#overstudying

[poppylovestowrite]

I just read the karma reacting to reader crying over bad grades, could you please do it with Gakashuu pleasee

Gakushu has the best scores.

Everyone praises him and is pretty much idolized.

As his girlfriend, you need to reach his level.

Like, what would everyone think if the amazing Gakushu Asano was dating someone with poor grades.

Suffice it to say, the pressure was on you.

You study harder than you ever had.

And you were even more motivated when Gakushu praised you for all your hard work.

However, you ended up overdoing it.

You skipped meals and sleep.

So when your grades got worse and worse, you began to panic.

You hid your grades from your boyfriend, fearing he would hate you.

But you couldn't hide it from him forever.

Being the son of the chairman came with a few perks.

One of those perks was being able to see everyone's overall scores.

That included you as well.

So, when he sees how badly you've been doing on your grades, he confronts you about it.

And that's when you break down.

You cried and cried, which stunned your boyfriend.

All he asked was why you've been keeping your bad grades a secret from him.

He wasn't mad, so why are you crying?

Actually, he can somewhat understand.

If he ever got poor marks, he would die in humiliation if you were to find out.

"(Y/n)... it's alright. I'm not upset so could you please stop crying?"

He would speak to you gently and tenderly, but when it doesn't work, he begins to panic a little.

You're his first girlfriend and as popular as he is with girls, he was unsure of what to do at a time like this, due to never having a close relationship with any girl.

Gakushu would end up gently grabbing your shoulder, trying to get you to look at him, but to no avail.

"Can you at least look at me? I promise I won't be mad."

In a desperate attempt, you would hug him.

Now, Gakushu isn't the most affectionate person, but he does soften at your touch and lets you use his shirt to dry your tears.

He doesn't hug you back, but he gently pats your back.

When you calmed down, he would offer to buy you some ice cream and that's when you told him about your unhealthy work schedule and told him how much pressure you felt to be with him by getting the same scores as him.

Gakushu admires your dedication, but he assures you that the grades you were getting previously were amazing.

He doesn't want you hurting yourself just so you can be with him.

His father's teaching methods were unhealthy and he doesn't want to put you in the same type of hell.

After some talking, you began to feel a lot better.

Gakusuh would now always remind you not to over-study.

And when you need help going over a subject, he would gladly help you.

[moonfromearth]

- Killer? Yeah. I'll believe it when I see it.

Day 7 - The Skeptic

"'See it to believe it' is their motto, and by then it's usually too late."

from @windbrook's Slashed Challenge.

[lilacthebooklover]

when i say that i don't do things by halves, i mean it. exhibit a: the past few months have been spent with my parents reprimanding me for not revising enough for my exams, but now that i've decided to do it, i spend every second i'm at school (from 8am-4:30pm) studying. it's gotten to the point where my mother congratulated me on having lunch today. oh well, gcses only come once. i can have friends next year :)

[circusislife]

brainrot joke

telepathy comes from the Greek tèle(far) and pàtheia(feeling), therefore "telepathy" technically doesn't mean "mind reading" but "[sharing]feeling at a distance"

meaning that telepathy is getting a feeling from someone at a distance

so

telepathy is just a weird way of saying vibe check

[izvmimi]

I was saving this for Kendy, but here you go!

I hope this boosts the morale!

i'm dying it's true

[candiedblueberries]

what am i doing with my life

[tablefourtyone]

These two are talking to each other.

[uc1wa]

m so tired. promise m working on req’s, been so busy n tired lately, thank u for hanging around nonnies & friends ♡

[girlwithherheadinthestars]

father figure prompts pt. 2 (cw: daddy issues)

because like. teachers who have adopted the traumatized gifted kids in their classes as their children >>>>>>

"you need a break. you're working too hard."

"i don't care that you didn't do that assignment i'm more worried about the fact that you're crying."

bursting into his office whenever you're upset: are you busy?

^him: yes. (closes his laptop) what's up?

^me: aren't you...

^him: your principal can go step off a balcony. this is clearly more important.

"you're more than just smart. you're funny and sweet and talented -- don't let anyone reduce you to just smart."

"i'm so scared for the midterm if i'm being honest."

^"why? your worst grade in my class is a 95."

^"yes but i don't want to disappoint -- "

^"get a B."

^"what?"

^"i'm being serious. get a B. that's more than enough. don't kill yourself overstudying for a perfect score."

"you're literally a child. this isn't your responsibility. don't worry about it. just...go have fun."

"stop studying and go out please for the love of god."

part. 1

part. 3

[xoxonxo]

Romione Headcannons

✰ ron would occasionally ask hermione what book she was reading. he would then read it so when he finished, he had something to talk about with her.

✰ when ron and hermione stopped talking in the halfblood prince, hermione mastered ron’s handwriting and would fix his essays.

✰ ron would pretend to struggle with simple spells just so hermione could hold his hand and ‘guide’ him through it.

✰ ron would sneak bites of hermione’s food when she wasn’t looking and she’d pretend to never notice.

✰ right before the OWLs, ron would hide hermione’s books and notes because he knew she tends to forget things when she overstudies.



✰ hermione kept every piece of parchment that ron ever gave her.

✰ both ron and hermione’s patronus was created with the same memory, that of which was centered around eachother.

✰ hermione secretly charmed ron’s broom after he complained about it hurting his back.

[marloree]

  𝙰 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚔 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚞𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚛

Pairing: Best Friend! Yeonjun × Reader

Genre: fluff

A/N: it is the last day of the spring this year, so I had to post something to mark it <3

It was the last day of May, the beautiful month that has gone to a waste this year due to your numerous exams.

You were stressed and exhausted, looking forward to the summer break with every fiber of your body.

Spring and summer..these always have been your favourite seasons. The blooming, the undeniable beauty of nature - everything made you wish such a thing as exams didn't exist, at least during spring.

You looked out of your window only to see the mesmerising view: all the trees finally green, birds chirping in the quietness of the spring evening. Sighing because you couldn't afford spending this beautiful evening outside and had to study, you borrowed your nose into yet another textbook.

Well, at least you could study by the open window and still take in the scenery. This made you a tad bit happier.

You didn't know how much time has passed when, suddenly, you heard a pebble being thrown into the direction of your window. It didn't reach the aimed material goal - the window, but reached the main goal - your ears.

"Is that kids playing or what?" you thought, looking out of the window.

To your surprise, there were no kids. The only person standing there was your best friend, Yeonjun.

"Ah, come on, you have studied long enough! You should take a break. Come out, let's go for a walk!" He shouted so you could hear him clearly.

The offer was too tempting, to say the least.

Yet, you wanted to get a good grade on your exam. Did that really matter to you in the moment, though?

"I've been studying for the entire week, I absolutely deserve that rest," you thought. They always say to not overstudy the night before the exams, so what can be better than taking a break?

"Coming!!" You shouted back before quickly disappearing out of sight to get ready.

Not even 10 minutes passed as you were already standing outside beside Yeonjun.

"Woah, didn't know you wanted to go out that bad," the guy chuckled.

"No comment, Jun. I really want to enjoy this last day of spring, though". You looked around, taking in the sweet aromas of the blooming greenery.

"Who doesn't? Let's make it at least a bit memorable by hanging out. It's been a while since we last did."

"Yeah, it's been a long while..," you confirmed unenthusiastically, " I feel like I've been living under a rock for the past month," you sighed.

"You have lived under a rock, no denying."

"This last exam ends and I'm coming out of the shell, I swear."

"Have you seen yourself? You look like a ghost, you seriously should rest more."

"I will, I will," another sigh from you, "but it's summer tomorrow already, can you believe it?"

"I hope you'll get the most out of this summer and enjoy it to the fullest, unlike how you wasted May, Y/N."

"I hope so, too."

[manicpixie-tieflingboyfriend]

Well it's not filthy but spicy - (established relationship in this idea- hope it's not an ick!)

But which BG3 guy would you want to wake up with a blowjob after a night together?

Oh absolutely not an ick at all, my icks are like. Few and far between mostly.

But honestly it's a toss-up... All of them would be good... Am I about to make arguments for all of them? Yeah. Yeah I am. I'm so sorry.

Gonna start with Astarion because he's my babygirl. Astarion doesn't technically sleep, blahblah, whatever, he's sleeping for this. Or maybe not, maybe he's in Trance so that it's a little jarring when he feels warmth around his cock. His probably feels really nice, especially if you go with the whole "vampires are cold" thing. Maybe that only appeals to me because I run hot all the time. Anyway. Astarion is just big enough to leave a little of him out without the threat of gagging, and he would be so into the surprise of it.

Halsin, the other technical not sleeper, would blissfully remain "unaware" of it, would thoroughly enjoy the whole thing. He's probably bigger and thicker than the others, so actually getting him in isn't so much the goal as just kissing and sucking along the length, the head, probably his balls, definitely more the size for a handjob with mouth play to give a little extra

Wyll would be into it wholeheartedly, I'm convinced he has The Freak in him, and waking him up with a blow job would definitely end up with the most tender face fuck of all time. He starts to wake up with a groan, starts to get a little hard when he realizes what's going on. He's the perfect size to fit all of him inside, he's just sensitive enough to start to leak precum at the attention. But once he starts to get a little harder, starts to wake up a little more, his hand slipping into hair and tightening just enough start moving his hips just skdhdjdjnd okay I started overthinking that one oops—

Gale I feel like is a heavy sleeper, he overstudies and caffeine crashes and he's just, done in. He'd probably wake up right before he bursts, so he'd be nice and soft most of the time, half hard until he wakes, moaning like he's having the wettest dream of his life, and when he does wake up and he's hard and leaking and putty in until he finally climaxes, and probably wants another, proper, round which I mean... I wouldn't complain...

Now if we're going outside of the male companions, we'd be here all night but let me just say this.

Zevlor, Rolan, Dammon? The ultimate sensory stim overload and I can guarantee they'd be equally fun to wake up with all the ridges and bumps uufhhfjf god

[courtofparrots]

What cell type do you think Leon, Luis and Ashley are.

I think Leon is an enzyme

oh my god what a fun ask!!!

ok SO I could answer this a few different ways so I'm going to break it down into if they were bacterial cells, human cells, or cell machinery (since that's what an enzyme is, rather than its own cell type, but you're so correct, Leon is an enzyme)

As bacteria: featuring this picture of Leon the E. coli cell:

Leon is E. coli FOR SURE. Truly the beloved white cis male of the bacteriology field (and I say this as both a Leon stan and an E. coli scientist lmao). The most well-known, the most studied (and actually is a bit overstudied, like there are other things to pay attention to) all around a star in the field.

Luis I think would be something like mycoplasma. SO underrated, but so unique and interesting when compared to other bacteria. A lot of lore for a bug that has very little research.

Ashley might be Bacillus cereus. overlooked to some extent but incredibly resilient, especially in the face of stress (we love a spore former!)

As human cells:

Leon is most like a macrophage, in my mind. They're a primary defense against infections, they keep the body safe, but they're not as aggressive or toxic as, say, neutrophils (Jack Krauser is a neutrophil)

Luis is a B-cell, takes in information and responds accordingly and is SO important for our immunity, but can sometimes misplace his trust and cause harm on accident (like causing allergic reactions in a sense!)

Ashley is a neuron, because not only is she vitally important and protected by the Luis and Leon immune cells, but she's also beautiful and smarter than the other two combined

As cell components:

Like you said, Leon is a protein, and specifically, he's an enzyme. He's the doer of the cell, he's catalyzing the chemical reactions and when something goes wrong it's all his fault.

Luis is DNA. He's got all the genetic info, he's the superstar that makes us what we are.

Ashley is lipid, aggressively overlooked, but soooo important! She holds the whole cell together!! (Hello, no Spain mission if she didn't go missing in the first place lol)

[iam93percentstardust]

*insert french laugh* Did someone say to send a prompt? Ahoy! Have no fear for I am here. How about stevetony kiss prompt with the dialogue "i think this is the part where you're supposed to kiss me"? Could Steve be the one to also say it? <3

naferty fren!!! yesss always happy to write steve for you <3

@soliloquent-stark also requested this prompt + "If you win, I'll kiss you" so I rolled y'all into one

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

~

Steve does follow his physical therapy plan religiously, and sure enough, by the time the next season—his final season, as a senior now—rolls around, he’s declared fit to play. And, fuck, does he play. Determined to prove himself even better after his recovery, to prove that Rollins couldn’t get him down, he leads his team to victory after victory and then to the playoffs and now to the championship.

Tony ducks into the locker room before the game, ignoring the good-natured wolf-whistles and catcalls from Steve’s teammates as he picks his way through the equipment littered across the room. It’s been an open secret for ages that Steve was seeing an omega, and after his injury last season, it became an open secret that Steve was specifically seeing Tony because he kept showing up to fuss over him, but none of them would ever turn him in. They have too much respect for their captain and quarterback, and anyway, most of them think the zero fraternization rules are just as ridiculous as they do.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Steve says, beaming at him. “How was your exam?”

Tony makes a face. He hadn’t flown over with the team yesterday, being required to take an exam for one of his courses—something about mechanics, which Steve had listened to all the ranting about, nodding sympathetically since that was about as much as he understood.

“That bad?” Steve asks.

Tony scowls. “No. It was boring. If you’re gonna make a big deal about this exam being the ‘hardest exam of the entire semester’—” he adopts a suitably dramatic tone for the quote—“then it should at least be difficult, right? I overstudied way too much for that thing. I don’t think it took me more than about ten minutes.”

“Maybe that’s just because you’re impressive.”

“Or maybe Dr. Kean’s not nearly as scary as she thinks she is.”

Steve hums. He doesn’t completely agree—no one knows how smart Tony is better than he does after years of listening to Tony telling him about his inventions—but he’s not going to argue the point. He wasn’t there; for all he knows, everyone was done with the exam after ten minutes.

“I’m glad to see you here,” he says instead. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”

Tony makes a dismissive gesture. “What’s a little light sprinting through the airport to catch the next flight?”

“And the TSA let you?”

“I told ‘em I was going to support my alpha, and they practically made a hole for me themselves. They’re big Steve Rogers’ fans, you know.”

It’s Steve’s turn to make a face. He doesn’t know how he feels about having fans. No, that’s not true. He knows exactly how he feels, and he doesn’t like it.

Tony laughs, “Yeah, exactly.”

Steve hears the coach starting to round people up for the pregame pep talk and says, “You better get out there. Don’t want you to miss the kickoff.”

“Hmm, yeah, probably,” Tony agrees and starts to walk away, grinning when Steve reels him back in. “What?”

“Don’t you think you’re forgetting something?” Steve asks.

“No?”

That innocent look on his face isn’t fooling Steve one bit. He reminds him, “Kiss for luck?”

Tony thinks about it, then gives him a teasing smile. “Hmm, I’m gonna have to go with no.”

Steve blinks at him. “No?”

“Yeah, no. But if you win, I’ll kiss you then.”

He darts away before Steve can catch him to kiss him himself, cackling like mad as he dodges his hand. Steve watches him go and shakes his head fondly. Well, now that Tony’s laid a challenge on him, guess he’ll have to win.

~

Looking back on it, he’ll be able to remember the game in excruciating detail. He’ll be able to sit down with Tony and watch the highlights and comment on what he was thinking at each moment of the game. Today though, it feels like barely a minute has passed before he’s standing in the winners box, looking at Tony beaming from ear to ear while someone asks him how he feels.

“Amazing,” he says honestly. He almost says something about Tony, but stops himself at the last second. That moment feels too private, too them to share on national television.  He gives another couple of soundbites before the mic moves to Peter, who’d made the winning touchdown in the last second, literally.

“I think I just kind of blacked out when I caught that last ball,” Peter says blankly, still clearly in shock. “I just ran for it. I’m lucky I moved at all.”

Everyone chuckles and then they’re finally allowed down off the stage. Steve makes a beeline straight for Tony, vaguely acknowledging the people who try to talk to him. Tony is waiting for him with a softer, more teasing smile.

“Congratulations, quarterback,” Tony says once he reaches him.

“Thanks,” Steve says, grinning at him. “Now, if I remember correctly, I think this is the part where you’re supposed to kiss me.”

“Oh, is that what part this is?” Tony asks, arching his eyebrows.

“Pretty sure. I did win, after all.”

“Well, if you won,” Tony says exaggeratedly, but grabs ahold of Steve’s jersey and yanks him in. He smiles again, bright and warm and so, so proud, and then leans up and kisses him. And it’s a perfect moment, the best way to cap off the best season Steve has ever had. Steve wraps his arms around him, holding him close, and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping"

On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96

What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog).

The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that also written, and which was born in machine-readable form.

This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/

The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way are often unreachable (anonymous or pseudonymous) or impractical to reach (because there's millions of them). The linguists who study this speech will go through institutional review board approvals to make sure that as they produce aggregate accounts of speech, they don't compromise the privacy or integrity of their subjects.

Computational linguistics is an unalloyed good, and while the speakers whose words are scraped to produce the raw material that these scholars study, they probably wouldn't object, either.

But what about entities that explicitly object to being scraped? Sometimes, it's good to scrape them, too.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has scraped every website it could find, storing snapshots of every page it found in a giant, searchable database called the Wayback Machine. Many of us have used the Wayback Machine to retrieve some long-deleted text, sound, image or video from the internet's memory hole.

For the most part, the Internet Archive limits its scraping to websites that permit it. The robots exclusion protocol (AKA robots.txt) makes it easy for webmasters to tell different kinds of crawlers whether or not they are welcome. If your site has a robots.txt file that tells the Archive's crawler to buzz off, it'll go elsewhere.

Mostly.

Since 2017, the Archive has started ignoring robots.txt files for news services; whether or not the news site wants to be crawled, the Archive crawls it and makes copies of the different versions of the articles the site publishes. That's because news sites – even the so-called "paper of record" – have a nasty habit of making sweeping edits to published material without noting it.

I'm not talking about fixing a typo or a formatting error: I'm talking about making a massive change to a piece, one that completely reverses its meaning, and pretending that it was that way all along:

https://medium.com/@brokenravioli/proof-that-the-new-york-times-isn-t-feeling-the-bern-c74e1109cdf6

This happens all the time, with major news sites from all around the world:

http://newsdiffs.org/examples/

By scraping these sites and retaining the different versions of their article, the Archive both detects and prevents journalistic malpractice. This is canonical fair use, the kind of copying that almost always involves overriding the objections of the site's proprietor. Not all adversarial scraping is good, but this sure is.

There's an argument that scraping the news-sites without permission might piss them off, but it doesn't bring them any real harm. But even when scraping harms the scrapee, it is sometimes legitimate – and necessary.

Austrian technologist Mario Zechner used the API from country's super-concentrated grocery giants to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. By assembling a longitudinal data-set, Zechner exposed the raft of dirty tricks the grocers used to rip off the people of Austria.

From shrinkflation to deceptive price-cycling that disguised price hikes as discounts:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071627182734180

Zechner feared publishing his results at first. The companies whose thefts he'd discovered have enormous power and whole kennelsful of vicious attack-lawyers they can sic on him. But he eventually got the Austrian competition bureaucracy interested in his work, and they published a report that validated his claims and praised his work:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071673594791946

Emboldened, Zechner open-sourced his monitoring tool, and attracted developers from other countries. Soon, they were documenting ripoffs in Germany and Slovenia, too:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071485142332765

Zechner's on a roll, but the grocery cartel could shut him down with a keystroke, simply by blocking his API access. If they do, Zechner could switch to scraping their sites – but only if he can be protected from legal liability for nonconsensually scraping commercially sensitive data in a way that undermines the profits of a powerful corporation.

Zechner's work comes at a crucial time, as grocers around the world turn the screws on both their suppliers and their customers, disguising their greedflation as inflation. In Canada, the grocery cartel – led by the guillotine-friendly hereditary grocery monopolilst Galen Weston – pulled the most Les Mis-ass caper imaginable when they illegally conspired to rig the price of bread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

We should scrape all of these looting bastards, even though it will harm their economic interests. We should scrape them because it will harm their economic interests. Scrape 'em and scrape 'em and scrape 'em.

Now, it's one thing to scrape text for scholarly purposes, or for journalistic accountability, or to uncover criminal corporate conspiracies. But what about scraping to train a Large Language Model?

Yes, there are socially beneficial – even vital – uses for LLMs.

Take HRDAG's work on truth and reconciliation in Colombia. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a tiny nonprofit that makes an outsized contribution to human rights, by using statistical methods to reveal the full scope of the human rights crimes that take place in the shadows, from East Timor to Serbia, South Africa to the USA:

https://hrdag.org/

HRDAG's latest project is its most ambitious yet. Working with partner org Dejusticia, they've just released the largest data-set in human rights history:

https://hrdag.org/jep-cev-colombia/

What's in that dataset? It's a merger and analysis of more than 100 databases of killings, child soldier recruitments and other crimes during the Colombian civil war. Using a LLM, HRDAG was able to produce an analysis of each killing in each database, estimating the probability that it appeared in more than one database, and the probability that it was carried out by a right-wing militia, by government forces, or by FARC guerrillas.

This work forms the core of ongoing Colombian Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, and has been instrumental in demonstrating that the majority of war crimes were carried out by right-wing militias who operated with the direction and knowledge of the richest, most powerful people in the country. It also showed that the majority of child soldier recruitment was carried out by these CIA-backed, US-funded militias.

This is important work, and it was carried out at a scale and with a precision that would have been impossible without an LLM. As with all of HRDAG's work, this report and the subsequent testimony draw on cutting-edge statistical techniques and skilled science communication to bring technical rigor to some of the most important justice questions in our world.

LLMs need large bodies of text to train them – text that, inevitably, is scraped. Scraping to produce LLMs isn't intrinsically harmful, and neither are LLMs. Admittedly, nonprofits using LLMs to build war crimes databases do not justify even 0.0001% of the valuations that AI hypesters ascribe to the field, but that's their problem.

Scraping is good, sometimes – even when it's done against the wishes of the scraped, even when it harms their interests, and even when it's used to train an LLM.

But.

Scraping to violate peoples' privacy is very bad. Take Clearview AI, the grifty, sleazy facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos in order to train a system that they sell to cops, corporations and authoritarian governments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

Likewise: scraping to alienate creative workers' labor is very bad. Creators' bosses are ferociously committed to firing us all and replacing us with "generative AI." Like all self-declared "job creators," they constantly fantasize about destroying all of our jobs. Like all capitalists, they hate capitalism, and dream of earning rents from owning things, not from doing things.

The work these AI tools sucks, but that doesn't mean our bosses won't try to fire us and replace us with them. After all, prompting an LLM may produce bad screenplays, but at least the LLM doesn't give you lip when you order to it give you "ET, but the hero is a dog, and there's a love story in the second act and a big shootout in the climax." Studio execs already talk to screenwriters like they're LLMs.

That's true of art directors, newspaper owners, and all the other job-destroyers who can't believe that creative workers want to have a say in the work they do – and worse, get paid for it.

So how do we resolve these conundra? After all, the people who scrape in disgusting, depraved ways insist that we have to take the good with the bad. If you want accountability for newspaper sites, you have to tolerate facial recognition, too.

When critics of these companies repeat these claims, they are doing the companies' work for them. It's not true. There's no reason we couldn't permit scraping for one purpose and ban it for another.

The problem comes when you try to use copyright to manage this nuance. Copyright is a terrible tool for sorting out these uses; the limitations and exceptions to copyright (like fair use) are broad and varied, but so "fact intensive" that it's nearly impossible to say whether a use is or isn't fair before you've gone to court to defend it.

But copyright has become the de facto regulatory default for the internet. When I found someone impersonating me on a dating site and luring people out to dates, the site advised me to make a copyright claim over the profile photo – that was their only tool for dealing with this potentially dangerous behavior.

The reasons that copyright has become our default tool for solving every internet problem are complex and historically contingent, but one important point here is that copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away. For that reason, corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power than the company to sign away their copyrights.

This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright (scope, duration, penalties), we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Many creative workers are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement for scraping their data and using it to train a model. If those cases go to trial, it's likely the creators will lose. The questions of whether making temporary copies or subjecting them to mathematical analysis infringe copyright are well-settled:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market

I'm pretty sure that the lawyers who organized these cases know this, and they're betting that the AI companies did so much sleazy shit while scraping that they'll settle rather than go to court and have it all come out. Which is fine – I relish the thought of hundreds of millions in investor capital being transferred from these giant AI companies to creative workers. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.

Because if we do end up changing copyright law – or the daily practice of the copyright sector – to create exclusive rights over scraping and training, it's not going to get creators paid. If we give individual creators new rights to bargain with, we're just giving them new rights to bargain away. That's already happening: voice actors who record for video games are now required to start their sessions by stating that they assign the rights to use their voice to train a deepfake model:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

But that doesn't mean we have to let the hyperconcentrated entertainment sector alienate creative workers from their labor. As the WGA has shown us, creative workers aren't just LLCs with MFAs, bargaining business-to-business with corporations – they're workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Workers get a better deal with labor law, not copyright law. Copyright law can augment certain labor disputes, but just as often, it benefits corporations, not workers:

https://locusmag.com/2019/05/cory-doctorow-steering-with-the-windshield-wipers/

Likewise, the problem with Clearview AI isn't that it infringes on photographers' copyrights. If I took a thousand pictures of you and sold them to Clearview AI to train its model, no copyright infringement would take place – and you'd still be screwed. Clearview has a privacy problem, not a copyright problem.

Giving us pseudocopyrights over our faces won't stop Clearview and its competitors from destroying our lives. Creating and enforcing a federal privacy law with a private right action will. It will put Clearview and all of its competitors out of business, instantly and forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

AI companies say, "You can't use copyright to fix the problems with AI without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right. But what they fail to mention is, "You can use labor law to ban certain uses of AI without creating that collateral damage."

Facial recognition companies say, "You can't use copyright to ban scraping without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right too – but what they don't say is, "On the other hand, a privacy law would put us out of business and leave all the good scraping intact."

Taking entertainment companies and AI vendors and facial recognition creeps at their word is helping them. It's letting them divide and conquer people who value the beneficial elements and those who can't tolerate the harms. We can have the benefits without the harms. We just have to stop thinking about labor and privacy issues as individual matters and treat them as the collective endeavors they really are:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Here's a link to the podcast:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450_-_How_To_Think_About_Scraping.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Image: syvwlch (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Print_Scraper_(5856642549).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[spoken-tacenda]

〚 how to stay motivated through your studying session? 〛

11 tips to help you get it together and get that A

❥ study in intervals. don't underestimate the power of good breaks to keep you motivated to push forward. a 5-10 minuets break gives you enough energy to go on.

❥ make studying fun. this is very self-explanatory, but try to make your studying more pleasing to do. for example, you can buy a cute set of highlighters or pens or take notes in a notebook that looks nice to you.

of course, be mindful of your money and your budget. you don't have to buy expensive stationary to study well.

❥ break it down. divide your task into smaller goals. a general goal such as 'study biology' can seem daunting. However, if you break it down to 'study chapter one' and 'study chpater two' and so on makes it appears to be more achievable.

❥ find your studying style. everyone has a unique way of studying. some are visual learners or auditory learners. some learn by rewriting what they studied in their own words. try different techniques and see which makes you more efficient and stick with it.

❥ reward yourself for reaching a goal. the reward doesn't have to be anything big. maybe a piece of chocolate for completing a chapter or a cup of your favorite tea after finishing a page of your essay. make sure the reward matches the goal's size. the bigger of a goal you managed to achieve, the bigger the reward.

❥ have a specific place for studying. study in a place that puts your attention and mood on your assignments. try to keep that place clean and neat to improve your focus. remember to keep your phone away from that space.

❥ avoid distractions in your study space. your phone, your rubik cube, your unrelated notes, etc. anything that's considered irrelevant to your task at hand shouldn't stay in your space.

❥ identify your cause of distraction. is it a family member? a friend? your phone? it's better to solve it at the root. if it's a friend or a relative, politely explain that you are studying and you'd get back to them the moment you have a break. get rid of the cause.

❥ create a limit. as much as it sounds nice, don't overstudy. make a minimum and maximum amount of time you can spend studying and try to keep within that bound to help you build habit.

❥ make a study schedule. personally, I find routines to be really helpful, so if you also like creating a schedule and a routine, then by all means do it. However, some also like spontaneity. just remember to write down what you want to do and go through with them.

❥ stop comparing your results. don't compare yourself to your past and to others, especially if you are coming out of a slump. creating false expectation and unreal goals will only dampen your mood and stop you from seeing the results. a step forward is still a step. be proud of it.