NotAwfulTech

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20241206205437/https://www.404media.co/brian-thompson-social-media-reactions-reddit-facebook-twitter/

bonus warm fuzzies: https://www.404media.co/multiple-major-health-insurance-companies-take-down-leadership-pages-following-murder-of-united-healthcare-ceo/

copy pasting the rules from last year's thread:

Rules: no spoilers.

The other rules are made up aswe go along.

Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.

the precision and clarity are astounding

by the time the hilbert curves got there my mouth was hanging open, and it still gets better

Looks like a local boy did good.

I linked the /r/nashville post since it has a good description of the website. Users can see a history of rent prices for a given property and its neighbors, which gives some leverage in negotiations. For more context, local rent prices are down 6% from highs.

I'm curious to see if it takes off, and how robust it is against adversarial tactics like bogus reports and nuisance lawsuits.

EDIT: Fixed "Blocked" issue by linking to archive

EDIT2: Also linked to the correct archive page

invidious link https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=OkfzjmY9cF8

He has sample photos starting around 12 minute mark - the colour tone he's getting is amazing

Example:

'cuz I definitely do

found this kicking around on one of the feeder sites a few days ago and only got to read it now

kinda neat. it's the sort of thing that you used to find quite a lot with keygens and other things prone to easter eggs, and that I don't really know of being as prevalent in more recent gaming and such

skeet: https://bsky.app/profile/kezz.io/post/3kpzm7ya6tb2g

from back when AI hallucinations were hallucinatory

found via someone running a server at revision

retro fun. quite slick, too!

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

Someone ported this 8-bit miniature Unix-like from Commodore to Nintendo.

The YouTube title is a little bit clickbaity, but the project is cool so I don't mind.

Remember how we were told that genAI learns "just like humans", and how the law can't say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?

Well, of course it's not true. Exploiting a few of the ways in which genAI --is not-- like human learners, artists can filter their digital art in such a way that if a genAI tool consumes it, it actively reduces the quality of the model, undoing generalization and bleading into neighboring concepts.

Can an AI tool be used to undo this obfuscation? Yes. At scale, however, doing so requires increasing compute costs more and more. This also looks like an improvable method, not a dead end -- adversarial input design is a growing field of machine learning with more and more techniques becoming highly available. Imagine this as sort of "cryptography for semantics" in the sense that it presents asymetrical work on AI consumers (while leaving the human eye much less effected).

Now we just need labor laws to catch up.

Wouldn't it be funny if not only does generative AI not lead to a boring dystopia, but the proliferation and expansion of this and similar techniques to protect human meaning eventually put a lot of grifters out of business?

We must have faith in the dark times. Share this with your artist friends far and wide!

Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?

A follow-up to this TechTakes post

Saw this live at the congress. The presentation was great and the hall was packed. It was hard to find a seat in a huge auditorium even 15 minutes ahead of the talk.