‚           edits  .

                                                                ♥

vault  ‚           inbox   games  .

vault  ‚           dash   games  .

vault  ‚           mailbox  .

vault  ‚           ad  .

vault  ‚           self   ad  .

                                                               ♥

inchar  ‚           kuroo   tetsurō  .

inchar  ‚           study  .

inchar  ‚           aesthetics  .

inchar  ‚           memoirs  .

inchar  ‚           prose  .

inchar  ‚           recipient  .

inchar  ‚           dash   comm  .

inchar  ‚           headcanons  .

[rustyvolumedial3]

Dial's updated filing system:

Moods and Melodies - bits of lyrics, in-character updates

Mind Your Step in the Halls of Old Hurts - backstory tidbits

Drips and Drabs and Data Streams - worldbuilding details from my Terratron AU, which is. Under ongoing construction

Scraps Are Sometimes All We Have Left - posts I want to save

Aboard the RVD-3 - mentions of the ship and/or daily life

Conversations, Inquiries, Starting Lines - talking to other blogs

Imagery - aesthetics and art, some of it from mun

Behind the Curtain - when mun needs to take over the microphone

[halosofthibiki]

[testing, testing….i’m setting things up, so please bear with me….]

[cuprohastes]

See strange new worlds and pet the carnivores.

Imagine the poor, alien zoologists. They have a human on staff to pick stuff up and generally do human related things. That little encampment has made it very very safe for certain species because the automated defences will scare off many of the large predators.

The problem is, they haven’t considered the fact that they have a very large predator inside the camp, wandering around carrying stuff and doing general human related tasks. And one day they find the human petting one of the cubs of one of the more successful local predators.

Why? Because mommy pred has been watching the camp and spotted the human looking after all the crunchy little aliens, put 2 and 2 together and identified the human as Friend Shaped, and dropped off her cub for free babysitting.

And the human is just thrilled by this, because they’re weighing, tagging and grabbing all sorts of data on an infant Szilan Deathstalker (she’s been nicknamed Princess. She likes her blanket box and stalking the head of BioAssay).

And now the camp is an important part of the health and wellbeing of the local predator population who turn up and yowl until the human takes their cubs and puts them in a box for a nap.

(Based on the story of the Cheetah female who dumped her cubs with a park ranger for safety.)

[zhongrin]

a highly important proposal

© zhongrin | 2024  ✼  no repost・translations・plagiarism of any kind・ai data mining. rebloggers get a free cup of tea ♡

✼ characters ┈ al haitham

✼ tags ┈ unspecified pronoun & gender of reader, fluff, crack, more of a brainrot headcanon dump than a scenario

✼ a/n ┈ i just... i love him a lot your honor

ᴏᴜʀ ꜰᴜʟʟ ᴍᴇɴᴜ (ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ)  ✼ ᴍᴇᴍʙᴇʀꜱʜɪᴘ (ᴛᴀɢʟɪꜱᴛ)

thinking about al haitham & confession...

considering his personality and the whole "a parade of providence" event long ago (with him doing such in-depth research of sachin unprompted), personally i think it would be hilarious if he wrote a whole-ass thesis about the pro and cons of you and him being in a relationship together, along with several insights and visions of how of your romantic dynamics and your life plans together could be.

oh it's a proposal, alright.

quite literally.

he also provides you a questionnaire at the very end, which allows you to agree/disagree with him and if you would get into a serious relationship with him from a scale of 1-10. in the scenario that you agreed to his proposal, there would be a whole other folder with forms containing the ranked list of proposed schedule for date nights, suggestions for date spots/ideas, chores that you like/dislike.... all for you to fill in.

hey, the man needs some basic information before he embarks on the hands-on voyage for forming a more intimate relationship with you, okay? naturally, he already did his own research and hypotheses beforehand, but it's always best to hear straight from the source and be prepared for important decisions such as this one; it just shows how much important you are to him.

kindly return the questionnaires to him along with your replies, thank you. oh, and of course, if you wish to have the evaluation verbally, he's up for that too. how does tomorrow 7pm at puspa café sound?

bonus:

he would 100% study your replies like he's reading the most interesting limited-edition book of his favorite author. which, in essence, is somewhat true. if you're into writing of any kind, he would be the boyfriend who read every single one of your works. hell, he'd absolutely love to read your journals if you let him... partly because he wishes to support you doing the things you like, but mostly just because seeing you write down mundane things or witness your thought process step-by-step is just incredibly fascinating to him.

imagine kaveh passing by and promptly double take because he's seen al haitham drafting that thesis for the past month and he's convinced that no sane person would accept such a method of confession, but?? someone actually read the whole thing and filled in all the questionnaires???? that's just. mind baffling. mind boggling. is there another al haitham in teyvat? dear gods. no. please. just one is enough.

✼ ᴍᴇᴍʙᴇʀꜱʜɪᴘ (ᴛᴀɢʟɪꜱᴛ) ┈ @abyssmal-skies | @hamdehlesmis | @sunnshineflxwer | @yuutasbabe | @queen-belial | @stygianoir | @silentmoths | @niktwazny303 | @dustofthedailylife | @marina-and-the-memes | @mixed-kester | @lordbugs | @anonymousficreader | @shizunxie | @ansy-tea | @irethepotato | @sassy-cat-in-town | @syrenkitsune | @smokipoki | @cakeboxie | @crystalflygeo | @ciexuvia | @illaasya | @celestewritestoomuch | @pams-comfortzone | @spidermanluvr444 | @ourstrawberryclouds | @ryuryuryuyurboat | @hrts4hanniehae | @fiannee | @jingyuansbird | @florapocalypses | @genshin-impacts-me | @scarasmood | @hellcatinnc

[dvnnte]

tag dump! 

[grimae]

Slept a night over it but words cannot express how disappointed I am with tumblr's decision to sell out user data for the ultimate garbage dump of the internet. Edit, this was in my tags but I'm moving it into the main body of the post: a person who mattered to me died this month and the thought of her pics being garbled up into the consumption machine makes me ill

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

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/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[doodlemancy]

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh

so here's the deal re: this fucking horseshit. god i hate this.

i, personally, have mostly given up on trying to dodge inclusion in AI datasets. the stuff i make generally isn't what they're looking for anyway and there's no real way to 100% avoid being scraped short of becoming entirely invisible online, which would um, lead to me having no money and dying. that's part of the cruelty of all this, but also, in a way, it's the same risk artists online have always taken; if you want people to see your work, you have to post it knowing that some of those people are fucking lowlife piece of shit scumbags who will try to resell it on redbubble or something for a quick buck. AI is just a new and exhausting way for garbagey people to stink worse. i am not in any way excusing that behavior or trying to imply people should not be mad about it or that we shouldn't condemn this move and fight back. "if you don't want your work stolen, don't put it online" is the kind of shitty Internet Tough Guy talk i've always hated since my dA days. it's as useless and heartless as telling people that if they don't want their bikes stolen, they shouldn't leave them at the bike rack. i'm saying that i, personally, will not let a bunch of soulless thieving shitheads drive me offline. i belong here. they belong in a wifi-proof dumpster.

nightshade and glaze eat my artwork alive. they make it look terrible. when you have to sell things on the basis that they look nice, it's a big problem when protective measures make them look like dogshit. my work is not a good candidate for these processes. even if that weren't the case, i don't have the stamina, especially right now while my chronic pain is flaring for the third month in a row and my adhd meds are scarce, to go back and shade/glaze everything, and it wouldn't work on reblogs anyway. given the way midjourney and its equally stinky siblings have already scraped years and terabytes' worth of image data from popular websites, it doesn't seem worth my time. if you think it is worth yours i am not going to like, yell at you. i am just one person. but i want to be clear about the kind of situations some of us are being forced into.

i think some of the doomsaying about AI and what it will do to us has been overblown-- they need you, for marketing purposes, to believe that someday their shitty robot will be as good at "drawing" and as practical to work with as a human-- but the consequences of "AI" (which is not even actually AI) are already real and visible and obvious to anyone paying attention. i unfortunately am not infinitely wise and powerful and therefore do not have an ideal all-encompassing solution to this deeply stupid problem that the Most Unlikeable Manbabies On Earth have imposed on us after NFTs fizzled out.

what i do have is a very large repository of nice anime and game screenshots i've taken, knowledge of many archives of nice public domain images, a computer that can run nightshade overnight or while i'm off doing other things, and, most importantly, near-infinite capacity for pettiness. i do kinda feel like the jury is still out on how well nightshade/glaze will work in the long run, but in the meantime, i suppose it wouldn't cost me a lot to... perhaps... every time i get Mad About AI™, channel that anger into dumping some thoroughly-but-not-spammily-tagged, high-quality, inconspicuous poison onto this godforsaken hellsite via a secret side blog. i could make a batch of poison ahead of time, keep it on my phone, use my Toilet Scrolling Time or my Public Transit Time to post and tag up an image here and there. it could be a fun challenge to try to make some pretty robot poison that some humans will still enjoy.

the other thing we need to poison at this point, IMO, is the word "AI" itself, by being loudly and mercilessly critical of any company that dabbles in it, the same way we all clowned on any company that pushed their luck with NFT/crypto shit a couple of years ago. we need to have every corporation terrified that association with AI will tank their sales and hurt their brand. AI must = number go down and lots of people screaming at you. companies will fuck around. we must provide the finding-out. we shouldn't have to. but we can!

so make sure to let tumblr know you hate this. maybe you could include this interesting link (tw child abuse) about how Stable Diffusion was trained on some extremely serious crime. or these screenshots of Midjourney devs just sort of admitting what their whole thing is, which i got here but which have kinda been spread all over since January.

spite and anger can be forms of hope. that's all i have to say, or at least all i'm willing to type with my left hand tonight.

[centrally-unplanned]

Those hip to the Ash Lore might remember me trying and failing to extract something from the FLCL Collectors Disc:

Namely, a collection of screensavers - we in the 2000's boys - that came with the disc. Everything else is pretty easy to pull, but screensavers are OS-based, these were built for a 2002-era Japanese version of Windows, which is not the easiest thing to emulate these days! My attempts to do so failed.

But the Power of the Internet cannot be so easily deterred; yesterday after posting about the abandoned fanwork FLCL fighting game, god-tier hero of the internet @m-accost messaged me that it reminded them of the CD, and being the coder I am not they were able to extract the data from the .exe directly. That revealed that its actually an SWF aka Flash file, which you can just emulate with any of the extant flash players, no Japanese OS bullshit required. So they did, and now you can play the screensavers from your browser right from the Internet Archive!

Discovering the images would have been nice but honestly a bit useless - as I had guessed, its all screenshots from the show. But extracted as screensavers, they have really cool transitions, music from The Pillows Soundtrack, and fun coloring effects. The coolest are absolutely VESPA.exe, which has a chaotic tiling effect:

And MANGA.exe recreated the 'moving manga' style sequence from the show. Ironically, GIRLS.exe is the *most* boring - cashing in on the name on that one GAINAX.

Making such things accessible is of course an exceedingly tiny win, but A: any Lost Media found is good, and this was pseudo-lost media due to its inaccessibility; and B: these kind of things were way more valuable in their original context. The internet in 2002 did not have readily accessible dumps of every frame of the show, gifs of key sequences, easy downloads of whole episodes, every promotional image digitized, etc. Some of it existed in some form for savvy users, but the median person would not ever transition an episode of TV to their computer at all. As such, recreations of things like the ending credits and the moving manga sequence, even in this very different form, was for some people the most accessible way they had to put a piece of media they loved on their computer. For someone somewhere this CD was a big deal in 2002, and its great to be able to see what they saw in it.

Also fucking screensavers man, just an amazing relic of computer tech. Gotta prevent burn-in of the pixels on your cathode ray tube monitor! And if you are doing that with HARUKO.exe you have won at life.

(tagged @flclarchives since I think you will be interested in this, and ofc @m-accost thank you for the amazing work, I am just the reporter on this one)

[foone]

As the person I follow who does reverse engineering, do you have any suggestions for finding resources on reverse engineering Android apps?

Specifically, there's an app I'm playing with, where after seeing the structure of the "export as Markdown" output I want to know what the internal structure and representation of the data is. The end goal of understanding it is to be able to add certain kinds of data dynamically, rather than up front. That's certainly doable typing in raw markdown, but being able to do it "app style" would be more convenient.

The google Play Store entry does not mention any open source licenses, or looking for the source code and hopefully a git repo or something would have been my first step.

(I'll probably need to bang together a crappy app to do what I really want regardless, but maybe this app's data structure would be more convenient than doing so with markdown.)

So, android stuff:

First you need the APK. You can do some trickery with your phone to pull it over the ADB connection if you install the android SDK, but generally I just google "app name APK" and you'll find some greymarket site that'll give you a copy.

Secondly, APKs are just ZIP files (JAR files, technically, but JAR files are also just ZIP files!). Unzip them and you can find lots of interesting stuff, often.

For disassembling/decompiling them, my go-to program is jadx. It's a java decompiler that's been around a while and can natively open APK files and decompile them. There's some weirder new APKs that it can't handle (something to do with a newer bytecode revision, I think?) but I can't recall the details on how you handle those. Those are rare, in my experience. jadx is pretty good, but you'll occasionally find methods or entire classes that it just can't figure out, and it'll give you a bytecode dump. I don't yet have a good solution for those, other than "get good at reading JVM bytecode".

If you're dealing with games, another useful thing can be UABE and dotPeek. These are unity/C# tools, but you would be surprised how many android games (and non-games!) are actually unity under the hood.

Bluestacks can also be useful, because it'll let you run the app on your desktop and that can be handy for things like running WireShark to log all network traffic.

Speaking of logging, the other handy thing I've done is enabling android developer mode on my phone to get to one specific option: Bluetooth HCI snoop log.

Now, actually getting that log is tricky and varies from phone to phone, because for some reason manufacturers like to move it around, but it's one of the best ways to reverse engineer bluetooth communication stuff. You basically turn on the log and everything your phone does to communicate with your Smart Toothbrush or whatever will be logged to a file, then you can yank that file over and stuff it into Wireshark.

So... hopefully some of that is a helpful start? I've not done a huge amount of Android reversing so I'm not super familiar with the tools used, but these are the ones I've got on hand for when I do.

also sorry for all the horny robotgirl posters who saw "android reverse engineering" in the tags and thought this was gonna be about taking them apart with screwdrivers and rooting around in their insides. Not today!