Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

A trillion dollars disappeared in a day because someone made a garbage generator that uses fewer irreplaceable natural resources than the current garbage generators, and that makes me think about cobblestones.

Remember cobblestones? You could hook your computer up to a big distributed science project, there were tons to choose from, you could fold human proteomes, you could search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you could map cancer markers, develop better solar cell materials, all sorts of stuff. It took the form of a screensaver - whenever you weren't using your computer your CPU fans would spin up and you'd be folding. Move your mouse and it pauses. Great stuff. Something useful for your computer to do when you step away for a minute.

Anyway, you'd get credit for the work your computer had done. Cobblestones, they were called. They were never used as currency, they were just to show off. A cobblestone was a kind of receipt to show that your computer had done something useful.

We never used cobblestones as currency, but we could've. Instead we got bitcoin, which is a receipt that shows that your computer made a bitcoin. What's the bitcoin for? Being a receipt that your computer made a bitcoin.

It served as proof that you'd wasted some electricity.

Proof of waste.

There's other cryptocurrencies as well, some of which work differently to the proof of waste system, and those are worthless, because they're not proof of waste.

The waste is the point.

Now we get this market crash today, money disappeared, because the new AI thing is roughly as pointless as the old one but nowhere near as wasteful.

The waste, is the point. We saw it with cryptocurrencies and we saw it with NFTs and we see it with AI.

The waste has to be the point, because to some people, waste equals scarcity equals wealth equals power. The waste has to be the point because the machines that process the pointlessness have to be expensive, have to be owned by someone, have to be inaccessible to the average person, have to be manufactured and sold and rented out, the means of production of the pointlessness has to be in the right hands. The waste has to be the point, because otherwise we would've decided years ago that a cobblestone was worth a twentieth of a nice sandwich.

The waste is the point.

"repost this if trans people are safe with you"

well maybe now is the time to do a bit more for trans people than click a button on your phone. yknow. we're not going to post our way out of this one.

#SilentSunday

You have heard of "dead internet theory" but you probably haven't looked at the theory as originally posted.

It's often summed up as "the internet is just a bunch of bots talking to each other" ... and it's tempting to nod along: it's fun to say that "things were better in my day" and YES many sites have too many bots.

However I wish to present the take that the now four-year-old "The Dead Internet Theory" is ... Bad Actually. 1/

and that effect was because the artists saw how fast the ai slop was produced compared to them spending several hours to make each image.

Their own work was drowned out and often didnt get much comment, or was replied to with the same positive comments that the ai slop got which no longer encouraged them to make more or improve.

It fully destroyed the space artistically. Pretty soon after the game itself replaced a lot of its own art with ai art, the community became a ghost town.

For the last 20 years ive been part of a small online modding scene for a very niche sandbox video game where a large part of the communtiy is people of all art ability contributing to produce work for the game either in written, 3d or 2d art form.

the introduction of ai generative image work into the community lead to 95% of the human designed 2d and 3d graphic art to stop being produced entirely.

1/2

this cat came up to me, meowed and then walked away. is there anybody fluent in cat who can translate? have i just been given a quest?

Deployed a small trick in front of my forge: Caddy checks if an x-bot-check cookie is set. If yes, it reverse proxies as usual.

If the cookie is unset, and the request path is not allow-listed, it will serve a small HTML page that uses JavaScript to set the cookie and reload.

The expectation is that bots will not run the javascript, and thus, will not have the cookie. It does require JavaScript, but my forge requires that anyway. Human visitors should see minimal interruption.

Will see how that plays out in the longer run! I do need to add this to my logs, though, so I can actually measure the effectiveness.

there literally isn't a single linux distribution that I can recommend to a new person without adding a sentence long "but..."