We learned this lesson in the 90s: If you put something on the (public) Internet, assume it will be scraped (and copied and used in various ways without your consent). If you don’t want that, don’t put it on the Internet.

There’s all sorts of clever things you can do to prevent scraping but none of them are 100% effective and all have negative tradeoffs.

For reference, the big AI players aren’t scraping the Internet to train their LLMs anymore. That creates too many problems, not the least of which is making yourself vulnerable to poisoning. If an AI is scraping your content at this point it’s either amateurs or they’re just indexing it like Google would (or both) so the AI knows where to find it without having to rely on 3rd parties like Google.

Remember: Scraping the Internet is everyone’s right. Trying to stop it is futile and only benefits the biggest of the big search engines/companies.

So basically… There’s was no justice for rich people in the past either.

It’s not a shame. Have you tried this? Try it now! It only takes a minute.

Test a bunch of images against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Ask it if the image was AI-generated. I think you’ll be surprised.

Gemini is the current king of that sort of image analysis but the others should do well too.

What do you think the experts use? LOL! They’re going to run an image through the same exact process that the chatbots would use plus some additional steps if they didn’t find anything obvious on the first pass.

I don’t think it’s irresponsible to suggest to readers that they can use an AI chatbot to examine any given image to see if it was AI-generated. Even the lowest-performing multi-model chatbots (e.g. Grok and ChatGPT) can do that pretty effectively.

Also: Why stop at one? Try a whole bunch! Especially if you’re a reporter working for the BBC!

It’s not like they give an answer, “yes: Definitely fake” or “no: Definitely real.” They will analyze the image and give you some information about it such as tell-tale signs that an image could have been faked.

But why speculate? Try it right fucking now: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini (the current king at such things BTW… For the next month at least hahaha) if any given image is fake. It only takes a minute or two to test it out with a bunch of images!

Then come back and tell us that’s irresponsible with some screenshots demonstrating why.

Or like isn’t the UK the most surveiled country with their camera system?

Ahahah! That’s a good one!

You think all those cameras are accessible to everyone or even the municipal authorities? Think again!

All those cameras are mostly useless—even for law enforcement (the only ones with access). It’s not like anyone is watching them in real time and the recordings—if they even have any—are like any IT request: Open a ticket and wait. How long? I have no idea.

Try it: If you live in the UK, find some camera in a public location and call the police to ask them, “is there an accident at (location camera is directly pointing at)?”

They will ask you all sorts of questions before answering you (just tell them you heard it through the grapevine or something) but ultimately, they will send someone out to investigate because accessing the camera is too much of a pain in the ass.

It’s the same situation here in the US. I know because the UK uses the same damned cameras and recording tech. It sucks! They’re always looking for ways to make it easier to use and every rollout of new software actually makes it harder and more complicated!

How easy is the ticket system at your work? Now throw in dozens of extra government-mandated fields 🤣

Never forget: The UK invented bureaucracy and needles paperwork!

If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.

There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.

I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.

I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.

Her problem is she cited the wrong bible!

Clearly, she should’ve cited the real bible that has the true word of the gods in it. Not that atheist Christian bible!

Remember: If you don’t believe in my gods, you’re an atheist!

I hope the SCOTUS justices aren’t using 3-strikes-you’re-out ISPs! All it would take is three random DMCA takedown notices and they’d lose Internet.

Their entire workflow is in Linux (KDE/Kate/Krita/Inkscape) which is awesome!

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1078/episode-39-production-report

You jest, but if conservatives have their way, you’ll soon have to verify your ID by uploading a video every time you visit the site (if not logged in). Even for non-adult content!

Because the reason for the ID isn’t to “protect the children” or anything like that. It’s about control. Conservatives want the power to decide what people get to see and ID verification systems are just a small part of that.

It’s good to know that incompetence is still the guiding principle of the Trump administration 👍

To summarize:

• The Republicans have no real plans to fix health care. The only thing they’ve thought up so far is an even bigger handout to Visa and MasterCard as well as other rich/incredibly profitable/unnecessary middlemen companies that handle Health Savings Account plans. Note: The more money you make, the more money you save via HSA plans!
• The Democrats have no real plans to fix health care. The only thing they’ve thought of is to extend the Republican band-aid known as Romneycare the Obamacare subsidies which will only slightly delay the inevitable, on-going collapse of health care in the United States. AKA the death spiral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_spiral_(insurance)

What should be illegal is patents like this!

The same thing can happen in Windows. Only difference, really, is that Linux tells you that there’s a problem and the Event Viewer doesn’t. You just end up with a hung Windows PC or a screwed up USB port that won’t work anymore after it happens enough times.

Oftentimes what causes it is undocumented firmware “features” that need to be turned on via a proprietary driver (for your USB device). The vendor “supports” Windows but not Linux so they never bothered to submit any patches to fix issues like that. It’s that Linux fault? Not really. It’s the fault of the shitty vendor.

It’s always some bargain basement piece of shit Chinese-made USB device that causes these sorts of problems. The type of thing that can happen when even the vendor of the product didn’t know a counterfeit chip ended up in their device.

To be fair, “avoid change at all costs!” Has been the Republican motto for a long time now. It’s right up there with, “ignore reality.”

I had this same thing happen a while back. You know what it was? A bad USB device!

I had a little USB debug probe that went bad (somehow) and it totally screwed up my USB hub’s ability to… Stay stable? Haha, that’s the best way to put it.

Anyway, the fix was to remove the device and disconnect the USB hub (and its power) for a few seconds. If I ever reconnected the probe, the problem would recur within an hour or two.

Here’s how you can check for something similar: Run dmesg and look for regular messages like, “unable to enumerate device”. It’ll tell you which bus and port it’s on but that’s not easy to figure out so just keep unplugging things until you get the one matching the device that’s regularly throwing errors in dmesg. Keep it disconnected, power everything off (PC, USB hub’s, etc) for a few seconds and then try running without that device for a while. It might be the culprit!

I’ve done a 3-hour session playing Beat Saber multiplayer with a friend. It was the most intense workout I’ve ever experienced.

The only break was in the middle to refill my enormous water bottle and to clean up the huge pool of sweat on the floor that was getting gross (I was wearing socks, LOL).

My arms hurt for like three days straight after that. I still played every night though 😁👍

Just place a fan on the floor in front of you. Bam! No nausea. Because now your body instinctively knows your position and orientation in the space you’re in.

It’s such a simple thing but it really works!

You know they’re just buildings full of servers, right?

I mean, I’d rather have a data center than some toxic chemical factory or a busy warehouse in my neighborhood. Data centers just… sit there. They use a lot of power and some use a lot of water, but if your region doesn’t have power/water problems it’s not really much of an impact.

A nation’s supercomputing power used to be something people celebrated. Especially one owned and operated by a place like Los Alamos National Laboratory.