I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Clarification: revenue from advertising their own paid services, not revenue from selling ad space to third parties

People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:

Traffic is down 40%

This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

As Cory Doctorow says: code is a liability, not an asset

One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

I was once a fool like you :)

Mike McShaffry’s book “Game Coding Complete” is a good guide to the practical side of using a game engine IRL to get things done.

It’ll give you a good idea of how things should be shaped in order to be useful, and some things you can “skip ahead” to. Off-the-shelf engines have to be extremely general in order to be flexible enough to be useful to many customers, so game devs have to put in the effort to make them more specific. You’ll have to start off by being specific, if you have any chance of actually finishing something.

Eberly’s book “3D Game Engine Architecture” deals with the nuts and bolts, the rigorous academic engineering stuff. It’s pretty solid, but it’s aimed at making a general-purpose engine, which is beyond the scope of a one-person project.

Backing up though… You don’t have any language or library opinions? You might need 5-10 years of experience doing general programming (or game dev) before you can sustainably tackle this, or else you’re likely to paint yourself into a corner.

Edit: Probably the biggest PITA with game engine dev is testing. If you’re not already an expert in setting up test harnesses at multiple levels of detail, you’re gonna find it impossible to keep moving after a few months.

Good luck!

Yeah… Linear increases in performance appear to require exponentially more data, hardware, and energy.

Meanwhile, the big companies are passing around the same $100bn IOU, amortizing GPUs on 6-year schedules but burning them out in months, using those same GPUs as collateral on massive loans, and spending based on an ever-accelerating number of data centers which are not guaranteed to get built or receive sufficient power.

I like the way Ted Chiang puts it:

Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

There’s nothing magical or mystical about writing, but it involves more than placing an existing document on an unreliable photocopier and pressing the Print button.

I think our materialist culture forgets that minds exist. The output from writing something is not just “the thing you wrote”, but also your thoughts about the thing you wrote.

Money-making is an orthogonal issue. LLMs subvert engagement with open source projects, which is important for their health whether or not there’s anyone trying to monetize that engagement.

AI is destroying the human-to-human connections that produced the artifacts that made AI function in the first place.

Fuck AI.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

That is wild.

The vending company factors this into the prices they charge for the items, the amount they spend on the machine to ensure accuracy, and the amount they pay the people who stock the machines to do it properly.

If you take it upon yourself to unilaterally re-balance the equation, you’re not being noble, you’re just a fool.

Headline: X disables CSAM generator

look inside

X monetizes CSAM generator

Decorated veteran, astronaut, and senator… telling armed forces to follow the Constitution… is “seditious”…

Probably make a legit retro emulation setup

Jensen, of course, has no interest in advancing American labor. He just wants Trump to say the government will commit to spending several billion dollars on data center buildouts.

Then the AI stonks will get back to filling their garages with Herbalife that’s about to expire warehouses with GPUs that will be outdated before there’s anywhere to plug them in.

No fun allowed

In 2019, the total cost of every robbery in the country was $482 million.

The cost of wage theft was more than 100 times that number.

The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program recorded 267,988 robberies in 2019. Those robberies cost businesses and the public $482 million in total losses. But wage theft costs workers $50 billion every year. And most of the time, employers get away with stealing money from their employees.

What is wage theft? Wage theft means underpaying workers. It can take several forms, including paying less than the minimum wage, withholding overtime pay, or not compensating workers for all of their work hours.

Imagine you work at a minimum wage job. But your company asks you to show up 30 minutes before the store opens every morning to prep – without paying you for that time. Over the course of a year, you’ve logged more than 100 unpaid hours of work. That’s wage theft.

whistleblower

Conceptual analysis of proximity isn’t exactly what I expected to see when I joined Lemmy

But it’s… 😎 close

Gamehub Lite is pretty wild. It does take some fiddling, but it’s amazing how well (and relatively easily) you can get x86 Windows games to run on a $200 ARM Android device.

I’m 12/13 so far on getting games to work at an acceptable level.

Inexplicably, Vampire Survivors causes the entire device to crash. I guess they pull some pretty silly memory tricks to keep that game responsive with potentially hundreds of thousands of projectiles, so maybe it’s not so surprising.