Three raccoons in a trench coat. I talk politics and furries.

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  • 12 Posts
  • 72 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Not sure how deeply positive it was necessarily, but as far as I can tell I changed at least one person’s life significantly.

    When I was in middle school I learned how to solve the Rubik’s cube through online tutorials, and afterwards I was basically addicted to it for a while and I was messing with a cube all the time. One of my classmates was interested in learning how to solve one, so I drew a bunch of guides and taught him the terminology, and soon enough he was also hooked on the Rubik’s cube.

    I eventually grew tired of it, but he kept going and learned how to solve all sorts of smaller and bigger cubes and pyramids. I bumped into him at uni a few years later and he had a cube in his hand lol. Last I heard of him he was even participating in some local competitions, but idk what he’s up to now.

    Even if he ultimately gave up on his speedcubing dreams I can at least say that I introduced him to a cool new hobby that kept him entertained for several years.




  • Winter because I live in Brazil, which is a tropical and very humid country so the heat can get unbearable even here in the south where it’s colder compared to the north.

    There are a few cities that get cold enough to reach negative Cº, but where I live it’s mostly between 10º-20º during winter so I just need some extra coats and more blankets and I’m happy. During summer I can only take off so many layers before it becomes illegal.





  • This did happen a while back, with researchers finding thousands of hashes of CSAM images in LAION-2B. Still, IIRC it was something like a fraction of a fraction of 1%, and they weren’t actually available in the dataset because they had already been removed from the internet.

    You could still make AI CSAM even if you were 100% sure that none of the training images included it since that’s what these models are made for - being able to combine concepts without needing to have seen them before. If you hold the AI’s hand enough with prompt engineering, textual inversion and img2img you can get it to generate pretty much anything. That’s the power and danger of these things.


  • IIRC it was something like a fraction of a fraction of 1% that was CSAM, with the researchers identifying the images through their hashes but they weren’t actually available in the dataset because they had already been removed from the internet.

    Still, you could make AI CSAM even if you were 100% sure that none of the training images included it since that’s what these models are made for - being able to combine concepts without needing to have seen them before. If you hold the AI’s hand enough with prompt engineering, textual inversion and img2img you can get it to generate pretty much anything. That’s the power and danger of these things.














  • In early 2019 bittorrent’s website views fluctuated between ~6M to ~9M. Now it’s around 3M to 4M.

    In early 2019 utorrent’s visits fluctuated between ~26M to ~75M. Now it sits around 25M to 21M.

    The fact that there were far more captures in early 2019 for both of them might be an indication that this was their peak, and while visits have reduced since then they’re far from dying.

    Streaming services may be part of the reason, though I also think it’s because many games and software have switched to freemium & microtransactions so spending money is optional, along with the fact that free and open source alternatives to mainstream software have become more robust and popular. When I was a kid I torrented Sony Vegas, but now that’s simply not necessary since we have DaVinci Resolve.