Darkly hilarious.

So is now a bad time to need to sell a 2020 RadCity 4?

This is horrifying.

I missed the detail about Disney+ using some of the Sora output, and that makes this whole thing even more about labor exploitation.

I disagree with the copyright framing here (it’s a labor issue), but otherwise, I think this is a good take.

Involving Disney, who infamously stiffed Alan Dean Foster on Star Wars royalties, so clearly demonstrates how the underlying issue with generative AI isn’t copyright, it’s labor.

If these numbers are right, the first (“small”) installment alone could potentially be higher than the total of all my paychecks between being hired at UK and my eventual retirement—and this is just a severance pay package.

Oof, what a read.

I think this is dumb, I feel strongly that “Mormonism” is larger than LDS institutions, and I’m pleased that the EFF has weighed in on this.

ProPublica does good work, and I haven’t been reading enough of them lately.

That this article talks up (and uncritically repeats) purported advantages of surveillance and only briefly acknowledges privacy concerns is a real failure. Reporting needs to do better so that we can walk back surveillance instead of sleepwalk into more of it. Gift link

Are we willing to pay this price in order to have some neat image generation tools? (I’m not.)

This sucks—and even more so because the Reddit company is willing to play nice with AI to get their pretty penny.

Wait what

Surely Elon “assassination coordinates” Musk is outraged that his own AI would do this. Right?

Things are piling up for Hegseth.

Very helpful context—especially as I consider writing a paper on Grokipedia.

Bookmarking this so that I can return to it and quote the man verbatim when necessary. Gift link.

Good on the publisher, and what a dumb world we live in. Also, “narco terrorist” reminds me of the poli sci class I had where we spent an entire day (week?) talking about the difficulty of clearly defining terrorism. It was mostly an abstract conversation, even with a GWOT backdrop, but I feel like it was preparing me to detect nonsense from this DoD.

Flock continues to suck.

Powerful read on the need for (and absence of) hope this Advent for immigrant Christians.

If one idea from Ellul has made the most impact on me, it’s his fierce criticism of attitudes of inevitability.

Some real cathartic rage in here.

I genuinely don’t know what legal liability for generative AI products should look like, but arguing that the onus was on the kid and his family because of TOS strikes me as incredibly shitty, not to mention falling back on “look, we have a mission to benefit humanity by building AI, have you taken that into account?”

This just makes me want to dig my heels in further.