Funny, I tweaked my Linux PC at work to look like Windows XP. It’s so cursed, I love it.

Y’know what? I’m gonna be even more of a furry now, just to spite you.

Well, I’ve tried using it for the following:

• Asking questions and looking up information in my job’s internal knowledgebase, using a specially designed LLM trained specifically on our public and internal knowledgebase. It repeatedly gave me confidently incorrect answers and linked nonexistent articles.

• Deducing a bit of Morse code that didn’t have any spaces in it, creating an ambiguous word. I figured it could iterate through the possible solutions easily enough, saving me the time of doing it myself. I gave up in frustration after it repeatedly gave answers that were incorrect from the very first letter.

If I ever get serious about looking for a new job, I’ll probably try and have it type up the first draft of a cover letter for me. With my luck, it’ll probably claim I was a combat veteran or some shit even though I’m a fat 40-something who’s never even talked with a recruitment officer in their life.

Oh, funny story–some of my coworkers at the job got the brilliant idea to use the company LLM to write responses to users for them. Needless to say, the users were NOT pleased to get messages signed “Company ChatGPT LLM.” Management put their foot down immediately that doing it was a fireable offense and made it clear that we tracked every request sent to our chatbot.

I haven’t accidentally deleted a bunch of data yet (which, considering 99% of my interaction with Linux is when I’m SSH’d into a user’s server, I am very paranoid about not doing), but I have run fsck on a volume without mounting the read/write flashcache with dirty blocks on it first.

Oops.

I bought a funny drawing for $20 from Goodwill showing toony animals in an 80s office setting. It was extremely dated, down to portraying a mainframe computer with eyes on it, but there’s something about it I find absolutely charming and it has a place of honor above my fireplace.

A few years later, I looked it up on a whim, and it turned out to be a limited-run lithograph called “Bits” by Robert Marble in 1983, and it was worth a hundred bucks then (closer to $250 now). There’s only 750 copies of it ever made, and mine is a relatively low number (122).

There’s no way in hell I’m selling it, but it’s a really neat little story!

It’s not that song, it’s a song that plays during the climax of End of Evangelion and has very strong themes of suicide and loss, played over an upbeat, lively tune. Just imagine these lyrics over something reminiscent of a Beatles song circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:

*I know, I know I’ve let you downz

I’ve been a fool to myself

I thought that I could

live for no one else

But now through all the hurt and pain

It’s time for me to respect

the ones you love

mean more than anything

So with sadness in my heart

(I) feel the best thing I could do

is end it all

and leave forever

what’s done is done it feels so bad

what once was happy now is sad

I’ll never love again

my world is ending

It’s one of my favorite scenes in animation, just because of how utterly fucked up everything is and how many layers there are to everything

The broader metaverse–mainly VRChat–had a brief boom during the pandemic, and several conventions (okay yeah it’s furries) held events in there instead since they were unable to hold in-person events. It’s largely faded away though as pandemic restrictions relaxed

Yeah, because having a chatbot that agrees to sell a car for $1 or writes a poem for customers trashing the company it represents is so much better than having something that can think for itself…

Ah, you’re this kind of idiot:

…who thinks that he’s making an actual point by comparing actual creative expression to heating food.

You’re also welcome to pick up a pen, or a tablet, or crayons, you don’t have to use just a pencil. But maybe non-toxic edible finger paint is more suitable for you in particular. :)

I wouldn’t even go that far. What’s the line between commercial and noncommercial use? Lots of people commission artists for custom made artwork and reference sheets for their characters; if someone instead uses AI art to replace that, is it still noncommercial even if that person never once makes a dime off the AI art? What if the artist makes a living drawing memes as a way to provide exposure and attract commissioners (rare, but they do exist)?

For me, the only ethical uses are entirely private cases where it’s never shared (e.g., an artist throwing out some ideas while looking for inspiration of how to draw something), and cases where it’s exclusively augmenting human work–for example, the feature in Photoshop to extend the background of a photo to create a panorama.

Did you have an actual point, or…?

I mean, I’m not the one who had the unmitigated gall and sense of entitlement to compare the thousands of hours each of the tens of thousands of artists (whose artwork was scraped by LLMs without so much as a by-your-leave) spent practicing to get good at artwork to the… what, ten? twenty? hours you took to get good at “prompt engineering.” Nor did I have the absolute nerve to then complain about how you have it SO ROUGH because you have to “fiddle with Photoshop” but all the mean people mock all your hard effort!

Hint: You’re being mocked because you deserve to be mocked. At best, AI “artists” like yourself are lazily piggybacking off the literal millions of collective man-hours of labor that actual artists spent honing their talent, and trying to pass off the creative equivalent of a boneless chicken nugget shaped like a dinosaur as being of worthy of the same respect as a beef wellington, or at least a damn good burger.

I hate hate hate hate it, I’d be happy if they were all banned, tbh.

This is prolly gonna be a hot take but the only reason I don’t block AI art communities is so that I can downvote them whenever I see an AI art post. Yes, I’m that petty, and no, I don’t give a shit.

Pick up a pen and learn to draw?

Still orders of magnitude less effort than actually learning to draw for yourself and making something actually creative

But please do go on about how your pink slime regurgitated by an LLM trained on stolen artwork scraped from hundreds of thousands of actual artists requires so much effort and creativity

Nah, I got that, you’re all Gucci

Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is “parsing and interpreting logs” sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren’t any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.

First, it’s important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you’re set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they’d be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.

It’s more work since you’re building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it’s overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.