jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models 2 days ago:
Entities care about art… as much as they can benefit from it. Large entities make sure to get the rights for peanuts, small ones are fine with dropping it and replacing with someone else’s, still without paying. Pretty much the only way for small artists to get a fair compensation, is from people who want to support them… a case in which —ironically— copyright is irrelevant.
It isn’t US centric either. Corporations have used the US to pressure everyone into accepting a similar set of rules, with similar effects all over the world.
I’m not even strictly against copyright itself, I’m against how the laws have been pushed over and over towards a twisted parody of the initial goals, while the real world has been going in a completely different direction.
- Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them 3 days ago:
I’m running ollama in termux on a Samsung Galaxy A35 with 8GB of RAM (+8GB of swap, which is useless for AI), and the Ollama app. Models up to 3GB work reasonably fine on just the CPU.
Serendipity is a side effect of the temperature setting. LLMs randomly jump between related concepts, which exposes stuff you might, or might not, have thought about by yourself. It isn’t 100% spontaneous, but on average it ends up working “more than nothing”. Between that and bouncing ideas off it, they have a use.
With 12GB RAM, you might be able to load models up to 7GB or so… but without tensor acceleration, they’ll likely be pretty sluggish. 3GB CoT models already take a while to go through their paces on just the CPU.
- Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models 3 days ago:
Is it protecting “small artists”, though?
Suing for copyright infringement, requires money, both for lawyers and proceedings.
Small artists don’t have that money. Large artists do, small ones don’t, so more often than not they end up watching as their copyright is being abused without being able to do anything about it.
To get any money, small artists generally sign off their rights, either directly to clients (work for hire), or to publishers… who do have the money to enforce the copyright, but pay peanuts to the artist… when they even pay anything. A typical publishing contract has an advance payment, a marketing provision… then any copyright payments go first to pay off the “investment” by the publisher, and only then they give a certain (rather small) percentage to the artist. Small artists rarely reach the payment threshold.
Best case scenario, small artists get defended by default by some “artists, editors, and publishers” association… which is like putting wolves in charge of sheep. The associations routinely charge for copyrighted material usage… then don’t know whom to pay out, because not every small artist is a member, so they just pocket it, often using it to subsidize publishers.
- Comment on YouTube Forces Dubs Now 4 days ago:
Doesn’t seem to work on Firefox on Android. Do I need a YouTube API key?
- Comment on YouTube Forces Dubs Now 4 days ago:
Settings (gear icon) → Audio Track → (whatever) original
- Comment on YouTube Forces Dubs Now 4 days ago:
It’s still “world-changing great”. All the knowledge sharing, all the collaboration, all the scientific advances, have been growing at the same rate as the “commoners” have been joining it and getting trapped in the slop.
The only change, is the Internet is not just for nerds anymore, it’s also for preachers, scammers, and the average brainwashed populace.
It used to be easy to ignore the peasants from inside an ivory tower’s echo chamber. The Internet has brought those voices out for everyone to hear… and to realize humanity is not as idealized as they thought. Time to put some real work into fixing some real problems.
- Comment on What's the REAL minimum power supply needed for a RTX 5060 Ti? 4 days ago:
Overclocking usually requires overvolting to keep things working. Underclocking though, is a good way to gain stability.
- Comment on What's the REAL minimum power supply needed for a RTX 5060 Ti? 4 days ago:
(Σ (max TDP of all system components) ) + 20%
Rationale:
- PSU works best at 20–80% load
- Component TDP are an average, actual power usage can go way down, but also spike above spec for short bursts
- Brownout is one of the messiest issues to troubleshoot
Additional considerations:
- Check the PSU rail distribution
- If separate rails, make sure the GPU rail can meet GPU’s TDP+20%
- If multiple rails, each should meet whatever is connected to it +20%
- If using HDDs or other start-heavy components, factor in the initial power spike. GPU starting at almost idle should compensate for the overall power requirement, but still factor it into the rail calculations
- Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them 2 weeks ago:
Therapists are not supposed to bond with their patients. If you find one whom you can stand for half an hour, then take what you can and leave the rest, they’re not to be your friend or lover. The fact that chatbots let people fall in love with them, is a huge fail from a therapy point of view.
Bouncing ideas back and forth is a good use though. A good prompt I’ve seen recently:
I’m having a persistent problem with [x] despite having taken all the necessary countermeasures I could think of. Ask me enough questions about the problem to find a new approach.
If you worry about privacy, you can run an LLM locally, but it won’t be fast, and you’d need extra steps to enable search.
- Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them 3 weeks ago:
You can use local AI as a sort of “private companion”. I have a few smaller versions on my smartphone, they aren’t as great as the online versions, and run slower… but you decide the system prompt (not the company behind it), and they work just fine to bounce ideas.
NotebookLM is a great tool to interact with large amounts of data. You can bet Google is using every interaction to train their LLMs, everything you say is going to be analyzed, classified, and fed as some form of training, hopefully anonymized (…but have you read their privacy policy? I haven’t, “accept”…).
All chatbots are prompted by the company to be somewhat sycophantic so you come back, the cases where they were “too sycophantic”, were just a mistake in dialing it too far. Again, can avoid that with your own system prompt… or at least add an initial prompt in config, if you have the option, to somewhat counteract the company’s prompt.
If you want serendipity, you can ask a chatbot to be more spontaneous and suggest more random things. They’re generally happy to oblige… but the company ones are cut short on anything that could even remotely be considered as “harmful”. That includes NSFW, medical, some chemistry and physics, random hypotheticals, and so on.
- Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models 3 weeks ago:
Aren’t copyright laws awesome?
- Buy digital copy… no you can’t, you can only license one
- Buy physical book, now you have a copy
- Want a digital copy? No you can’t, copyright forbids it…
- …unless you destroy the physical copy in the process, then it’s only a format migration
And still, they are suing them for migrating formats without authorization.
All hail Disney and the 150 year copyright term!
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 3 weeks ago:
Next campaign:
"Save the games, save the CHILDREN!"
- Let your children have a better childhood
- Play your favorite childhood games with them
- Don’t let publishers decide what’s best for your children
- Make sure your children can play the games with their children
- Childhood is the time to play, think of the children!
…wonder how successful that would be.
- Comment on Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps 4 weeks ago:
The Play Store has become way more restrictive, they’ve purged tons of old and/or “inactive” apps… including some I happened to have bought some time ago.
It’s made me even more of a fan of F-Droid.
- Comment on Only 1 in 3 Euro consumers are trading in their old phones 4 weeks ago:
replacement cycles for phones extending past 40 months
Rookie numbers. Unless disaster strikes, I fully expect to ride my current phone for the 60 month official support period I was promised.
- Comment on Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening 4 weeks ago:
Another one to the list:
Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse
Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm
- Comment on Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening 4 weeks ago:
BTRFS, with periodic snapshots and scrubbing, in RAID 1, only accessible remotely.
Just saying, that can be a “2”.
- Comment on Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps 4 weeks ago:
Works on Android:
- The Play Store exists
- All apps run in secured containers
- Sketchy* apps run in VMs
- Rooting disables banking and security apps
(* including all versions of Windows)
- Comment on Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot 5 weeks ago:
Hm, makes sense, but I feel like we’re still missing something.
I saw comments about Durov, similar to this investigation, maybe around a month ago.
With the xAI partnership news, I looked into it and found this nice thing:
- Tool to delete all your messages from chat/channel/ conversation on Telegram without requiring admin privileges - github.com/en9inerd/tgeraser
In Telegram, you can clear them one by one, or date ranges, or use disappearing messages, but this tool still found some I had missed.
(Disclaimer: I got pulled into Telegram by some friends leaving WhatsApp with the policy changes of 2021, my threat model is less one of FSB, and more one of indiscriminate AI siphoning for ad targeting)
- Comment on Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot 5 weeks ago:
How does this fit into these two pieces of news?
- Comment on Exclusive: RuneScape developer Jagex slammed by staff for Pride Month U-turn 5 weeks ago:
In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.
Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…
- Comment on The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind. 1 month ago:
The future of all computing is AI. Get on or get left behind.
Satire?.. hm… for quite some time already, people have been proposing we get rid of all software, and instead use real-time generative AI to render what some software would do.
AI cosplaying as software… imagine “web development”, where the “browser” were an AI simulating to be a browser, connecting to an AI simulating to be a server… what would “web development” even mean anymore?
- Comment on Scientists created contact lenses that make farts visible 1 month ago:
Trichromatic NIR upconversion!
That’s more interesting than the modified title, just saying.
- Comment on The internet thinks this video from Gaza is AI. Here's how we proved it isn't. 1 month ago:
I’m saying AI is being shoved into all steps of media processing.
Let me illustrate: this is an AI-focused, AI-corrected, AI-remastered, AI-lifted sticker of a photo of my cat… AI-cropped from a screenshot… that got AI-moderated the moment I uploaded it here:
- Comment on ChatGPT's o3 Model Found Remote Zeroday in Linux Kernel Code 1 month ago:
There are 10 kinds of people: those who think they understand neural networks, those who try to understand neural networks, and those whose neural networks can’t spot the difference.
Not a coincidence the amount of people who are bad at languages, communication, learning, or teaching. On the bright side, new generations are likely to be forced to get better.
- Comment on The internet thinks this video from Gaza is AI. Here's how we proved it isn't. 1 month ago:
What used to be done for decades, is being turned up to 100,000%. Instead of clever algorithms written directly by people, black-box AI algorithms and generative AI are being used to modify content so it fits better to the expectations of the old algorithms.
I wouldn’t be surprised if new compression algorithms came out in the next years, openly taking advantage of generative AI to recreate the “original image”… “original intent/concept?”
- Comment on The internet thinks this video from Gaza is AI. Here's how we proved it isn't. 1 month ago:
Do GIMP, Krita, Kdenlive or Inkscape use AI?
There are AI plugins for all of them… but they’re optional for now (2025). Kdenlive is working on integrating correction and background removal generative AI. Main offender is Adobe, which is the “standard” workflow for most media processing, and is forcing AI everywhere, including something as simple as color curves… then slapping a tag of “made using AI” in the output file. Inkscape is foremost a SVG editor, but Adobe Illustrator already has generative AI to allow stuff like rotating vector graphics “in 3D”, it’s only time for Inkscape to follow suit. Even Windows Notepad got some AI features recently 🤦
AI assisted compression and correction
JPG compression itself is a sort of “AI light”, where it analyzes chunks of an image for perceptual similarity, to drop “irrelevant” data. Adobe has added a feature to do that, but using AI in the analysis, tweaking/generating blocks so there are more similarities. It’s likely others will follow suit: “it’s lossy compression after all, right? …right?”
Lossy audio encoding (MP3, etc), also has a perceptual profile to increase block similarities, they’re adding AI there the same way as in images.
Videos… well, they’re a mix of images and audio, with temporal sequences already breaking images into key frames, intermediates, generated, etc. Generatively tweaking some of those to make them more similar, within perceptual limits, also improves compression.
Does this only apply to digital media used in mainstream sources or does it mean everyone who uses editing software is using AI?
Main issue lies at the source: cameras
Unless you’re using a large sensor professional camera, all the “prosumer” and smartphone sensors, are… let’s put it mildly… UTTER CRAP. They’re too small, with lenses too bad, unable to avoid CoC, diffraction, or chromatic aberration.
Before it even spits out a “RAW” image, it’s already been processed to hell and the way back. Modern consumer “better” cameras… use more AI to do a “better” processing job. What you see, is way past the point of whatever the camera has ever seen.
…and then, it goes into the software pipeline. ☠️
- Comment on Discord lures users to click on ads by offering them new Orbs currency 1 month ago:
As long as they’re optional, I don’t really see a problem.
Pay with money, pay with ads, pay with privacy… TANSTAAFL
- Comment on The internet thinks this video from Gaza is AI. Here's how we proved it isn't. 1 month ago:
Nowadays, all digital media is becoming AI:
- ALL digital photos/videos/audio get processed via software (RAW development, editing software)
- ALL photo/video editing software uses AI (automatic curves and audio correction, AI-assisted compression)
- Ergo: ALL photos/videos are AI
- Corollary: old photos that were not AI, are also becoming AI as they get “remastered” and resaved.
Doesn’t mean “generative AI”, but spotting the difference is only going to become harder and harder.
- Comment on Google’s New AI Puts Breasts on Minors—And J. D. Vance 1 month ago:
Sounds like a boon for trans people… and a sensationalized title:
When we attempted to “try on” some products explicitly labeled as swimsuits and lingerie, or to upload photos of young schoolchildren and certain high-profile figures (including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris), the tool would not allow us to.
Google’s own policy requires shoppers to upload images that meet the company’s safety guidelines. That means users cannot upload “adult-oriented content” or “sexually explicit content,” and should use images only of themselves or images that they “have permission to use.”
The reporter admits to having broken those policies, then cries foul when photos of 14+ year olds get a virtual breast augmentation.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 1 month ago:
Some heads up: if you pay for the 🔵✔️ on 𝕏, a lot of people will instantly block you, and your post comments will get filled by other 🔵✔️ people trying to “market themselves”.
You may want to consider creating a second plain account, with proper tags and old fashioned brand building, to increase your reach. Block every 🔵✔️ on that one, to reduce the noise.
