@off_grid_living@twtxt.net I use Opera. It comes with some basic ad blocker, built in. It’s far from a good browser, it’s just what I’ve always used and I’m too lazy to switch.

It’s probably the same with most browsers on Windows, unless you harden them through settings and extensions.

The Nostr protocol really is a cryptobros wet dream. On Amethyst (the Android client), every account automatically gets a pointless blue checkmark - before it even has a name. You get the promise of free speech, in the marketing, but in reality, that predictably translates to bots, spamming vague porn ads and other suspicious links, new users begging for followers for a follow in return and most prominent of all, the people utilizing the great feature, to beg for cryptocoin change, without doing anything else and not getting any.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci @movq@www.uninformativ.de I for ones was just silently confused, I’m not in the IRC, so whatever it was - therefore I didn’t see it. I also think it’s important to add, that no group, event or action, should be considered “protected from humor”.

It’s a feeling, hard to describe, but the Internet went for mostly toxic, with only a few sanitized places, to now almost fully sanitized. It ruined the fun.

The Fediverse fractured, mostly because some percentage of users, had to find a way to silence those offensive to them, for the entirety of their instance. I really don’t want this place, taking the same path.

@prologic@twtxt.net 24HourOps - obviously 😏

https://youtu.be/vxgdHgMPP3k

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net By more extreme measures, I meant the things, that Tor browser does. For all that is holy, or unholy, please don’t ever return to Internet Explorer - it has destroyed the sanity of enough web developers as is, we can’t risk it’s user numbers ever increasing - never!

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Even back when I still somewhat cared about the site, the API was lacking (and that’s putting it extremely nicely). In addition to lacking the support for many, if not all, new features, the alternative clients, relying on this not so great API, also had a very strict, hard limit of accounts, allowed to use them. That’s why these clients usually didn’t last long, or had a million different versions and charged their users to make those few user slots last.

Some might have had a better contract (don’t know if that was just a rumor, or not), but now with Elon taking over, none of it matters - they’ll all go away now. Sure, it might force people to use the ugly default app and see the ads, that it is full of, but I hope the users aren’t this brain-dead and that it’ll have a negative effect on the company, in the long-run.

Surely, there must have been a better solution, than shutting it all down. If the API was updated and ads included, in the alternative clients, or it had some other from of monetization, Elon could have removed the hard user limits instead and be seen as the good guy, like he was often in the past.

@prologic@twtxt.net “outsourcing” and “restructuring” are the hot new corpo buzzwords these days. The shirt economy and endless inflation we find ourselves in, probably isn’t helping it either.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net There is a difference, between scraped data, used for AI training and the advertising companies, who track your behavior online, across sites, to better target you, with more relevant advertisements. These tools also give companies that use this technology, statistics about how people use their sites, so they can deduce, what needs to be changed, to increase their profits - but no AI is involved in any of that yet.

There might not be much one can do, to prevent what they publish online, from being scraped, to make some AI, but you can fight against targeted advertising and corporate analytic, by hardening your browser.
I think it’s best to combine things like: Using adblockers, scriptblockers/filters, incognito modes, settings that delete everything, when the browser is closed, not allowing unnecessary cookies, logging out of services, right after you’re done using them (unless you are sure, they don’t track you).

There are more extreme measures too, but those are a bit of an overkill, for normal web browsing, in my opinion.

@prologic@twtxt.net Google scanned all kind of books, to improve their search results - letting people find books and studies, based on any of the text in them, while not having the content of the books freely available, for obvious legal reasons.

Despite only doing that, it still resulted in a big lawsuit, that dragged on forever, then settled, only to be brought back to court again. Eventually Google won, more or less because their service did more good, than harm, for both book sales and people looking for books to do book things with.

This case was also recently brought up by many, when some artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, for their AI, trained, using copyrighted images.

This is just a “brief” and maybe not entirely accurate summary, mostly based on this stream, by Uncivil Law, who is a real lawyer and surely more qualified to talk about this, than I am: https://www.youtube.com/live/CwTWwvLRdeo

@akoizumi@social.kyoko-project.wer.ee So you’re now in favor of it?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess unusual garbage in places, where one wouldn’t expect it, is a problem everywhere. Still find it hard to understand, as even if you don’t care about nature and animals living there, in any way, it still takes a lot of effort, to bring the furniture, car parts and heaps of other junk there.

I also doubt the average perso doing this, is carrying washing machines into forests by hand and when you’re already driving around with it, it’s probably simpler, to just dispose of it legally. In many cases it might also be closer, or get you a bit of money, for the scrap metal.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net No problem. The dataset the site searches, is only comprised of images, with very detailed text descriptions attached to them, as that’s something all images used for AI training need. Therefore I think this site works more based on those descriptions, than it does recognizing the text on the images themselves. 🤔

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net There is not much one can do, other than avoid putting any of it on places, that get scraped frequently or engage in data harvesting, for some other purposes.

You can also check the site https://haveibeentrained.com . There you can see, if any of your images are already in the scraped datasets, used to train AI. If they are, you can request them, to be removed.

@jlj@twt.nfld.uk Just wait until you make it into one of those cursed forest-ish areas, that’s where the old furniture, electronics and car parts begin.

Or maybe that only happens here. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think banning it, is the right solution, as it can be quite helpful, when used the right way. I just think the works produced, should never be able to get copyrighted or monetized in similar ways. The double standard between music and images should also be addressed and either every artist gets fair compensation, or none of them do.

Sites should also decide, if they want to be an image board, or a portfolio site for artists and approach the situation accordingly, rather than trying to play both sides and failing.

Lastly, the situation should be used, to bring awareness to user agreements and the things companies put in there. Many of them already include, giving the company the right to use your work (be it code or art) to train some proprietary AI (GitHub, everything Adobe, DeviantArt…).
This is where it comes full circle, back to the subscription based apps. They change their agreements all the time and always add these things, that let them monetize your data, so they get you to be the product, like the “free” ones, but they get to charge you for it too.

@prologic@twtxt.net I understand people falling for “free” software, especially if it’s something you’re almost never using, but subscription services still confuse me.

How can someone be unwilling, to pay for a thing once, but happy to lower their monthly income for the foreseeable future, for it?

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I don’t think there even is an equivalent for other artists, you’d have to get your own team of lawyers with powerful connections. Good luck doing that with (in comparison) next to no income.

What I also find funny, is how music streaming services are a normal thing, most people use theses days. You couldn’t sell people a subscription, to look at all the images. In some cases, you’re even expected to pay, for the privilege of people seeing your art. cough cough Facebook pages cough cough

This interesting video about AI art, just came out: https://youtu.be/nIRbN52PA0o

I already knew, most of what it was talking about, but found it interesting, that no company, developing music generating AI, was ever brave enough to use copyrighted music, for training. They all seen to have no problem, doing it with images.

It’s not surprising, I’ve already expected it to be the case. It just amazes me, how they find a way to incorporate the “music is worth money, images are not” bias into everything.

It’s more so a battle of lawyers, than artists at this point - or perhaps it always has been. With the corporations, using the garbage flat art and “nothing music*” for their interests and letting stupid and underpaid artists, eat the (usually deserved) backlash for it.

*nothing music/corporate music is a whole other chapter itself, if anyone wants to find out more about that, this is a good start: https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI

@prologic@twtxt.net Are you doing all your work, on this tiny keyboard? 🥴

I’m starting to notice replies to Tweets, after Elon took over, are now sorted in this way:
1)checkmarks
2)non-checkmark other checkmarks replied to mixed with checkmarks
3)non-checkmarks

We just unlocked the segregation ending, for “our online public square”.

@prologic@twtxt.net At least when it comes to personal use, it also depends on how much data you’re storing, how important it is and how much you’re fine with using dirty tactics.

For a lot of people the free options are enough, or the combination of them, at least. Neither is there anything, preventing you, from using alts on those services (other than the impracticality, of having everything on a different account).

For data you want to share, but don’t mind loosing, there’s also sites, that let you forcefully connect your account to some companys paid Google storage, that you can then use, until they find and kick you, or cancel their subscription - but they can never get your OG Google account banned for doing this.

Lastly there’s also Chinese companies, that let you save upto 1 or 2 TB, in return for most likely mining that data, having it linked to some adware and wanting money for faster download speeds. These services can also be exploited to get those paid speeds and features for free and the ability to use it without the adware, making it usable, if you don’t care if the data is private.

So you can have all the cloud you want, for free. What you pay for is privacy (or the illusion of it), convenience and the peace in mind, that you’re not a “cloud pirate”.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m still using the relatively old version of the Go/Flutter app and other than the two spaces at the start of a new reply, it being impossible to select text properly (while writing it) and the looping timelines, I don’t see any serious problems with it.

I don’t think it needs all the new features, fixing what’s broken, finishing the rebrand to Yarn and making it easier to download, would be more than enough.

There’s also the fact that while sending this reply, for the first time, the app got stuck in an infinite loading loop. Because text editing is broken, the best I could do was screenshot what I wrote - then OCR it back into text.

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s not an unpopular opinion, it’s one shared by most people with a brain, most likely including the majority of the Apache people - if anyone actually asked them.

The problem is that the minority, interested in censoring the history, speech and opinions allowed always complains louder and is backed by the media, owned by those, that this benefits in some way.