kibiz0r

You know, I’m something of a failed game developer myself.

The #1 thing I learned was: Set your sights low. Lower than you think you should have to. And then lower than that. And now take that and cut it in half. Got it? Okay, now, from that, figure out what you think you could get done in 2 weeks. And now imagine that you’re 2 days in and someone told you you actually only have 1 week to finish completely. Pencils down, you can never work on this again. What would you focus on?

If the design is only fun if there are heaps and heaps of content, hyper-realistic art, epic soundtrack, and intricately-tuned parameters, you’re pretty much doomed to fail. It has to be fun even with one basic level, placeholder art, some sfxr audio clips, and wildly unbalanced stats.

Not FOSS, but Mahjong Soul is pretty well-made.

At least we got alternative payment portals out of it.

But damn, the EU is 10 years ahead of the US on tech antitrust. And they are, themselves, 5-10 years behind the industry.

Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…

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Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:

Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.

The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money.

I think in the Darknet Diaries episode about TPB, the guy said they never even made enough off of ads to pay for the server costs.

It’s not the same issue at all.

Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.

Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.

One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.

Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study large-scale statistical analysis says

Getting real sick of everything being “AI”.

Over the past year, Microsoft’s support for artificial intelligence tools by backing OpenAI has helped boost its value

…which I’m sure is not just hype and grift obscuring a heap of pending lawsuits.

The artists (and the people who want to see them continue to have a livelihood, a distinct voice, and a healthy engaged fanbase) live in that society.

The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering

Isn’t this exactly the problem though?

From books to radio to TV, movies, and the internet, there’s always:

• One group of people who create valuable works
• Another group of people who monopolize distribution of those works

The distributors hijack ownership (or de facto ownership) of the work, through one means or another (either logistical superiority, financing requirements, or IP law fuckery) and exploit their position to make themselves the only channel for creators to reach their audience and vice-versa.

That’s the precise pattern that OpenAI is following, and they’re doing it at a massive scale.

It’s not new. Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, all of these companies started with a public pitch about democratizing access to content. But a private pitch emerged, of becoming the main way that people access content. When it became feasible for them to turn against their users and liquidate them, they did.

The difference is that they all had to wait for users to add the content over time. Imagine if Google knew they could’ve just seeded Google Video with every movie, episode, and clip ever aired or uploaded anywhere. Just say, “Mon Dieu! It’s impossible for us to run our service without including copyrighted materials! Woe is us!” and all is forgiven.

But honestly, whichever way the courts decide, the legality of it doesn’t matter to me. It’s clearly a “Whose Line Is It?” situation where the rules are made up and ownership doesn’t matter. So I’m looking at “Does this consolidate power, or distribute it?” And OpenAI is pulling perhaps the biggest power grab that we’ve seen.

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Unrelated: I love that there’s a very distinct echo of something we saw with the previous era of tech grift, crypto. The grifters would always say, after they were confronted, “Well, there’s no way to undo it now! It’s on the blockchain!” There’s always this back-up argument of “it’s inevitable so you might as well let me do it”.

We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.

Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?