Ivey Barr

A group photo on stage at the Emmys. Ryan Ken is on the right wearing a bright orange outfit and matching respirator.

Ryan Ken at the Emmys, looking fabulous and displaying how easy it is to do your part to protect against COVID.

It can be hard to be the lone masker, but your health and the health of those around you is worth it.

Respirators do an excellent job stopping transmission.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

It is VITAL for all Georgians for vote in the November elections for our public service commission to put folks in power who might actually stop this.

I was looking for this one 😆

Okay it’s literally SO cool to see someone else on the internet talking about this! I’m a singer and actor and I basically can’t do any theatre anymore without tons of planning and testing and quarantining, because everyone else wants to pretend it’s gone now and they don’t have to care 😭

On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution.
But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light

"Graphic with 'Anthropic' logo on left, circuit-like design. Right text reads: 'Authors: You May Be Part of This Class Action Lawsuit. Anthropic AI Lawsuit Explained.' Modern, tech-themed design."

A federal court ruled that ANTHROPIC illegally copied MILLIONS of books to train its AI.

All authors and publishers whose books were downloaded by Anthropic from pirate websites are subject to receiving compensation. This could involve your work.

For more info: authorsguild.org/news/anthrop...

JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH! This gave me old Google back! It killed the AI results dead!

like why would you think anyone wants that? It’s not like anyone will stop you from being a hermit if you really want to, but most people would really rather NOT do that if they can go places safely - especially when it’s SO freaking doable to MAKE IT SAFE 💀

"people who are still concerned about covid are so unreasonable, they just want us all to go into lockdown again!"

literally nobody is asking for that. what people are asking for is stuff like universal masking in healthcare settings and investment in indoor air filtration/clean air infrastructure

Sketchbook comic. Panel 1: a disembodied voice says “I KNOW a.i. is ethically, ecologically and esthetically awful, but I just gotta say…” Lucy is reacting with a ._. Face and thinking “do ya? Do ya really GOTTA?” Panel 2: Lucy’s thought bubble reads: “do you just GOTTA recite some tired anecdote using the phrase ‘I just typed it in!’ That just amounts to you admitting that your cheapness, laziness and poor taste outweighs your unexamined ethical code?”

Sketchbook comic page 2: Panel 1: Lucy’s thought bubble reads “and, at the very least, do you GOTTA say it to ME?” She is turning away, saying “ok I’m gonna go, um, get a snack.” Panel 2: another disembodied voice is saying “Lucy! You’re an artist— whattaya think about a.i? Ya know, it may be bad, but I JUST GOTTA SAY…” Lucy is startled, dropping a chip.

Sketchbook comic page 3: Panel 1: Lucy is surrounded by speech bubbles and text, repeating the phrase “gotta say…” she looks terrified. Panel 2: she is fleeing the repeated “gotta say”s, yelling “you gotta live with yourselves, but I don’t gotta!” A note with a heart at the end reads “stop doing this I will not absolve you.”

Gotta say…

The scam is to conflate everything that computers do (or ever have done) with the current "AI" craze, so that the AI scam tech that nobody wants feels inevitable, rather than a tech bubble run by villains, that needs to crash immediately.

This whole year has just been seeing everyone I know making the best work of their lives and getting paid less and less for it until they’re working so hard to survive they can’t create anymore. I’m so so sick of it!!!

This remains the intractable problem with AI: You know it's wrong a too-large percent of the time, but you never know how it's going to be wrong today, so you have to verify everything, even things it was right about yesterday.

I’m Starting To Worry This Industry Has No Respect For The People Who Work In It Once your stock options were fully vested, did you sell off all the shares in your humanity?

I wrote this column and I'll just say that the original headline was much meaner. The piece itself, though, is still very angry and very mean, I assure you.

I was so delighted to see one (1) female city representative in DS2, which is… oof 😅

Don't spare a fucking cent on these people.

If you want your money to do good, donate to your local library, to someone's healthcare fund, to a food bank or shelter or SOME kind of mutual aid group.

Politicians don't need your money when they never do their jobs.

from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social:

GOP Congressman Thomas Massie says he has the votes to block Trump’s big bad bill in the House.

❗Call a Republican rep!

This bill hasn't passed. The only thing that changes is you call your house representative rather then your Senate Rep!

5calls.org/issue/hr1-on...

Fascinating! 😁

Can’t wait! 👀

Literally begging you to post about Just Some Stuff. We will see the news I absolutely promise. Twenty people will repost the same exact thing about the news. Only you can post about a turtle you saw

it's actually not possible to condense any set of knowledge into a paragraph, no matter how many writers you've plagiarized in the attempt