Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed. Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either. The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!” Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you. He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”

-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023

ok you see it goes like this: turn on phone. navigate to browser app. open browser app. navigate to school email--oh it logged me out. log in. it has been more than 12 hours so i need to verify myself with push duo 2 factor authentication. swipe down to approve the notification--oh I have to open the app. open duo 2 factor authetication app. approve. navigate back to web browser. wait for email to load. immedietly close the app turn off my phone and walk into the sea

i cant believe so many leftists on this site believe tht anyone anti ai (not pro IP laws just anti ai) is a dumb luddite scared of new tech and cant at all be people concerned abt how automation is stripping away the minimal ability artists had to survive under capitalism

hell im worried abt the fact tht like every AI art program designer has like also been used to better face recognition software and explicitly started at a time in which the state realized its face rec software was lacking when it came to stuff like masks

like? why is it controversial tht those programs and their creators are vile pieces of shit? yeah if we lived in a post capitalist society ai art could be a fun new way of doing things but rn its actively costing artists their jobs and increasing the reach of the security state

Some of the aesthetics I want to introduce to my space opera setting just aren't possible anymore. Beto reading an paper magazine issue of Astronaútica Popular, old heavy CRT monitors (especially true when spaceships need to save weight), Ragua playing around with an old hand-held console, steel welded rockets. On one hand, it's also a bit nonsensical to expect realism in this way; all old sci-fi looks quaint and obsolete to us, except perhaps for the cyberpunk genre which remains surprisingly prescient, so no matter what I invent, it will be obsolete so I might say fuck it and go with a retro style anyways. On the other hand, it does requires less suspension of disbelief that daily life can remain mostly as it is, rather than go back to say, paper magazines and single use electronics.

It's just... I hate writing about using electronics because that's what I do all day. Writing my characters pulling a cellphone to solve their daily problems (as I did today multiple times) just clashes with me. A scene of Beto reading the latest astronautic news on his smartphone feels less authentic, if it makes sense, that him reading a magazine. Why is that?

The focus is still on the adventure and the "costumbrismo" (in quotes because it's not), the daily life of a rugged pilot in the space frontier who suddenly has to deal with a new person in his life. I don't want to write about him scrolling through his social media timeline, I want to write about him landing the ship on a remote airfield and basking under the light of unknown moons while drinking tereré. Even the presence of contemporary electronics just sorts of bothers me.

i'm sure someone has said this more articulately than me but i feel like a lot of the people who defend AI art genuinely don't understand what AI can do. i won't pretend that I fully understand. it's like the way people compared the first cars to "carts with no horse"; it allowed them to understand the automobile but that is in no way an accurate description of what a car is capable of, especially nowadays.

i don't like the argument that it's fine for AI to "learn from artists and writers because that's what people do" because that isn't accurate at all. the human brain isn't capable of doing what an AI does. human brains are not capable of synthesizing tens of thousands of images in a fraction of a second and mashing that into whatever parameters have been set. there's no organic creative process. AI is not a person. it doesn't feel or make its own decisions. it's a bunch of lines of code with no intrinsic values or unique perspectives beyond the parameters that an actual human has to set.

i think there's something to the conversation about accessibility and what AI can do for people with disabilities. but you can't ignore the ethical problems with how AI models are being used today. where are these companies getting the physical materials for their computing hardware? they're not ethically sourced, i can tell you that. who's training these models in the first place? are they getting paid fair wages? (no. the answer is no.) AI just isn't ethical on the back end, and i disagree with people who say the material it produces is going to be some benefit to society.

it just makes me mad because i never consented to having my data scraped. i work really hard as a writer and it makes me feel disposable and unappreciated to see people produce paragraphs of text with the click of a button. sometimes you have to work hard to make things. it's good to work hard. i genuinely don't feel that there's a need for AI in creative mediums. i certainly don't want it here.

FUCK ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW

turns out that Obsidian has a bug on Linux

It deletes files permanently instead of sending them to .local/share/Trash/files

Guess who has accidentally deleted all their bg3 wips

(I could rescue A Bludgeon to My Shrines and a Lakrissa/Nocturne/Alfira one thanks to the Obsidian version history, at least)

I hadn't updated the backup repo in 5 months, I think something in the git plugin broke and I didn't worry too much since, well, if I accidentally deleted them there was always the trash right?

WELL, TURNS OUT THAT I HAVE BEEN BETRAYED AND BACKSTABBED

life in 2023 is really just a perpetual motion machine of repeated input that makes you go "they were so busy wondering if they could, they didn't even stop to think about whether they should"

in a moment of weakness i redownloaded tiktok and discovered it was even stupider than it was when i left. i was worried i’d get re-addicted to it but honestly the whole app is so annoying that it completely bypassed my addictive personality and i deleted it in less than an hour

someone help me, my blorbos are dragging me out of bed with an idea every time I try to sleep

ninjago fam i'm looking at you

[blorbo thoughts below]

I ask that my blorboposting is not derailed.

remember the early internet, when not every single website forced you to sign up for an account

remember a few years ago when you'd sign in and all you had to do was enter a username and password

& now it's like you enter your username and password and then they ask you a security question and then they send a code to your email and it's a fucking gamble if the code will even actually be sent and sometimes you just straight up don't even enter a password they send a code to your email to log you in and sometimes you HAVE to have your phone right next to you because they'll text or even call you to tell you the security authentication code and they tell us that this is more secure and somehow "better" than these fucking companies paying people more so that their security will be tighter. I hate it here I hate it here I hate it here

That whole essay might be the last thing I post here for a bit considering my weary and aged computer is literally in the process of breaking as we speak

Thus: Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no alternative,” a polite way of saying “Resistance is futile,” or, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” This is inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change. It’s the opposite of science fiction. As a science fiction writer, my job is to imagine alternatives. “There is no alternative” is a demand pretending to be an observation: “stop trying to think of an alternative.” At its best, science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s an important exercise, maybe the important exercise. It’s the method by which we seize the means of computation for the betterment of the human race, not the immortal, rapacious colony organisms we call “limited liability companies,” to whom we represent inconvenient gut-flora, and which are rendering the only planet in the universe capable of sustaining human life unfit for human habitation.

-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023

If the entire internet went dark tomorrow, what would you lose? What would you lose that you can't afford to lose? How do you save it?

Trying to learn how to actually take advantage of a digital canvas

dipping my toe into fandom discourse here, which is never a great idea, but—i really am baffled by the contingent of fans who apparently want AO3 to not only denounce but ban AI-generated works, as if there were any reliable way to distinguish between mediocre writing produced by a human and mediocre writing produced by an AI…?

Luddites

Holding back the AI of today, will stop the space exploration of tomorrow. But it sure will make some billionaires even bigger billionaires. Which would you prefer? Being chained to the past will just make you slaves in the future.