TechTakes

it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money

Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account

25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expired

tinyviolin.bmp

saw this via a friend earlier, forgot to link. xcancel

socmed administrator for a conf rolls with liarsynth to "expand" a cropped image, and the autoplag machine shits out a more sex-coded image of the speaker

the mindset of "just make some shit to pass muster" obviously shines through in a lot of promptfans and promptfondlers, and while that's fucked up I don't want to get too stuck on that now. one of the things I've been mulling over for a while is pondering what a world (and digital landscape) with a richer capability for enthusiastic consent could look like. and by that I mean, not just more granular (a la apple photo/phonebook acl) than this current y/n bullshit where a platform makes a landgrab for a pile of shit, but something else entirely. "yeah, on my gamer profile you can make shitposts, but on academic stuff please keep it formal" expressed and traceable

even if just as a thought experiment (because of course there's lots of funky practical problems, combined with the "humans just don't really exist that way" effort-tax overhead that this may require), it might inform about some avenues of how to to go about some useful avenues on how to go about handling this extremely overt bullshit, and informing/shaping impending norms

(e: apologies for semi stream of thought, it's late and i'm tired)

pivot to ai now has working dark mode! all praise to the illustrious @fasterandworse@awful.systems

i still hate dark mode, but others fucking love it so

v light, only weakly techtakes material, but I'm immature enough to want to share:

Does anyone read these things before or after they're sent?

here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:

New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics

and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

i am hearing that ProQuest has been quietly contacting small publishers to see if it can ingest their published output for AI training.

ProQuest has an AI thing now, but it's denied it's training on hosted content ... yet.

if you are, or know, an author who's had a letter of this sort recently, mentioning ProQuest or no, i'd love to know and please tell your friends - email is dgerard@gmail.com

New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion's pretty damn good, so I'm copy-pasting it here:

All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

Speaking of twitter shit, I'm sad that it's back online in Brazil.

Eigen "Turn the Homeless into Soylent" robot strikes again

our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians

i haven't watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing

one hour thirty frickin eight