2024-05-06

Items of Interest, May 6-15, 2024: Turn It Off edition

Turning Off Adobe Acrobat’s AI Assistant - Wes Cowley, Words By Wes. My Toot on Mastodon about how to turn off DuckAssist on DuckDuckGo was my most popular and influential ever by a large margin, not in the least because it was a really simple message that I could write in under 20 words. So I want to highlight it when other people write instructions for turning off unwanted features on apps and services. Unfortunately, turning off the new AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat is nowhere near as easy, because Adobe. However, Wes Cowley at Words By Wes did the work and we can all still benefit from it.

Fight fascism by saying “I Do” in the nude - Curtis Atkins, Planet Nude. It’s very rare for anyone in the naturist movement to call out things as they really are and say that right-wing authoritarianism and naturism do not go together.

Speaking of fascism: Peter Breedveld has something to say about fascists in the Netherlands inventing and then weaponizing antisemitism wherever the genocide in Gaze is being criticized or protested: Snakken naar Jodenhaat, met wijd opengesperde snavels (In Dutch). Nothing new here but I admire his righteous anger. When I have a bit of money again, I need to join Peter’s Patreon as a paying subscriber.

I may want to do something with this Gofundme for the short film Blootje, like maybe interview the producer.

Bitter Karella on Bluesky has started a new Sinfest thread, which only covers the first half of 2022 and is nevertheless wilder and contains more to unpack than the original one on Twitter. The original Twitter thread is being reposted on Bluesky as well, by redkagami, with Bitter Karella’s permission, so that those of us who no longer have accounts on the absolute tit’s pet project can read it.

David Gerard has some good comments on Jack Dorsey’s departure from Bluesky and Dorsey’s stated reasons for leaving (that it didn’t turn out into a ‘free speech’ sewer as he intended, basically).

There’s a kind of person who is the reason that blocks and bans exist. They’re also the ones who argue loudest that blocking is evil, and you’ll be stuck in a filter bubble or an echo chamber if you deprive yourself of their sparkling wit. You should block these guys faster than anyone.
Ordinary users who want to talk to their friends and make new friends don’t like wading through poop. A social network’s product is its content moderation.
Dorsey took care to hire on for the Bluesky staff a collection of LessWrong rationalists, neoreactionaries, VibeCamp anti-wokeist race scientists and crypto developers. And Bluesky still had to asymptotically approach a tolerable degree of moderation and — eventually, despite the CEO and several devs being followers of the test case offender — ban the Nazis.
There is not a single mention in that Dorsey interview of what the real-world market of people who want to socially interact might want from a site that exists for social interaction. There are only Dorsey’s hypothetical ideas for a perfectly spherical social network in a vacuum.

More good stuff on Planet Nude: Carved Out, Carved Up which goes into the nitty-gritty of politics and policy-making that makes naturism legal and possible. Also, have some backgrounder on the Radical Faeries, a subculture rooted in sexual liberation that is doing non-sexual nudity better than the nudist/naturist movement as it exists today: Getting to the root of things - CAMP at Planet Nude.

You can tell that These Vampires Can Have Everything Except Our Love by Hamilton Nolan was written in 2023, but it is the best explanation I’ve ever seen for the moral panic over cancel culture.

Though it would seem, rationally, that a bunch of not-rich college kids heckling a guy who makes $100 mil a year would mean nothing to him, that is not the case. The idea of being mocked and shouted down by the unwashed masses strikes fear in the heart of the powerful because it is emblematic of their inability to buy that respect that cannot be bought. This goes not just for moguls and billionaires, but for those who have achieved cultural success—the prestigious newspaper columnists who cannot stop writing dumbass columns about this spectacularly asinine topic because it represents their worst fears. Namely, that a lifetime spent worshiping at the altar of careerism and credentialism was all for nothing.

(So why do I say you can tell if it was written in 2023? Because of this:

Creativity allows regular people to create great art that leads to cultural power. Powerful people want to buy it and control it.

What powerful people have actually been doing to creativity over the past 18 months (so before Nolan wrote this, but it takes a while for this sort of thing to permeate into the public consciousness) is to attempt to destroy it by replacing its outputs with AI slurry. Is it working? Well, actual creative outlets like Small Wonders Magazine are pushing back: Why We Don’t Take AI Submissions.

So I’m still hopeful.

Which brings me to our palate cleanser for the week (or slightly more than a week, actually. When posting new old The Hooded Crow videos on social media, I’ve been making more of a point of distancing myself from the AI-generated thumbnails on them, but also admitting that one way to make those thumbnails stop is to do more of the work in drawing real art for them. Unfortunately, the run of uploads is nearing completion, so whatever I do now will mostly be too late. In any case, the musical creativity in these videos is 100% human, and so I recommend, as a human who took part in its creation, to look past the thumbnails and enjoy the latest upload, The Hooded Crow’s version of a song called ‘Bug’, recorded in studio Sing-Sing in Metsilwier (formerly Metslawier) in 1995.