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Riskable

@ riskable @programming.dev

Posts
3
Comments
546
Joined
3 yr. ago

Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • AI boom has caused same CO2 emissions in 2025 as New York City, report claims

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  • 8% of total global aviation emissions doesn't put it in second place. It's not even in the top 100. I don't think it ever will be... Because building huge data centers takes years and by the time there's enough data centers to make a huge dent, the previous AI data centers will have been used to make fusion power a reality.

    Today's fusion reactor designs were all made thanks to AI. The kind running in big data centers.

    It takes a lot of computing power to simulate fusion reactor designs!

  • Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games

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  • I use gen AI every day and I find it extremely useful. But there's degrees to every model's effectiveness. For example, I have a wide selection of AI models (for coding) at my disposal from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc and nearly every open source model that exists. If I want to do something simple like change a light theme (CSS) to a dark one, I can do that with gpt5-mini, gpt-oss:120b or any of the other fast/cheap models... Because it's a simple task.

    If I need to do something complicated that requires a lot of planning and architecture, I'm going to use the best model(s) available for that sort of thing (currently, Claude Sonnet/Opus or Gemini Pro... The new 3.0 version; old 2.5 sucked ass). Even then I will take a skeptical view of everything it generates and make sure my prompts are only telling it to do one little thing at a time, verifying everything at each step.

    What I'm saying is that AI is an effective tool depending on the use case/complexity. Do I trust the big game publishers to use AI effectively like this? FUCK NO. Huge negative response to that question.

    Here's how I suspect that they'll use generative AI:

    • Instead of using a gen AI model to interpolate steps between frames (which is most effective at 2D or 2.5D stuff), they will use a video model to generate the whole thing from scratch, 8-10 second clips at a time. Complete with all the inconsistencies and random bullshit that it creates. The person in charge will slap a "good enough" sticker on it and it'll ship like that.
    • Instead of viewing the code generated by AI with a critical eye, they will merely rely on basic unit tests and similar. If it passes the test, it'll ship. We can expect loads of "how did this even happen?" bugs from that in the near future (not just in games).
    • Instead of using image models to generate or improve things like textures (so they line up properly), they'll have them generate whole scenes. Because that saves time and time is money! And that's all that matters to them. Even though there will be absolutely insane and obvious inconsistencies that piss off gamers.
    • Instead of paying people to use AI to help them translate text, they'll just throw the text at the AI and call it a day. With no verification or improvements by humans whatsoever.
    • They'll pay 3rd parties for things like "AI cheat checking" and it will ban people left and right who were not cheating but will do nothing to stop actual cheaters (just like every anti-cheat that ever existed).
    • They will use AI bots for astroturfing and ad campaigns.
    • They will use poorly-made AI chat bots for completely unhelpful, useless support. People will jailbreak these and use them for even more nefarious purposes inside of games (because security folks won't be paying as much attention in that space).

    There's a lot of room in gaming for fun and useful generative AI but folks like Tim Sweeney will absolutely be choosing the villain route.

  • I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything?

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  • You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That's a counterfeit.

    Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It's counterfeitting. That is it's own category of law.

    It's also a violation of the owner's copyright but let's talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone's work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It's a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it's neither here nor there.

    The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.

  • I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything?

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  • Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!

    You would download a car!

    If piracy was stealing, we'd all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.

    Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could've been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.

    When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That's it! That's all it does.

    How can that be considered "stealing"‽ It's absurd.

  • I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything?

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  • That's not "upscaling". That's having the AI color it in for you. Like a comic artist who has a colorer (person that literally does that).

    Upscaling just makes the image bigger (resolution-wise). It uses the same exact technology as regular AI image generation though 🤷

    There's degrees to everything. AI haters are at the point where they're arguing with digital artists over what counts as art and it's getting insane.

  • I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything?

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  • Don't say, "stolen". It's the wrong word. "Copied" is closer but really, "trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet" is more accurate but doesn't sound sinister.

    When you steal something, the original owner doesn't have it anymore. AIs aren't stealing anything. They're sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren't really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high "score" when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc... anything that was used to train the AI).

    Someone figured out that there's so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI's training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That's because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.

    Nobody's stuff is being stolen.

  • Pam Bondi wants the government to create cash bounties for turning in trans equality activists - LGBTQ Nation

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  • You know it was a joke, right? 😀

    Pam Bondi couldn't put together a Lego set let alone a cash bounty system.

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    Senators count the shady ways data centers pass energy costs on to Americans

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  • Regulate data centers already! Make it mandatory that they be self-powered by renewable energy. Problem solved.

  • Pam Bondi wants the government to create cash bounties for turning in trans equality activists - LGBTQ Nation

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  • Woah! How much money we talking about? If anyone wants to split it with me, you can "turn me in" 👍

    I'll be happy to explain my incredibly boring, not even remotely illegal activities. Can't say them out loud here, though. That's for the FBI to fall asleep to 🙂‍↕️

    I wonder how many times we can get the money? "Ugh, not you again! Why are we paying people for this‽"

  • Removed

    What steps can be taken to prevent AI training and scraping of my public facing website?

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  • We learned this lesson in the 90s: If you put something on the (public) Internet, assume it will be scraped (and copied and used in various ways without your consent). If you don't want that, don't put it on the Internet.

    There's all sorts of clever things you can do to prevent scraping but none of them are 100% effective and all have negative tradeoffs.

    For reference, the big AI players aren't scraping the Internet to train their LLMs anymore. That creates too many problems, not the least of which is making yourself vulnerable to poisoning. If an AI is scraping your content at this point it's either amateurs or they're just indexing it like Google would (or both) so the AI knows where to find it without having to rely on 3rd parties like Google.

    Remember: Scraping the Internet is everyone's right. Trying to stop it is futile and only benefits the biggest of the big search engines/companies.

  • Dawson County, Nebraska voted for Trump. And now 1/3 of them lost their job

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  • This seems more like a story about global warming killing jobs than anything else.

    Of course, Trump's obscenely pro-oil stance is very Leopards Eating Faces.

  • Towards a Deeper Understanding of Our Age of Monsters and Predators

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  • So basically... There's was no justice for rich people in the past either.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.

  • Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

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  • It's not a shame. Have you tried this? Try it now! It only takes a minute.

    Test a bunch of images against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Ask it if the image was AI-generated. I think you'll be surprised.

    Gemini is the current king of that sort of image analysis but the others should do well too.

    What do you think the experts use? LOL! They're going to run an image through the same exact process that the chatbots would use plus some additional steps if they didn't find anything obvious on the first pass.

  • Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

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  • I don't think it's irresponsible to suggest to readers that they can use an AI chatbot to examine any given image to see if it was AI-generated. Even the lowest-performing multi-model chatbots (e.g. Grok and ChatGPT) can do that pretty effectively.

    Also: Why stop at one? Try a whole bunch! Especially if you're a reporter working for the BBC!

    It's not like they give an answer, "yes: Definitely fake" or "no: Definitely real." They will analyze the image and give you some information about it such as tell-tale signs that an image could have been faked.

    But why speculate? Try it right fucking now: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini (the current king at such things BTW... For the next month at least hahaha) if any given image is fake. It only takes a minute or two to test it out with a bunch of images!

    Then come back and tell us that's irresponsible with some screenshots demonstrating why.

  • Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

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  • Or like isn't the UK the most surveiled country with their camera system?

    Ahahah! That's a good one!

    You think all those cameras are accessible to everyone or even the municipal authorities? Think again!

    All those cameras are mostly useless—even for law enforcement (the only ones with access). It's not like anyone is watching them in real time and the recordings—if they even have any—are like any IT request: Open a ticket and wait. How long? I have no idea.

    Try it: If you live in the UK, find some camera in a public location and call the police to ask them, "is there an accident at (location camera is directly pointing at)?"

    They will ask you all sorts of questions before answering you (just tell them you heard it through the grapevine or something) but ultimately, they will send someone out to investigate because accessing the camera is too much of a pain in the ass.

    It's the same situation here in the US. I know because the UK uses the same damned cameras and recording tech. It sucks! They're always looking for ways to make it easier to use and every rollout of new software actually makes it harder and more complicated!

    How easy is the ticket system at your work? Now throw in dozens of extra government-mandated fields 🤣

    Never forget: The UK invented bureaucracy and needles paperwork!

  • How do you overcome writer's block?

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  • Think about all the absolutely terrible writing that's out there. Writing that people are reading because they feel like they've read everything else in their fetish genre already.

    You can do better than that! Surely!

    It's so bad that people are resorting to using AI to write (awful) stories for them. These stories don't make any sense yet people read them anyway. Why? Because they ran out of the other stuff they like in their little fetish genre.

    Tell your story! I'm positive someone will be interested in it.

    I recently wrote a novel for a writing contest: https://www.honeyfeed.fm/novels/22194

    Many people thought it was funny and entertaining but most stopped reading after the second or third chapter. The people that made it all the way to the end expressed an attitude like, "Finally! A story that's actually unique!" And that's exactly why I wrote it! Because I'm sick of "the same old shit" (in the isekai genre) 🤣

    Write your story for you and be satisfied 👍

  • Debate sparks after OU student's essay citing Bible gets failing grade

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  • Her problem is she cited the wrong bible!

    Clearly, she should've cited the real bible that has the true word of the gods in it. Not that atheist Christian bible!

    Remember: If you don't believe in my gods, you're an atheist!

  • The Supreme Court Is About to Hear a Case That Could Rewrite Internet Access

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  • I hope the SCOTUS justices aren't using 3-strikes-you're-out ISPs! All it would take is three random DMCA takedown notices and they'd lose Internet.

  • What's your power? Choose wisely.

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