ElectroVagrant

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission.
[...]
Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.

A lot of folks are understandably paranoid about their data being stolen, lost, or monitored, and I count myself among them...Yet there's one situation many take for granted that jolts me up in the night in a cold sweat. Some would laugh at me for even sharing this, but when you feel a certain way, you just feel that way, y'know?

You may be thinking, "Oh, they must be afraid of getting doxed despite being a nobody, having a kink outed, or some sex video leaked" but honestly...It's more mundane than that.

No, what really gets me up at night? What wakes me in a tremble?

It's being bound in an office cubicle, forced to navigate the internet...Without adblockers...Without any custom extensions...And required to view and listen to and click through every last ad. If the ad leads to another ad? I have to go through every one, and I'm forced to act delighted, forced to share each one with...Friends? The clients and sites resemble email clients and social media sites but I don't recognize any of them. It doesn't matter, I'm forced to spread the sterile marketing material grinning like a maniac.

And then, once I've spread the slop around, what am I rewarded with? Whatever was buried beneath all the ads on the sites I'm being compelled to visit...Only for the site contents themselves to be nothing more than ads! When I try to get away, each site is the same process, and if I try to call out to someone, anyone else in this cubicle hell?

Some hyperactive suits show up outside trying to sell me on a different cubicle space, a promotion to the "executive" offices, so finally, realizing I'm trapped and no one here will help me...It finally dawns on me to try my personal phone...

Only even there I'm hounded by notifications to upgrade my mobile plan and reminded of the bill coming next month but that if I pay this or that way I can save so much more! Every attempt to call anyone is run through machine menus that only lead to more marketing material and it's only as I feel as though I'm losing my mind that I wake shuddering and I hear the echoes of clips stuck in a cacophonous loop...

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Share whatever music is helping you get the week going, whether it's chill or energetic or anything in-between!

As the video description notes, person making the video isn't a professional historian (and they're not from Japan), so some details may be off. Nevertheless, I thought it highlighted some interesting info to dig into and proposed an interesting possible contributing factor to hikikomori tendencies.

Was unaware Japan had also gotten tied up in eugenics garbage in the '40s for instance.

Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.

Anyone here happen to remember this, or watch it recently? I was browsing about trying to decide what to watch and its art style caught my eye. No clue who was behind it or what was up with it, and finally got around to watching it, and it was absolutely worth it!

It's a scifi flick about a couple of amnesiacs waking up naked outside a city with no clue how they found themselves there, but they're hungry and want some clothing so they just raid the city for both and things spiral out from there. It's almost nonstop action with only some brief breathers throughout and it's uh, well, mature and immature simultaneously, so nothing you'd want to show your kids or more, ah, reserved sorts.

If you're down for an absolutely ridiculous, relentless animated action movie, I'd easily recommend this. Very much put me in the mind of Shoot'Em Up (2007).

A few genuine signals quickly become noise as everyone tries to be heard, demanding more and louder signals to stand out.

The world fades into the background as your thoughts envelope you, and if you're a musician imagining your music, maybe it's closer to that than I'd have thought. =O

Waaay early on when cryptocurrencies were regarded as being possible alternative currencies it may have made sense, but now as they appear to have become more like extremely questionable investment products/securities, I'm left confused why anyone still has donation links for them alongside alternatives that provide, y'know, usable money (e.g. Ko-fi/Liberapay/etc.).

Are the donation links I'm seeing just a web artifact like the occasional Google+ share icon on some sites, or is there something more at play?

I'm still not sure if that's exactly how I want to put that question, but it's the best that comes to mind at the moment. This isn't asked as though you're totally oblivious to or avoidant of pop culture (see defining terms), but closer to like maybe someone on a casual diet or something.

It seems kind of hard to figure out how or what to relate to people with if it isn't through questions like, "Hey did you see [the game/recent big movie/etc.]?" or other times like, "Do you play or have you played [major game release]?"

You don't want to kill the conversation before it's even started, but it can be almost unavoidable when opened like that and you haven't yet experienced that bit of pop culture or whathaveyou. It gets a little more clunky if you may have (a little) and you didn't really click with it, but at least there's a little more room for conversation then.

I know nowadays we can generally look up almost anything we can think to ask, and failing that, ask others online, but some of my favorite memories are of just making up total nonsense to kill time and "explain" the origins of things.

Today I was wondering about the salt contents of the oceans, and while there's a bunch of brief videos that lightly explain it (something to do with deep sea magma vents and an exchange of minerals from deep in the earth as the water passes through these subterranean channels), it got me to thinking about what might've been a little more fun or might have been some people's myths.

The super simple silly story I came up with as an alternative was some ancient giants cracking wise and laughing so hard they cried and their tears formed the oceans.

So what are some stories you've come up with of either the natural or incredibly mundane for how things came to be or were made?