Maybe I’m a lightweight, but pseudoephedrine makes me feel weird. I can’t put my finger on it, but maybe a bit jittery and kind of cold. Also hyper - like I’ll want to do chores when I take it

Works better than anything else for my colds, but it also makes me feel odd so I avoid it unless I’m feeling super trash.

It’s controversial, to be sure, but I’ve always been of the mind that if someone wants to do something transformative to one of my works, they’ve generated something different, despite being “inspired” by my work.

ML gens are transformative by nature, so I don’t think my work being one of millions of datapoints used to create something is a huge deal.

That said, I’m also an advocate of preservation through piracy, so I’d be a hypocrite if I wanted to go copyright mad at bots for looking at images I uploaded on the public internet.

I get it - I appreciate the correction anyway!

Yeah, I shouldn’t have said “literally zero”, but considering how small our community here is compared to Reddit, or Mastodon compared to X, it is, arguably, functionally zero, and something as obscure as a TOS change that allows scraping for AI is much less likely to drive many people off of a site as something as drastic as destroying the entire mobile app ecosystem, ala Reddit.

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But it won’t matter, because a mega corp scraping data is going to put it into their TOS and literally zero percent of these people are going to get off Twitter or Bluesky or whatever big website that has an exemption to whatever law is passed to stop the scraping of data.

The only groups who will suffer will be researchers, open source software builders, and pretty much anyone who isn’t a corporation already.

There’s no solution to this that will end with everyone being 100% happy, but keeping the open internet open and continuing this idea that has pretty much persisted from the beginning of the internet, that whatever you put out there is fair game for viewing, is ideal compared to the alternative.

Stuff like this is my biggest reason to believe that the current anti-ai movement is incredibly misled.

They want to stop open scraping, but if they’re successful, only companies like Twitter, Google, Disney, Getty, Adobe, whatever, are going to have their own closed systems that they’ll either charge for or keep themselves to replace workers, instead of the tech being open to all of us.

Open scraping is the only saving grace of all of this tech because it’s going to keep at least a number of options entirely free for anyone who wants to use them.

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What the hell kind of bidet were you using? I’ve got what I’d consider middle of the road shits, and every bidet that I have ever used has been literally a different world from mashing my shit around with a tissue.

Went from like a three-minute process involving a lot of paper to ten seconds, followed by thirty to dry, and usually no toilet paper at all.

Maybe now that you’re older you should try it out again? I probably wouldn’t have liked one as a kid either, but I also took like one shower a week.

Quick question. I just need a yes or no answer. Would you wear a mask if you weren’t being forced to?

Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.

Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.

If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.

I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.

It’s funny, growing up near a steel mill/train hub, I took for granted how confused other people might be about what the hell “coke” is.

On-topic - I once looked up stats for estimated premature deaths due to industry in our area and it was eye-opening. I really want to get out of here.

Crazy how people have the ability to overlook/ignore deaths caused by things as long as the deaths are a bit more gradual. A hundred premature deaths over the course of a year or so is practically nothing on the public’s radar, but if an accidental release at the mill killed a single person downwind, there’d be hell to pay.

The funniest shit is these sad dudes are probably clamoring to say they’d take dinner with Musk in hopes they’d somehow magically unlock the secret to being rich, totally unaware of the fact that the “secret” is to start with enough wealth to get that first leg-up, and no amount of lobster dinner with Musk will change the fact that they will never have his money.

Not sure why anyone would want dinner with Tate unless they wanted to get into human trafficking.

Take the $10 million, ya dinguses.

Come back to me after convincing a group of non tech-savvy iPhone-using friends or family to use literally anything but whatever the default messaging app is available on their phone or whatever they’re already used to.

I think the most frustrating part is Apple is willfully hampering the ability to intercommunicate between iPhones and Androids and people aren’t like “Oh, fuck them for doing that”, they’re like “Oh, Android sucks.” Like it’s just a wildly successful and incredibly scummy tactic to convince people that Apple devices are superior and people didn’t just fall for it, they’re willfully diving in headfirst.

It’s a shame, really, because I do think they make some pretty good hardware. Might not be my thing, but they make a good phone. That said, I’ll never patronize them because of the bullshit I’ve had to endure trying to communicate with my iPhone-owning family.

There was a time back when gas prices got kinda high when I thought Americans would finally shift down to slightly smaller cars, but now it’s practically a cultural thing for half the country to burn as much fuel as possible, so I suspect even if gas prices here hit Europe levels it wouldn’t cause them to budge much.

It does feel really odd, though, going somewhere like a school and just being absolutely surrounded by huge SUVs and pickup trucks that you know damn well like 90% of the drivers aren’t actually utilizing.

Double-sucks because it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a small car. Everything new, even most cars, are huge.

With that mindset, only the powerful will have access to these models.

Places like Reddit, Google, Facebook, etc, places that can rope you into giving away rights to your data with TOS stipulations.

Locking down everything available on the Internet by piling more bullshit onto already draconian copyright rules isn’t the answer and it surprises the shit out of me how quickly fellow artists, writers, and creatives piled onto the side with Disney, the RIAA, and other former enemies the second they started perceiving ML as a threat to their livelihood.

I do believe restrictions should be looked into when it comes to large organizations and industries replacing creators with ML, but attacking open ML models directly is going to result in the common folk losing access to the tools and corporations continuing to work exactly as they are right now by paying for access to locked-down ML based on content from companies who trade in huge amounts of data.

Not to mention it’s going to give the giants who have been leveraging their copyright powers against just about everyone on the internet more power to do just that. That’s the last thing we need.

You don’t even need to order to see the difference if your local grocery store also delivers. I was curious one day and brought up my local grocery place in one tab, Instacart in the other, and realized I was spending a significant amount more on markups alone using Instacart, not even including delivery charge and tips.

I always leave them in because pulling them out is more trouble than it’s worth. I’m lazy as hell, but I’m also cooking for just my wife and I.

Literally worst case nobody’s going to crack a tooth or something. They get a spoonful of soup with a big leaf in it and they just put the leaf aside.

For real though, you don’t plant your own tomatoes to save money, you plant your own tomatoes because your crop is going to taste so good that you’ll be chasing that flavor any time you’re stuck buying them from the store. Just so far beyond storebought.

It’s the one crop I keep coming back to every year - the effort is worth it.