Maitland

It’s my birthday, if you needed an excuse to donate to KUT’s membership drive: www.kut.org/support-kut

Or vote: www.votetexas.gov/voting/where...

Well, it’s a primary for an election for a federal office.

It’s an election for a federal office.

Federal

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Please don't post photos of dead children, or videos of dead children, or yell DONT LOOK AWAY. You are sick. Log off. Touch grass. You have PTSD and are inflicting it on us all. If you are not in media/ a conflict researcher/ etc you do NOT need to consume Horrors. Blocking lots right now.

"This may be the year when we finally come face-to-face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it –that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesman with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." —Hunter S. Thompson

Good morning

Btw, Dems who “boycotted” it? Nobody noticed. Nobody cares when you *don’t* show up. Your whole job is to show up.

You didn’t ask, but my review of this year’s SOTU:

Boring. Needed editing. Would have been far more interesting if the rest of the Dems had taken a page out of Al Green’s book. Or even just rolled their eyes and walked out once he started into the nonsense.

Staying sane.

Happy #TwinPeaks Day!

I agree with this! The other thing it doesn’t acknowledge is the economic realities of how these industries work. If AAA goes away, that doesn’t free up funding for indies. That means investors look at other markets.

A rising tide lifts all boats. We’re in this together.

why does code review software need heart reactions? i don’t *love* someone’s suggestion to pass by const ref here i don’t want to offer them emotional support

Recently replaced my work headset with a standalone mic and

1) how liberating!
2) wow my head looks really different without headphones?
3) holy crap I’ve been staring at my own face for multiple hours a day for 6 years this cannot be healthy

This fuckin guy

One could argue that the alteration of a skin tone and facial expression has minor impact, but the escalating attempts of this government to convince us not to believe our own eyes needs to be monitored closely.

The entire state is iced over and yet the ice trays in the freezer are empty. How could this be? 🤨

Is that the one with the baby? My sister and I made it a point to visit each other to watch them all in theater.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth”

-1984

Anyway, I should say that Mike is not wrong, and the hype is definitely overhyped. I think it’s very unlikely that Larian would be able to train a full LLM before D3 comes out, but could they make an SLM trained on Gutenberg and their stuff? Maybe!

Art, though, harder for me to imagine.

Like if I posted a poem under CC in 2005, thinking people could use it for motivational posters or in the prelude to their website or something else human made… it’s not like I would have had a licensing option that excluded model training, so is it ethical to use it in that way? Idk

I think there are probably still some questionable elements here. Climate impact, as I mentioned, but also… people who published their work under a CC license before LLMs may have technically granted permission, but they may not have had the prescience to know what they were agreeing *to*.

They almost certainly don’t have enough data to train an LLM from scratch, but they don’t need general AI, just a specialized case, so I wonder if, in theory, they could use one of the models trained on public and Creative Commons data to create an SLM for their narrative specifically.

I think it’s the same thing. Larian did an AMA on Reddit, and the CEO said that if they used AI for assets, it would only be if it was 100% ethically trained. I won’t claim to have read the whole AMA, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ND said something too.

Being employed primarily as a programmer, my view on this is probably different from artists or writers, but maybe not that different. It’s hard for me to object to a studio benefiting from my code as training data years after I left, but I do not want MS using my GitHub, for example.

It doesn’t alleviate the climate concerns, of course, and they certainly don’t have enough to train a general model, but a highly specialized dialogue generator… between D:OS1+2 and BG3, maybe they have enough.

Definitely makes you think about what it means for your employer to own your work tho.

I do wonder if Larian could pull off a somewhat ethical use of genAI using something like Common Pile or Common Corpus as a basis for a specific SLM. They have loads of internal narrative text to train on if they’ve already got a foundational layer that has built a basic vocabulary.

Video: Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis An analysis of footage from three camera angles show that the vehicle appears to be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire.

Following on to this, the NYTimes has provided an even more conclusive analysis today (warning, extremely triggering): www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

We must give journalists time if we expect quality work.

As we continue to press for justice for Renee Good, let us not forget that ICE shot two more people the next day in Portland.

They are emboldened, and it is important that we recognize and emphasize that this is not an isolated incident.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this one crosses your feed a few times this year. A good poem for the times:

“Please Call Me by My True Names” by Thích Nhât Hąnh

sacredpoetryproject.com/please-call-...

Please, I hope this does not read as a blanket absolution for journalists who sit back and echo the state-sanctioned narrative without doing the work. The whole point is that they need time to do that work.