If looking at a picture is stealing, then I’m doing so every day when I browse a web page or Google Image Search.

Energy needs are a concern, but it was never a new problem. Our energy needs have been ramping up ever since we learned how to make electricity.

The ones who “contribute to human culture” are the 1% who are lucky enough to make a career out of making art or making music or whatever other creative talent they had. The problem is oversaturation, not AI. AI makes the problem worse, but so does the Internet and every other technological leap we’ve seen.

“Once it runs out of new content to plagiarize it will be unable to produce anything new.” Sounds like humans in a nutshell. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Creativity itself is not sustainable at the rate we consume it. Every new thing is drilled into the ground, and beaten into a bloody pulp, until we find the next new thing. This is not a new problem.

Capitalism is the enemy of humanity. Capitalists wield AI as a weapon, and we treat it as a scapegoat. We think that we can just get rid of AI, and then the enemy is gone. But, AI isn’t going away, and the same enemy we’ve always had still exists.

Use it to your advantage. Use local models. Support open source LLMs. The biggest failure of rich capitalist assholes is sheer, absolute overconfidence and an inability to relate to the people they are trying to fleece.

March 2025, WTF?

A long time ago, I used to work at a gas station when post-pay was allowed. All of the pumps required the cashier to activate them when somebody picked up the nozzle, but it was just expected that you hit the button to allow them to pump first. Most of the time, it’s just a normal transaction. Sometimes, you realized some asshole stole gas when the next guy was at the pump.

Enough of this happened, especially during periods of high gas prices, that my boss would say “prepay is required now”, and we’d tell them they have to come inside first. Eventually, paying with credit cards was so popular, and cash transactions were so rare, that nobody allowed post-pay anymore. There wasn’t a point, when the risk was people would steal gas, and it’s so easy to just stick a CC in a slot.

So, yeah, there’s locks on the pumps, but if post-pay is the norm, it doesn’t really matter.

I think we, as a society, need to do a better job separating out the real issue. The real issue isn’t AI. The issue is laziness. It’s the “slop” part, not the “AI” part.

This is just CGI arguments all over again. People fucking hated CGI back in the 90s and 2000s. They hated how it was a crutch for VFX, hated how people wouldn’t bother hiring an animal to put into a simple scene, but they’d spend $10K to make a CGI sheep for a few seconds. Practical effects were suddenly novel. People praised Mad Max: Fury Road for its practical effects, but completely ignored the fact that Fury Road very much had CGI effects throughout.

And that’s the secret: people stopped talking about CGI when it became invisible. If you can’t tell it’s CGI, then CGI has done its job. If you can’t tell it’s AI, then AI has done its job.

But, quite often, you can tell it’s AI, because lazy hacks pretend it’s supposed to replace things that it’s not made for. They spend five minutes trying to generate something, and call it “good enough”. The creative art/video models are getting there, but they aren’t there yet. It still requires a ton of work to get certain styles out of the uncanny valley, and inpainting isn’t perfect. Voice models are okay, and better than the old TTS ones, but they don’t know how to act out a scene well enough. 3D modeling might get somewhere, but it shouldn’t be used for primary characters.

This hype train needs to crash into a brick wall, so that we can use it in a more reserved manner. Some companies are quietly doing so, but that’s not what pushes the headlines.

The gameplay mechanic can be a bit trolly at times, purposely trying to trick you very often, but I had a lot of fun with this game. It just has a vibe that works a lot better than the jump scare bullshit horror games you find elsewhere.

A while back, I told myself that I wasn’t going to watch any YouTube video over an hour. But sometimes, really good YouTubers that I respected ended up putting out great two-hour material, like Folding Ideas or RLM or Grimbeard, and I just ended up watching these things, anyway. I might watch it for an hour, switch over to something else, and then watch the rest later. I just did that with the RLM Christmas video they just put out a few hours ago. It’s a hell of a lot better than the fleeting TikTok garbage that is geared towards maximum overstimulation and minimum education.

But, I also watch a lot of YouTube. And I still have my limits. I don’t understand these videos that go up to 5-6 hours. That’s just a lack of restraint in the editing department in my opinion.

You pump the gas, go in, tell the cashier the pump number, pay, go back and leave.

You’ve described post-pay pumps, which is how they used to do it 20-25 years ago. This is how pump theft happens: They pump the gas… aaaand run off.

And yet, she was still sentenced to five years in prison. Legal fees aren’t going to make up for that.

I mean, Michael Wolff is out there, with plenty of email evidence that he was a hack “journalist” that was practically a PR agent for Epstein. Why attack Brooks?

The Intercept, the same rag that ratted out Reality Winner, is lying with headlines? Say it ain’t so!

The Defense Department’s new ChatJAG turned out to be better than the human chain of command.

So, what the fuck are we waiting for?! You know what to do!

I’m pretty sure he was not detained. And, I’m pretty sure that just overstaying staying a visa is not actually a crime. I’m pretty sure that entering their car without a warrant for arrest like that is a crime, and gives a reasonable person fear of imminent bodily harm or death.

I’m pretty sure ICE will do whatever the fuck they want in this political climate.

I’m still patiently waiting for it to get released on Steam.

All things land on Steam eventually.

The first 30 minutes was one of the greatest world-building hooks ever made for a video game.

Control was fun, but let’s be real, it’s Smack Enemy with Chair Simulator with a little bit of gunplay mixed in.

If it’s an indie game, there’s a 95% chance you’ve never heard of the developer.

Further proof that copyrights, like patents, only benefit the rich.

Also, AI-generated material still falls into the monkey selfie legal realm, so they are going to have a helluva time trying to copyright what comes out.

Sometime after the hype finally dies down and the economic substructure finally decimates some of these companies, I really hope we’ll spend more time with portable and trainable models that isn’t this cloud-native madness we keep latching on to.

Some things bothered me, and seemed worth the removal, like “slave”. MySQL 8.0 deprecated it, and 8.4 removes it entirely.

But, the whole white/blacklist thing seemed like we’re making color associations that don’t really exist.

Half of people arrested in London may have undiagnosed ADHD, study finds

FTFY.