The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

Something that I’m super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn’t last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren’t keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn’t enough to get anything that they’d consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).

As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my “normie” friends, because they’re one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I’m trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.

(A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn’t expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

That’s sad. Regardless of whether it’s one of the reasons for Microsoft’s nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually do much work, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one.

It really seems like a hollow existence.

Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.

Yeah, this really was an excellent answer. I’m impressed by how he used this example to illustrate the wider strategy without it feeling like a weird kind of “we will cut programs like this and then everything will be fine”. It gives the sense that this is being used as an example because it’s simple enough to be at the top of a large pile of potential savings, which will take time and work to dig through.

To put it a different way, his answer abstracts away the right stuff. He doesn’t pretend that everything will be as simple and easy as cutting this one program was.

Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it’s humans who need to clean up the mess.

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

So many features like this have gotten so much worse over the years. Google assistant is the big stand out one for me. I first switched to Android in 2014ish, and I got heavily into tinkering and automating stuff. I could say “Okay Google, make a coffee”, or “pop a coffee on please”, and Google assistant would hear this, parse it and understand that this wasn’t a command it knew. This would lead to that input being passed over to Tasker, the app I used for automating stuff, and that would then do the behind the scenes magic of turning on the coffee brewer as I was on my way home (It was very funny, because I didn’t have a fancy smart coffee pot or anything — I just used a ball bearing on a track to hit the on button)

Nowadays, I say something simple like “Okay Google, make a note” and it will say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that” more often than not. The speech recognition used to be so good, especially after training it on your voice for a while. Now it’s just shit.

It makes me disproportionately sad. Like, enshittification is everywhere, but this is something distinct, even if it is linked to enshittification. If they were gating better voice recognition behind paywalls, I’d be annoyed, but much less sad, because at least that functionality still exists. Modern software, especially that produced by the tech giants, has gotten so complex that I wonder whether even the most proficient engineers in Google understand their software nowadays.

Windows update will frequently reenable OneDrive. Microsoft systematically undermines people ability to understand and control their own device.

You’re right, it was the .se one I used and I misremembered when writing my comment. Though this mistake highlights why adding sites like this to your bookmarks is important. Opportunistic scams are always common when a big domain goes down, and mistakes are easy to make

They already had a big target on their back. Sure, scraping Spotify made that larger, but given that their aims are explicitly political, I think there’s a lot of value in not being overly cautious and using takedowns as a way to bolster the resiliency of your service.

Domain takedowns are inevitable, even if they’d just continued with their existing archival efforts. That’s why, when I found I wasn’t able to access the .org domain over the weekend, I just went to https://annas-archive.se/ instead.

Edit: wrote one of the old domains (.gs) because I just use what’s bookmarked and got mixed up. It was .se that I used

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.

What a G.

I get what point you’re making in distinguishing between pedophile and ephebophile, but personally I don’t find the distinction particularly relevant. As an adult, the level of grossed out I feel at the prospect of sexual interactions with a young teenager Vs a literal child is approximately equal, because it’s not their physical attributes that cause ick, but rather the exploitation and power dynamics involved.

Edit: I guess what I’m arguing is that in practice, we see the term “pedophilia” used as an umbrella term that encompasses pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia, and I think that is a reasonable use of the term. It does muddy the waters a tad, given that pedophilia does still have its more specific use of referring to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, but I don’t think that an issue in the majority of contexts. When it comes to the law, an adult having sex with a child is equally illegal as an adult having sex with a 15 year old. Sure, we can split this hair and distinguish between the terms, but we don’t need to

I want this on a t-shirt

I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years’ worth of stuff now, but AI isn’t going away any time soon, so it would mean that there’d be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna’s archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn’t be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.

It seems they’ve opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna’s archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.

I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.

An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery