Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.

This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.

Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.

Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.

The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.

If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.

I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.

By the time the artists cancelled the disaster was already in full swing and there was no reasonable possibility of salvaging it. The artist cancelling at that point isn’t doing anything wrong, they have been hired to do a job and they have a right to a safe and productive working environment. They’re victims too, they’re just less impacted because they are successful artists with millions of dollars who probably weren’t relying on this job to pay for supplies or put food on their table.

Take the million-dollar artist out of the equation and imagine that you’re an experienced gardener hired for a very generous sum to plant some decorative plants on this remote island. The organizers are going to advertise the quality of your work all around the world and get thousands of people to come pay to see your work. You’re super of this recognition and opportunity, so you cancel all your other jobs in anticipation of being able to go do this fantastic job on a tropical island, your plane tickets are arranged everything seems great. Then you find out at the last minute that the area where they are building this garden is actually a health and safety hazard. Maybe they want you to plant azaleas on top of a nuclear waste dump. You decide fuck that and cancel. But the organization isn’t even communicating anymore and you can’t find anyone to notify properly, so not everyone even knows that you’re not planning to show up.

Are you letting down the people who have paid to come see your plants? Sure. But based on what we know of the relationship, the gardener/artist has done nothing wrong. Their reaction is totally reasonable and they are not the crooks here, nor are they part of the problem, they were used. Unless we’ve got evidence to the contrary, they were misled just like the buyers were. Maybe they should’ve done more due diligence, but they’re not having a great time either, they’ve had genuine losses (real and reputational). It’s a big mess but they are not obligated to be a part of it and arguably if they did show up knowing their fans are being put in danger, isn’t that actually worse?

Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

As a Canadian and Albertan, screw Canadian oil and natural gas too. If it’s going to hurt our economy, so be it, it’s our own damn fault for doing shit-all to diversify. I hope we can supply you guys the transitional fuel you need with minimal additional investment, but it’s well past time for the world to start getting over this and break its addiction to these awful fossil fuels. I’m really tired of the entire country constantly being literally on fire. Fuck the wildfires, fuck the smoke, fuck climate change, fuck fossil fuels, fuck billionaires. Let’s take our planet back.

You know what, as much as I love space and believe it is a critically and strategically important technology, you’re right. It’s all a lost cause if we turn it over to billionaires like Musk. Fix the root of the problem first before we build a foundation on top of it.

Yes, all internet dead. No escape from dead internet. I’m a bot. You’re a bot. We’re all bots here.

For any of them starting to ask themselves are we the baddies? It really shouldn’t need to be explained, but yes. You are clearly the baddies.

They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much. They’re “doers” not “thinkers”. And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.

In terms of health risk, not intentionally putting chemicals into your lungs that haven’t been prescribed by a doctor is best, but non-disposable vapes are a good harm reduction strategy for those who can’t get out of the compulsive habit.

It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).

Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.

The rules will be the same as they always are: First Come First Served, and Might Makes Right.

The D and R are only pretending to fight each other to create the illusion of opposition. They actually have the same agenda, they are two peas in a pod, and it does not matter if you vote for Kang or Kodos, you will get the same outcome in the end. Fascism is the goal, it’s not an “oh no we accidentally voted for fascists” situation, they’re all fucking fascists funded by billionaires and none of them give the slightest shit about any of us beyond having different ideas of how exactly they’re going to take all our money before they kill us.

But if someone can’t be bothered to even use a throaway protonmail address to file a bug report or feature request? Quite frankly, what they have to say wouldn’t have been worth our limited time anyway.

You don’t know that, because you’ve never once heard what someone didn’t say. Their time is limited too.

Oh good now maybe the Subnautica developers can go independent to make a spiritual successor that isn’t called Subnautica and isn’t garbage.

Fuck Canada in particular, as usual. It’s starting to feel a bit personal.

We are reinventing our way back to Web 1.0, pretty soon we will be teaching people that they can design their own sites using simple tools or even just by typing in plain text and that they can use “links” to connect to other people’s content anywhere else on the web.

And because this probably sounds like a facetious criticism, I need to clarify: it’s really not a criticism at all. This is how the web is supposed to work. Companies broke it in order to entrap you and make profit from you.