Given the current political landscape, I find way more likely that some random American province declares independence than a Canadian one.

The 'isms are better thought as points of reference for your political views; for example someone saying “I’m an $personist” is basically saying “I agree with what $person said/did in most theoretical and practical matters”. They are useful, specially as they help you to understand what the other person defends, e.g.

• a Maoist is likely to put heavy emphasis on rural workers
• a Trotskyist is likely to believe the revolution should give no fucks about borders
• a Dengist is likely to downplay the differences between market vs. state-planned economies, seeing them as just tools for an end
• a Luxemburgist is likely to raise criticism against any “higher” role of a vanguard; etc.

So they aren’t problematic on themselves. You need to watch out for dogmatism, though; just because you’re a $personist doesn’t mean you should automatically clap to every single thing $person did or said.

Ah, that’s actually good. I don’t mind some bias (I’m sceptic on sources claiming to be “unbiased”), but I want it to be as explicit as possible.

I just tested it and confirmed what you said, by asking “What’s the role of peasants in revolutionary processes?”. The answer quoted Trotsky almost exclusively; that works like a charm for me (I’m mostly Trotskyist), but a Maoist would already scream bloody murder.

This looks like a notoriously bad idea.

In 2023, a city (Porto Alegre) near-ish my homeland approved a law initially proposed by ChatGPT, then manually reviewed and edited. Here’s a link; it shows both the initial proposal and final version (both in Portuguese).

The law addresses some shite the water and sewage department (DMAE) did often:

1. install new water meter for a house, with no regards to its placement or securing it properly
2. wait until water meter gets stolen for parts (welcome to Latin America!)
3. charge house owner for a new water meter
4. go back to step 1.

So a councilperson prompted ChatGPT to draft a law addressing it. And the draft sounds reasonable… until you inspect it further, and notice a certain article omitted from the final revision:

[Rough translation] 7th article. DMAE shall be allowed to establish complementary norms to regulate the enforcement of this law.

Why was this article omitted? Remember: DMAE was the very department being legislated against. If allowed to issue “complementary norms” regarding that law, the law would become toilet paper — because all the department had to do is to claim “the law is only valid if the theft happens in the 31st of February!” or some equally dumb shit.

The issue I mentioned above was fairly specific, the solution was straightforward, and mostly non-partisan. And the entity in question was a city government, so no “nested” political entities. And the e-muppet was still able to drop such a huge bollock.

What would happen if this was done on a country level? And it included partisan matters? And the issue was something complex, with no “right” answer?

That’s what I’m thinking, while reading the link in the OP.

I’m no Luddite when it comes to AI but I dunno how to feel about this either.

Those bots are not a good way to inform yourself. They’re a bit too prone to say inane shit while vomiting certainty, they convey the undeclared political bias of the data set, and even when they’re right they’re simply not cost-efficient regarding water/energy consumption. I think a good FAQ system addressing newbie questions would be better, beyond that referring them directly to the literature.

Non-photosynthetic plants (like ghost pipes) are typically rather small parasites of other plants, that for some reason lost access to good sunlight (such as being so deep in a forest that other plants call dibs on those yummy photons). I don’t see how it would be the case here, given the fossil in question is 8m tall, and apparently it predates actual (Viridiplantae) trees. And I think the same reasoning applies to a potential Rhodophyta = red alga.

Because of that I think it’s way more likely the taxon in question is related to both, but part of neither. And the reason it’s heterotrophic (as per Wiki article) is because it never developed something similar to photosynthesis on first place.

In fact the size is bugging me. Why did it grow so big? Plants usually do this because they’re trying to outcompete other plants, but that doesn’t make sense here.

My guess is that it’s a relative of red algae and plants/Viridiplantae, but not quite either.

At least one source mentions it produces lignin or something similar; lignin is present in both clades I mentioned. However since it doesn’t do photosynthesis we can rule out belonging to those clades, I genuinely don’t think evolution would favour ditching phycoerythrin or chlorophyll, so odds are it never developed either.

Just as a heads up, you accidentally posted the same question four times.

That said yes, it’s piracy.

Besides flat out refusing their “cloud” services, what else can we [in the short term, without too much co-ordination being necessary; unlike, you know, a revolution] do to foil their plans?

…actually screw that. We need a revolution. Now. Seize the means of computation.

Call me paranoid, but:

What if all this babble about AI is a way to force hardware demand thus prices up, so the average person cannot pay for a half-decent machine?

If I got this right, what most people call “slop” is mass-produced and low quality. Following that definition you could have human-made slop, but it’s less like a low quality meme and more like corporate “art”. Some however seem to be using it exclusively for AI generated content, so for those “human-made slop” would be an oxymoron.

Human reviewing is not directly related to that. Only as far as a human to be expected to remove really junky output, and only let decent stuff in.

Vibe coding actually implies the opposite: you don’t check the output. You tell the bot what you want, it outputs some code, you test that code without checking it, then you ask the bot for further modifications. IMO it’s really bad, worse than what a non-programmer (like me) outputs.

so then is responsibly-trained output of AI, like using DeepSeek on a personal machine where someone pays for their own electricity, okay?

That’ll depend on the person. In my opinion, AI usage is mostly okay if:

• you don’t do it willy-nilly. Even if you pay for the energy, it still contributes with global warming and resources consumption. Plus supply x demand effects.
• you’re manually reviewing the output, or its accuracy isn’t a concern. For example: it’s prolly OK to ask it to give you a summary of a text you wouldn’t otherwise, but if you’re doing using it to decide if someone is[n’t] allowed in a community then it’s probably not OK.
• you’re taking responsibility for the output. No “I didn’t do it, the AI did it!”.
• the model was responsibly trained and weighted, in a way that takes artist/author consent into account and there’s at least some effort into avoiding harmful output.

conversely, what about stealing memes on the internet and sharing those without attribution as to the source

Key differences: a meme is typically made to be shared, without too many expectations of recognition, people sharing it will likely do it for free, and memes in general take relatively low effort to generate. While the content typically fed into those models is often important for the author/artist, takes a lot more effort to generate, and the people feeding those models typically expect to be paid for them.

Even then note a lot of people hate memes for a reason rather similar to AI output, “it takes space of more interesting stuff”. That’s related to your point #6, labelling makes it a non-issue for people who’d rather avoid consuming AI output as content.

piracy

It’s less about intent and more about effect. A pirated copy typically benefits the pirate by a lot, while it only harms the author by a wee bit.

Note I don’t consider piracy as “theft” or “stealing”, but something else. It’s illegal, but not always immoral.

Even for the one just in YT, people automatically say “eeew” if it’s AI-generated, even if not slop.

This now makes me curious: does the term “slop” apply beyond text, images, and videos? I thought “ai” coding was called “vibe-coding” rather than slop?

I think it could. I only recall seeing it for media, but the meaning fits AI code well. Specially dysfunctional code outputted in large quantities.

“Vibe coding” simply lacks that negative connotation, it’s what the people making it call it.

I think the negative reaction is composed of multiple factors coming together:

• slop (as you said),
• people using the slop to add noise to the internet,
• harmful output (not talking about the paperclip problem; think on Grok sexualising minors, or ChatGPT fuelling mental issues)
• businesses shoving those models everywhere and being extra pushy about them,
• environmental and geopolitical issues,
• authorship and intellectual property issues,
• “training” being made with no regards to consent of the creators,
• all that “you’re now obsolete garbage! Soon we’ll be able to trash you and replace you with AI!” bzzz-bzzz-bzzz,
• supply and demand of hardware parts…

…phew. All of that while disingenuous people — like Huang, Altman or Nadella — feign ignorance on why people complain about it and pretend it’s a bunch of primitives backslashing against “the future”.

You’d need to fix a lot of those to make people like AI. Not just the slop.

That’s a common discussion in my family, with the added take of piracy. Basically, my sister not getting why my BIL and me download the songs/albums we enjoy, since Spotify exists. Or why I created a LAN to listen to downloaded stuff from my kitchen. And I often half-joke that, eventually, she’ll only listen to the stuff my BIL likes — as all her favs will be locked in a platform she won’t be able/willing to access.

Same deal with anime. I’m not ashamed to say I have 1600 episodes in my hard disk. I don’t download everything I watch (because… well, I do watch a lot of junk), but if I feel in the mood to re-watch something, it means I should avoid losing it, so I download it.

Of course, you could do all of that without piracy, if you got the bees’n’honey (unlike me). Or go for a middle ground; back in the 90s we used to record tracks playing on the radio in K7 casette tapes, while still buying official ones for artists we really enjoyed, so this isn’t exactly new.

At this rate I’m calling dibs on your nickname 🤣

(subtitle) Won’t somebody think of the CEOs?
(ending sentence) It’s unlikely that the negativity is going to go away because it hurts a few executives’ feelings.

I bloody love the mockery sandwich. Also:

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently complained that the conversation around AI needs to move beyond “slop.”
As a reminder, it’s now estimated that more than 20% of YouTube’s feed can be defined as slop,

Kind of a damn good way to convey “yeah, just ignore Nadella”.

Fuck! I misread you. Yes, you’re right, Tim Sweeney is supporting CSAM.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, undeserved crankiness, and defensiveness; I thought you were claiming I was the one doing it. That was my bad. (In my own defence, someone already did it.)

Now, giving you a proper answer: yeah, Epic is better sent down the forgetting hole. And I hope Sweeney gets haunted by his own words for years and years to come.

Nobody here is supporting CSAM. Learn to read, dammit.

Yes, it certainly comes across as you arguing for the opposite

No, it does not. Stop being a liar.

Or, even better: do yourself a favour and go offline. Permanently. There’s already enough muppets like you: assumptive pieces of shit lacking basic reading comprehension, but still eager to screech at others — not because of what the others actually said, but because of what they assumed over it. You’re dead weight in any serious discussion, probably in some unserious ones too, and odds are you know it.

Also, I’m not wasting my time further with you, go be functionally illiterate elsewhere.

I wish I was as composed as you. You’re still calmly explaining things to that dumb fuck, while they move the goalposts back and forth:

• first they lie I was saying there were no victims;
• then they backpedal and say “It doesn’t matter if there’s a victim or not. It’s the depiction of CSA that is illegal.”;
• then they backpedal again and say what boils down to “talking about morals bad! Also I’ll talk about MY morals. I don’t see moral difference when people are harmed and when they’re not” (inb4 I’m abridging it)

All of that while they’re still pretending to argue the same point. It reminds me a video from the Alt-Right Playbook, called “never play defence”: make dumb claim, waste someone else’s time expecting them to rebuke that dumb claim, make another dumb claim, waste their time again, so goes on.