If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you’d think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.

Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.

I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.

It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”

I’ve been assured that AGI is right around the corner and will solve climate change (in a way that is economically palatable to the rich and powerful)

I think one of the most toxic things on Lemmy is the prevalence of judging normies for using incredibly popular services and ascribing it to a character defect instead of life just being too complex for most people to be able to prioritize exploring more ethical technology choices.

Canada should back out of the USMCA and stop respecting US IP

Well, Pakistan isn’t exactly a leader in world peace either…

Which Country Is The Greatest Threat to World Peace?

The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%). Respondents in Russia (54%), China (49%) and Bosnia (49%) were the most fearful of the US as a threat.

I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

We have mistaken rationality for a philosophy rather than a methodology, and efficiency for a virtue without any particular end in mind.

To have a unique, personal, subjective, divergent human experience is to sin against your prescribed algorithm.

Polluting the sky in order to pollute the internet 👌

Yes, that’s a good addition.

Overall, my point was not that scraping is a universal moral good, but that legislating tighter boundaries for scraping in an effort to curb AI abuses is a bad approach.

We have better tools to combat this, and placing new limits on scraping will do collateral damage that we should not accept.

And at the very least, the portfolio value of Disney’s IP holdings should not be the motivating force behind AI regulation.

I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)

But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.

Take archive.org for example:

It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.

But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

Edit: And to be clear, when I say it’s fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don’t mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.

I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.

I don’t think blahaj would object to the basic message.

There are the occasional man-hating users, sure. But for the most part, the instance seems to accept the idea that men suffer under patriarchy as well.

Now, when you bring it up in response to women, enbies, etc. suffering under patriarchy… that’s not so great.

So I guess it depends on what community it would be posted to, and how it would be posted.

Given how OP seems to be spamming this in multiple unrelated communities… I can’t imagine they would post it to blahaj tactfully. So… maybe you’re right, lol.

How about robots that heal people?

Point was: most of the time I see someone spending time counting the requisite number of ..s, all they really wanna do is “go back to where I was before”.

cd foo/bar/baz/qux and cd - is better than cd foo/bar/baz/qux and cd ../../../..

cd - helps

Do not nixos-install me without reason

Do not uwsm start select me without valor

Tim “Cook of” Apple

So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.

At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?

So what counts as dictating my life?

The government prohibiting me from firing my gun in the air, or my neighbor’s falling bullets prohibiting me from leaving my porch?

I’m always suspect of those who assume there is only “freedom to do” and not also “freedom from being done-to”.

They tend to think they will never be on the receiving end of someone else’s “freedom”.