dingus

Right. I usually try to make sure I can live somewhere I can be in control of my own connection, but I understand that's not always available. I've been in the same position before myself and it was a bummer because it felt limiting.

There's some options where ad-blockers are VPN based, like Blokada for Android. That means you could log in to the VPN with your personal machine and get ad blocking that way. You could turn it off for when you game if you game on PC, or if you play games on console, you can always leave it on because it won't affect your consoles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

When this kind of shit has a Wikipedia entry, you don't really have an excuse for not understanding a long-term vilification of the poor in general in the US, used as an excuse for excessive means testing, and gutting social programs in general. More recently, in Florida, where they began a program of drug testing recipients of welfare, they spent more money drug testing people than they saved by kicking people off the program for being caught doing drugs.

The US is, by the numbers, a majority Christian nation. Thus it follows, a large number of those people must be behind these attitudes.

I’m at a loss.

It took me a second, but now I hate you. Thanks!

Remember when Jesus went into the temple of God and smoked a blunt with the moneychangers and flipped over the poor people's tables and lashed them until they left?

Pepperidge Farm members.

I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?

on a book is pirating said book.

If the source is literally a piracy website that serves up applications on how to remove DRM from ebooks, it's absolutely piracy. You can't just deny the source and be like "it's not piracy!" The way the data came into your hands was illicitly, not legally. Especially if DRM has been circumvented and removed before it came into your hands.

They didn't go out and buy copies of thousands of books.

Pretty amusing that you think scraping published data somehow constitutes surveillance, though.

I don't, I was making a point about how absurdly large the language models have to be, which is to say, if they have to have that much data on top of thousands of pirated books, it means they fundamentally cannot make the models work without also scraping the internet for data, which is surveillance.

Why does Star Trek seem to attract a lot of non-stereotypical gay boys? Reminds me a lot of a college friend of mine who was a chubby gay nerd who loved Star Trek. He used to write humorous Trek gay erotic fan fiction in the early 2000's.

In space, no one can hear you preen.

The original creators are long gone, the philosophy of the site has changed, and it's filled to the gills with ads and is just pretty sketchy at this point.

Which is surprising, honestly, because the whole reason that the original team got absolutely fucked was because they had way less advertising on the site to help cover the costs. They were railroaded with "profiting off of facilitating piracy." Yet the current team clearly is actually doing that and yet its fucking crickets from law enforcement. Reeks of it probably being owned by some government and they keep it up so they can keep track of piracy and send out cease and desist notices.

Why else would they be allowed to continue to exist while flagrantly doing worse stuff than the original team that they literally jailed over less?

If garlic keeps away vampires and apples keep away doctors...

Does that mean doctors are a specific type of vampire?

This is an underrated joke here.

Right, you can still do traditional advertising without the targeted metrics provided by smartphones, but....

AI LLMs literally require a corpus of language to learn from. Thus the "Large Language" part of "LLM." The amount of data these models need to function is so staggeringly huge there is no way they can compile all that data without scraping the entire internet and pirating a bunch of copyrighted books.

It's fundamentally a surveillance technology, because the technology fundamentally cannot function without that large dataset of language to begin with. It needs massive amounts of data that have to be surveilled to be achieved, because unless you're Reddit or Facebook, your own site probably doesn't contain enough data to fill out the needs of the LLM. Thus you need to scrape the internet for more data in hopes of filling it out.

Books3 is used widely as part of "The Pile" and is clearly all of the content of private torrent tracker Bibliotik. People theorize Books2 is all of the books from Library Genesis. To be able to make their models work, they have to scrape the internet and pirate thousands of books to make it functional at all.

This is also fundamentally why AI starts to fail so quickly, because these tools have been used to flood the internet with AI generated pages, which in turn become training data for AI, which means the training data is tainted with AI generated garbage, which will further degrade the LLM. On the plus side, I guess, is that if they keep using this kind of business model, they will unintentionally make their AI pretty useless within a few years by flooding the internet with useless, incorrect data.