Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!

Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

Overpriced. It maybe used to be worth it, but these days all phones look and work the same anyway.

I used to be an iPhone person, bought a new one every two years from the iPhone 4 in 2010 until my iPhone SE broke in 2018. That was when iPhones jumped to being like $1000, so I thought fuck it and bought a $150 Android.

I was ready for a really rough transition but it turns out these days all apps are cross platform React Native with data stored in the cloud. Once you’re logged in literally everything is exactly the same.

Having tried to do something similar, “Nothing, Forever” must have some pretty serious coding to engineer the prompts and reconstruct tiny snippets of AI generated dialogue into a full meaningful script. I wonder if that’s enough for the creators to claim copyright.

Interestingly twitter’s “block” function did originally just mute people. I remember being blocked in around 2010 and it didn’t stop you following or reading their tweets. At first I was confused when people started requesting the true block functionality - what’s the point when tweets are publicly available to logged out users?

When you’ve never been harassed, like me or Musk or twitter’s original engineers, you don’t immediately understand that allowing (muted) interaction feeds the harassment and can still spread it around into a pile-on by non muted users.

Luckily most people get it now, but it looks like Musk wants to turn the clock back on it.