Items of interest, February 28 to March 25, 2024
I was in Portugal for a month. This roundup was started before I left and completed after I came back.
Congratulations! You Have Achieved The Same Results As Apple’s 10-Year-Long EV Program Which They Just Shut Down - Jason Torchins, The Autopian.
I had forgotten Apple was still doing this, but, more importantly, now that the project is finally at a close, we can make note of something truly remarkable that you, yes you, sexy reader, should be very proud of: you, with resources a mere fraction of what Apple brings to the table, with none of the money or expertise or time or anything, you have gone head-to-head with Apple and have arrived, after a full decade of effort has passed, at the same point: neither you nor Apple will be mass-producing an electric car. Think about that! You achieved the exact same result in the competitive electric car space as one of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world!
I Don’t Care About Your Brand; Nex Benedict, Taylor Lorenz, and why trans trauma is not your goldmine. - Jude Doyle
Apparently, an entire style guide wasn’t enough. Apparently, I now have to add another guideline, one which seems like it should have been obvious: Don’t be a fucking ambulance chaser. When trans trauma and trans death are in the news — and they very often are — then you, as a cis person, must not use this as an excuse to go viral, create splashy controversy, spin a narrative that centers on your own Bravery and Goodness for Caring, or otherwise use it to enhance your brand.
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools - Samantha Cole, 404 Media.
Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.
I’ve already gone public and stated that data poisoning is the answer here. Instead of deleting your art from Tumblr, you should flood it with new art that has been processed with Nightshade, the technology that disguises the content of the image so that programs based on large language model mistake it for something else. If you have time, you may also want to replace your old images in existing posts with Nightshaded images, but I don’t know if that actually replaces the old images in Tumblr’s back-end database; if it doesn’t, that means replacing already-posted images won’t be that effective. Of course, not everyone can use Nightshade. I don’t have a computer that is powerful enough to run it, and cannot afford to purchase one right now (I do run Glaze through Webglaze, which is still better than nothing). And especially if you do go to the lengths of replacing your old images in the hope that it will make a difference, that’s work you didn’t ask for and that you’re not getting paid for. In any case, the time for open warfare against platforms that enshittify themselves has come. Problem is, that’s all of them, at the same time, in a race to the bottom.
Some good news: “StoneToss” Tossed: Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, TX - Anonymous Comrades Collective.
Food for thought: Business as Usual [COVID, labor, ethics, P/A/S, Patreon], Siderea:
I feel the need to point out we could do this differently. It’s entirely possible to have a fully exploitative society that measures the worth of a human exclusively in terms of that human’s capacity to labor, and still not be so short-sighted as to work people to death and maim their bodies to the point they are useless as laborers. At least hypothetically. We could, hypothetically, have a society that values humans’ capacity to labor sufficiently to cherish it and preserve it. But we don’t have that society. We have this one, in which human well-being is shortsightedly devoured until it is gone.
While I was away to our off-grid farm in Portugal, I read some reports that the current crop of GOP MAGA fascists (but I repeat myself, twice) was looking to Viktor Orbán’s regime in Yugoslavia as an example of a right-wing populist government that was stable and strong and uncontroversial, which, just no. Orbán has turned a relatively normal post-Communist country into a corrupt and impoverished shithole that is constantly under EU sanctions, and even after muzzling the media and the judiciary, his government has still been rocked by a scandal in which it was found to have secretly pardoned an administrator who covered up decades’ worth of child molestation in an orphanage. And now Orbán has credible opposition again in the form of Peter Magyar’s new party.
I don’t have high expectations of Magyar as a potential leader. He was brought up within Orbán’s party Fidesz and still identifies as a right-wing nationalist. But he could at least achieve the unseating and possibly imprisonment of Orbán, and that’s not nothing.
While I was away, my brother has kept updating the The Hooded Crow playlist on YouTube. I’m just gonna pick one of the songs that were posted in my absense, but may dip into the playlist again later if the next one is a song I don’t like. This week, it’s the under-watched “Burden”, written by Michel Bouma, from our second demo released in 1994. As usual, it’s fully demixed and remixed.
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