#epic html

[gottagetshiver]

I just finished coding something kinda cool into the kidfic for when it drops tomorrow 👀

[laeynecodes]

006 - Wallpost: There Are Other Ways

Really simple wallpost code today while I work on fixing some old codes that don't work on site and finish making some more complex new codes

As always please keep the credit, and don't steal/use this code as a base.

[ludmithjacques]

Would you fall in Love with me again?

If you knew what I've done?

The things I cannot c h a n g e...

Would you love me all the same?

I know that you've been waiting....

W a i t i n g . . . .

For

Love

[magna-bratta]

That happened to me once and from then on I made sure to type long comments into a note, then C+P it into AO3.

ao3 being down right when I was leaving a six paragraph long comment on my favorite fic telling the author what I loved about the chapter is… more painful than the site being down right when I’m posting my own fic, apparently

the way I audibly make a sound from my throat when I hit comment and this shows up

[curlytrek1701]

K so not to be dramatic or anything, but there's a free vintage French pattern book available on antiquepatternlibrary so if you like to crochet/weave/make pixel art/tie epic friendship bracelets don't walk- RUN.

It has scenes from aesop's fables! Cherubs doing things! Beheadings! Greek muses! Little farm people! Intricate floral pattern! Goth stained-glass window like patterns! Fun little corner pieces! Eeeeeeeeeeeeee

https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/C-TT008-180.htm

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

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

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

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

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

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[gunksplunk]

html= Have To Meet Ladies jpeg= Just Pretty Epic Girls png= Penis oN Girl gif= Girl Is Friend css= Cute & She's Single https= we actually dont know what this one means and nobody will tell us

THIS POST WAS MADE ON BEHALF OF NOW-SUSPENDED USER “CHARLOTTAN”, AS GOD IS MY WITNESS

i pray i am not banned

[apod]

2024 May 16

Aurora Georgia Image Credit & Copyright: Wright Dobbs

Explanation: A familiar sight from Georgia, USA, the Moon sets near the western horizon in this rural night skyscape. Captured on May 10 before local midnight, the image overexposes the Moon's bright waning crescent at left in the frame. A long irrigation rig stretches across farmland about 15 miles north of the city of Bainbridge. Shimmering curtains of aurora shine across the starry sky though, definitely an unfamiliar sight for southern Georgia nights. Last weekend, extreme geomagnetic storms triggered by the recent intense activity from solar active region AR 3664 brought epic displays of aurora, usually seen closer to the poles, to southern Georgia and even lower latitudes on planet Earth. As solar activity ramps up, more storms are possible.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240516.html

[vestaignis]

Русский художник, представитель символизма и модерна,  Иван Мясоедов (1881, Харьков – 1953, Буэнос-Айрес) родился в семье  знаменитого художника-передвижника Григория Мясоедова. Был внебрачным сыном художника Григория Мясоедова и художницы Ивановой. Еще ребенком Иван Мясоедов начал учиться рисованию в частной школе, организованной его отцом. В 15 поступил в Московское училище живописи, позднее — в Императорскую Академию художеств. Он мало чем походил на своего отца, и никакой преемственности в искусстве  не было. Все, что было мило Григорию Мясоедову, Иван Мясоедов презирал (и наоборот). Его привлекали мифологические сюжеты, эпический размах, подвиги, боги, герои — все то, от чего бежали передвижники. Художник Иван Мясоедов был прекрасным профессиональным гравером, что стало причиной большой беды. Проживая с женой в бедствующей Германии в 20-е годы, он рисовал и печатал английские фунты- за что и был арестовыван как фальшивомонетчик. Три года Иван проводит в Моабитской тюрьме, где  расписывает тюремную церковь.  Выйдя на свободу, он пишет целый ряд ностальгических полотен и в 1938 году бежит с семьей в Лихтенштейн по поддельному чешскому паспорту (сам «нарисовал») на имя «профессора Зотова». В княжестве Иван Мясоедов стал придворным художником, создал великолепные эскизы почтовых марок. В Лихтенштейне художник вновь попал под арест за подделку  государственных кредитных бумаг, а всю его семью лишили гражданства княжества.  После непродолжительного заключения Мясоедов с семьей в 1953 году переезжает в Аргентину.  По приезду в Буэнос-Айрес Иван Мясоедов внезапно тяжело заболел и умер  от рака печени. Ему было 73 года.

Russian artist, representative of symbolism and modernism, Ivan Myasoedov (1881, Kharkov - 1953, Buenos Aires) was born in the family of the famous Itinerant artist Grigory Myasoedov. He was the illegitimate son of the artist Grigory Myasoedov and the artist Ivanova. As a child, Ivan Myasoedov began to study drawing at a private school organized by his father. At 15 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, and later the Imperial Academy of Arts. He was little like his father, and there was no continuity in art. Everything that was nice to Grigory Myasoedov, Ivan Myasoedov despised (and vice versa). He was attracted by mythological stories, epic scope, exploits, gods, heroes - everything that the Wanderers fled from.

The artist Ivan Myasoedov was an excellent professional engraver, which caused great trouble. Living with his wife in poverty-stricken Germany in the 1920s, he drew and printed English pounds, for which he was arrested as a counterfeiter. Ivan spends three years in Moabit prison, where he paints the prison church. Upon his release, he painted a whole series of nostalgic canvases and in 1938 he fled with his family to Liechtenstein using a fake Czech passport (he “drew it” himself) in the name of “Professor Zotov.”

In the principality, Ivan Myasoedov became a court artist and created magnificent sketches of postage stamps. In Liechtenstein, the artist was again arrested for forging government credit papers, and his entire family was deprived of citizenship of the principality. After a short imprisonment, Myasoedov and his family moved to Argentina in 1953. Upon arrival in Buenos Aires, Ivan Myasoedov suddenly became seriously ill and died of liver cancer. He was 73 years old.

Источник://kulturologia.ru/blogs/160919/44149/, https://dergachev-va.livejournal.com/86205.html,arthive.com/ru/artists/31745~Ivan_Grigor'evich_Mjasoedov/works/587071~Vid_na_SanSusi, /artifex.ru/живопись/иван-мясоедов-часть-1/, /artchive.ru/publications/4134~Zhizn'_i_udivitel'nye_prikljuchenija_Ivana_Mjasoedova.

[rebeccalouisaferguson]

REVIEW ROUND UP OF DUNE: PART TWO

"Ferguson delivers another beguilingly sinister turn as Jessica, arguably the most fascinating character in the whole film..." https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/dune-2-review-2541695/

"Rebecca Ferguson adds a hint of malevolence to the gravitas she brought to the first movie, continuing her role as Atreides’ mother and champion." https://www.avclub.com/dune-2-review-visually-ravishing-storytelling-1851274494

"Butler remains the flashier villain, but Rebecca Furgeson proves to be the film’s horrific star. Seamlessly transitioning from conscientious mother to cunning priestess, she wanders through the film continuously plotting with her pregnant belly. The mere flick of her eyes is enough to show not only dangerous instability, but the frightening calculations behind the power she’s amassing." https://femaleantagonist.com/dune-part-two-leads-a-burgeoning-franchise-into-paradise/

"Zendaya and Ferguson steal the show, providing polar opposite figures in his development. Ferguson must chart a course from a physical and emotional threat to a large-scale schemer. The character transformation comes after drinking a substance, but watching her mental evolution is something to behold." https://sunshinestatecineplex.com/2024/02/21/dune-part-two-2024/

 "...it may be Rebecca Ferguson who gives the most villainous performance. Ferguson commits to making your blood boil as Lady Jessica corrupts her own son, leaving no question as to who the most vile character is." https://discussingfilm.net/2024/02/21/dune-part-two-review-denis-villeneuves-daring-epic-is-unlike-anything-weve-seen/

"Ferguson eats up every morsel of her rejuvenated, meaty role." https://freshfiction.tv/dune-part-two-review-denis-villeneuves-monumental-masterpiece/

"Chalamet and Ferguson take all that was regal and dignified about their performances, and apply to them a poisoned tip." https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/dune-part-two-review-zendaya-timothee-chalamet-b2499855.html

"The rest of the cast is fine and engaged, with Rebecca Ferguson playing complex notes as a wannabe mother-of-God..."https://scottmendelson.substack.com/p/review-dune-part-two-is-an-audiovisual

"Ferguson, her face tattooed throughout much of the movie, leans into an arresting menace." https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024-02-21/dune-part-2-review-timothee-chalamet-zendaya-austin-butler-denis-villeneuve

"Chalamet and Ferguson’s performances are strongest when mother and son tussle about the right thing to do. Through these arguments, Chalamet sheds the boyish innocence of the first film for a darker, more complicated persona. Ferguson’s character also enters more morally ambiguous terrain when she is asked by the Fremen to become the group’s Reverend Mother." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/dune-part-two-review-timothee-chalamet-zendaya-1235830061/

"...but it’s Ferguson’s slippery performance and Bardem’s playful one that really add flavors here that weren’t in the first outing." https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dune-part-two-movie-review-2024

"Ferguson’s Lady Jessica rises to become a gripping “Dune” persona, who goes from being extremely dry in the first film to an intriguingly determined figure in “Part Two.”https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/02/21/dune-2-movie-review/72654598007/

"Even Rebecca Ferguson, who bristles early on in this film when it comes to her exact role in this story, blossoms into a bonafide force of Reverend Mother nature that does well to capitalize on her ability to mix vulnerability with savage confidence. Pretty much how I always envisioned Mother Mary, myself." https://inbetweendrafts.com/dune-part-two-review/

"Ultimately, it's Lady Jessica and Feyd-Rautha that reveal the true terror of unfettered belief. Watching Rebecca Ferguson stride through the Fremen's desert hideaway as she whispers to her fetus could easily fall into caricature if it weren't so chilling."https://screenrant.com/dune-part-2-movie-review/

"...this is an undoubted success, and is powered a clutch of lead performances – Chalamet, Zendaya and Rebecca Ferguson as a newly-ordained Bene Gesserit reverend mother at the shining core of the ensemble..." https://lwlies.com/reviews/dune-part-two/

[hook-line-and-sinker]

Marine Biology Hyperfixation recommendations!!!!

Big-Brain-Reading:🌐

1. twilightzone.whoi.edu | specifically the creature feature section is great

2. seasky.org | looks like a 90s html website 10/10

3. deepseanews.com | lots of environmental eduction as well very epic

Epic-YT-People:📷

1.MBRI (Montenery Bay Aquarium YT Channel)

Top tier educational Videos + 2 hour squid and shrimp lofi

2. Odd animal specimens | Some marine bio stuff + generally interesting Biology

3. Lindsey Nicole | Quite some marine bio stuff + worlds coolest Creator ever probably

Big-brain-watching: 🎬

1. Chasing Coral

Covering the destruction of coral reefs by humans

2. Puff: Wonder of the reef

Epic Pufferfish shenanigans

3. My Octopus teacher

Guy follows an octopus around

All on Netflix (in my country if u cant find it im sowwy)

Additional: ✂️

Ever tried Origami? Suck at it? Hey me too :D I managed some of these ones so feel free to try as well :)

1. Squid 🦑

2. Crab 🦀

3. Shell 🐚

4. Turtle 🐢

5. Jellyfish 🪼

I was gonna make a video games section but tbh i played Subnautica for 30 minutes and absolutely shit myself because deep water scary i am scared.

Happy hyperfixating

[laeynecodes]

002 - Lesson - Warrior of the Mind

Hello! I'm back with my first lesson code and the first part in my epic the musical series.

This code should be responsive but I'm not 100% how it will turn out on site because I don't have teacher admin.

As always please leave my credit and don't fork my codes.

[violet-prism-creatively]

Last day to bid on Fandom Trumps Hate auctions! Donate to charity and get me to write a fic for you!!

This is my contributor page: https://fth2025offerings.dreamwidth.org/353185.html

Short version: I'm offering the fandoms Nimona, Batman/WFA, and Epic The Musical, up to 5k words (possibly more if I'm feeling inspired). The current top bid is $15 (I'm still kind of in shock that I've gotten multiple bids!)

This is what I wrote for subjects/theme/tropes of interest: I love hurt/comfort! Anything from the angstiest whump to the softest comfort, ideally a mix of both. Platonic and familial dynamics! Flawed characters that sometimes lash out as a trauma response or don't know the right thing to say! The poetic tragedy of things not working out the way a character's younger self would have imagined! Characters who don't expect tenderness receiving it!

Also check out my friends @itslilacmoon (fth), @zyrafowe-sny (fth), and @findmeinthefallair (fth) for other fandoms!

[jackmythix]

▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀JackMythix ▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀

Jack / Dan \\ He/It/fir \\ Age 21 \\ Your local succubus catboy \\ Hobbyist artist \\ Learning HTML

My Toyhouse: Beep Commissions: Open (Cash App only) Requests: Open My Userboxes: Masterlist Friends: @fleaful \\ @dizeezcryptid \\ @cindertobglow \\ jinxjawz \\ ieroz \\ @furr-ii \\ Dovie

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My tags: #jackmythix, #my art, #jackadoodles, #reblog, #welcome to jack's own personal hell feelings, #politics, #that's me it's me, #hiraeth hours

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My interests: #dhmis, #tftgs, #andrewgaming76, #mouthwashing, #dan vs, #gregory horror show, #death note, #load aim burn, #disco elysium, #what lurks beneath, #resident evil 7, #epic the musical

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My comics: Faith and Melia (coming soon) DernVadon Blizzard cats needs name comic (coming soon)

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Credits: Userboxes 1-10 by @jackmythix Text animation by @lgbtqtext Stamp 1 by @we-die-like-fools Stamp 2 by @e-resources Stamp 3 by @zkxzii Userbox 11 by @burntoutuserboxes Userbox 12 by @trinamkita

[galactic-hunter]

Star Wars Figure of the Day: Day 3,236: SM-33 (Epic World of Action)

http://figureoftheday.blogspot.com/2025/04/star-wars-figure-of-day-day-3236-sm-33.html

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

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

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

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

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by Sidereal@kolektiva.social, of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing