#anyways nfts are stupid

[gongedtornado]

.

[bihet-dragonize]

I'm officially tired of seeing ai art discourse

[croissant-au-chocolat]

Not gonna lie, this time the twitter thing is really getting to me. It’s absolutely dying right now, and I have no idea how it will affect my chances to get work - actually I do know, it will affect  them negatively, I just don’t know how badly.

I have a foot on the door, which is at least Something, but in freelance that feels so immaterial...if people don’t see your work they just forget you exist, poof, gone from their minds forever. it’s out of your hands.

this year had been going so well too....fuck 😞

[what-the-fuck-khr]

lmao someone on Instagram fighting for their life in the comments bc they posted some Adopts and people are like “bro NFT’s???” SKDNDJ

and not to be mean but Adopts are so useless they feel like a scam and May as well be NFT’s anyways lmfao but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[reachartwork]

crossposting from twitter;

are you guys really telling me in the entire two years that this has been a Federal Fucking Issue for a certain type of extremely online artist you still have refused to learn even for a second how it actually works?

the information has been widely available for you to consume and teach yourself for the past two years (even longer if you've been paying attention). at this point if you say and believe shit like this you are deliberately keeping yourself stupid uninformed, i'll be diplomatic. and it's sad to me because if you knew how it worked you would be substantially less afraid of it!

it genuinely makes me upset that instead of just accepting a new medium into the artistic world these people are just doubling down and will continue doubling down on MAKING THEMSELVES UPSET FOR NO REASON via anti-intellectualism.

if you're going to reject out of hand an entire art movement and its purveyors, you can at the very least teach yourself how it works to have a more informed criticism. this person even SAYS that they like it!

it's like... i don't know, if i went to critique a bunch of brutalist sculptures and expressed my displeasure at not knowing where the rocks they quarried and carved into these statues came from. like does that make sense? there's a total mismatch here of what they know vs what the actual problem is here (in this case, this person does NFTs, which is what you should've started the fucking thread with!)

i don't know. i know it's a fools game to worry about this but it makes me really upset that there are people in this world who are just... incurious. like to me that feels like humans trying to understand cthulhu. what do you mean you don't research the things that make you afraid so that you can understand them and be less afraid?

i don't really have a point here i'm just sad and annoyed. anyway.

[doodlemancy]

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh

so here's the deal re: this fucking horseshit. god i hate this.

i, personally, have mostly given up on trying to dodge inclusion in AI datasets. the stuff i make generally isn't what they're looking for anyway and there's no real way to 100% avoid being scraped short of becoming entirely invisible online, which would um, lead to me having no money and dying. that's part of the cruelty of all this, but also, in a way, it's the same risk artists online have always taken; if you want people to see your work, you have to post it knowing that some of those people are fucking lowlife piece of shit scumbags who will try to resell it on redbubble or something for a quick buck. AI is just a new and exhausting way for garbagey people to stink worse. i am not in any way excusing that behavior or trying to imply people should not be mad about it or that we shouldn't condemn this move and fight back. "if you don't want your work stolen, don't put it online" is the kind of shitty Internet Tough Guy talk i've always hated since my dA days. it's as useless and heartless as telling people that if they don't want their bikes stolen, they shouldn't leave them at the bike rack. i'm saying that i, personally, will not let a bunch of soulless thieving shitheads drive me offline. i belong here. they belong in a wifi-proof dumpster.

nightshade and glaze eat my artwork alive. they make it look terrible. when you have to sell things on the basis that they look nice, it's a big problem when protective measures make them look like dogshit. my work is not a good candidate for these processes. even if that weren't the case, i don't have the stamina, especially right now while my chronic pain is flaring for the third month in a row and my adhd meds are scarce, to go back and shade/glaze everything, and it wouldn't work on reblogs anyway. given the way midjourney and its equally stinky siblings have already scraped years and terabytes' worth of image data from popular websites, it doesn't seem worth my time. if you think it is worth yours i am not going to like, yell at you. i am just one person. but i want to be clear about the kind of situations some of us are being forced into.

i think some of the doomsaying about AI and what it will do to us has been overblown-- they need you, for marketing purposes, to believe that someday their shitty robot will be as good at "drawing" and as practical to work with as a human-- but the consequences of "AI" (which is not even actually AI) are already real and visible and obvious to anyone paying attention. i unfortunately am not infinitely wise and powerful and therefore do not have an ideal all-encompassing solution to this deeply stupid problem that the Most Unlikeable Manbabies On Earth have imposed on us after NFTs fizzled out.

what i do have is a very large repository of nice anime and game screenshots i've taken, knowledge of many archives of nice public domain images, a computer that can run nightshade overnight or while i'm off doing other things, and, most importantly, near-infinite capacity for pettiness. i do kinda feel like the jury is still out on how well nightshade/glaze will work in the long run, but in the meantime, i suppose it wouldn't cost me a lot to... perhaps... every time i get Mad About AI™, channel that anger into dumping some thoroughly-but-not-spammily-tagged, high-quality, inconspicuous poison onto this godforsaken hellsite via a secret side blog. i could make a batch of poison ahead of time, keep it on my phone, use my Toilet Scrolling Time or my Public Transit Time to post and tag up an image here and there. it could be a fun challenge to try to make some pretty robot poison that some humans will still enjoy.

the other thing we need to poison at this point, IMO, is the word "AI" itself, by being loudly and mercilessly critical of any company that dabbles in it, the same way we all clowned on any company that pushed their luck with NFT/crypto shit a couple of years ago. we need to have every corporation terrified that association with AI will tank their sales and hurt their brand. AI must = number go down and lots of people screaming at you. companies will fuck around. we must provide the finding-out. we shouldn't have to. but we can!

so make sure to let tumblr know you hate this. maybe you could include this interesting link (tw child abuse) about how Stable Diffusion was trained on some extremely serious crime. or these screenshots of Midjourney devs just sort of admitting what their whole thing is, which i got here but which have kinda been spread all over since January.

spite and anger can be forms of hope. that's all i have to say, or at least all i'm willing to type with my left hand tonight.

[eliluminado7]

im writing my broad opinion on AI art now that im on an autistic tangent about it. im kinda cooked from yesterday so sorry if i dont make much sense

my issue with (serious) A‎I art is not because of moral or ethical implications arising from the technology itself, but rather from the general userbase itself. like i believe most of us can fucking tell if something's ai generated when we see it right. Bear in mind i said serious AI art. you know i love a good sei‎nfel‎d screenshot of je‎rry and kra‎mer going into the void or geo‎rge dressed as a coss‎ack

anyways generally speaking the kind of people generating those serious illustrations are all either 1. recycled nftbros 2. porn freaks or 3. children. And im gonna be real i do not like that kind of AI art even if its just a harmless illustration of a pokemon or whatever. to me it feels like those ppl are either kids who i Do Not Think should be on the net, or basement dwelling deviantart incels who are like 'Computer generate se‎xy gard‎evoir vo‎re infla‎tion fe‎et pics'. the kind of people who wouldve had no problem stealing others' art. just sayin.

well actually theres a fourth category and those are companies and public institutions that use AI art (often as some sort of money laundering scheme, if i may add) and those are the ones ACTUALLY hurting artists because You See you could be actually hiring someone instead of using fucking midjourney or bing. this is a very common practice here in spain even if it ends up looking like literal shit, see:

also theres this yearly art contest in either val‎encia or cata‎lunya where ppl submit illustrations of snails and this year's winner was a very blatantly AI generated pic created by some turkish individual who is rumored to not even exist. its a rabbit hole but looking up bedhiran akagündüz (or, likewise, rubén lucas garcía) should set you on the right track

Now let me be clear: i vehemently hate anti-ai luddites and picrew fandomites and ive always been very vocal about this. and quite frankly im tired of the moral panic steeming from anything AI-generated as if it was the antichrist!!!!! you all just sound reactionary as fuck. AI art is certainly not stealing from you and the only exceptions to this rule are very very very blatant copies, and you almost never see those unless were talking about nft-adjacent ponzi scheme websites. would you consider collages theft? music samples? AI just draws "inspiration" (for lack of a better word) from the illustrations that it is fed because its like a tabula rasa and it needs knowledge, just like us human beings are inspired by other people's artstyles. the end product is something that doesnt even look similar to the data it is fed because it is an amalgamation of different styles that create something unique. is that theft? be for fucking real

this stupid myth about the brutal energy consumption of AI art generation as well as the whole ‘did you know that every time you generate one picture youre wasting an entire bottle of water????’ argument... im sorry to say none of that is true. ai isn't even the most water-intensive sector if we're comparing it with other industrial sectors like petroleum/coal factories or wineries or paperboard mills. training datasets IS resource-intensive but its normally a one-time process, inference (which is what you use daily) is not any less efficient than looking something up on google for example:

this whole 'carbon footprint' bullshit that has been sold to us is just a tactic to divert attention from the actual polluters which are corporations like coca-cola or exxon or bp. You know this you get your praxis from this website.

regarding the whole 'AI is theft' argument, im just going to share these tags that someone left in another post i made:

like a clear example of anti-ai panic actively hurting artists is the backlash that oka‎me-p, a voc‎aloid artist, got for using AI generated illustrations as the ACCOMPANIMENT for his songs:

and to be honest this is a huge problem regarding western voc‎afans who often have the emotional maturity of a peanut. youre so so so hellbent on demonizing others just for using a technology that is widely available to everyone, that youre willing to throw them under the bus and delegitimize everything they do just because it hurts your feelings well im not going to fucking stay quiet about that

who do you think youre talking to you stupid fucking bitch. god this person makes me so mad.

Anyways my point is: ai is like acupuncture; just like the latter can be used to treat or alleviate different ailments but it cant completely treat cancer like modern medicine would; AI can be complimentary, but it can NEVER replace actual labor. its merely a worktool! its merely meant to automatize daily tasks!!! its not your enemy i promise. Ok im tired of writing goo buh buh

[gokartkid]

medium-fail actor!daniel pr relationship with model!max au

There’s coffee and a croissant waiting for Daniel when he comes in, which from Christian, means that he’s about to drop the craziest and most off-putting scheme on him. 

He starts hypothesising in his brain: a summer of non stop convention circuits with sweaty nerds; starring in a movie where he’ll wear so many prosthetics he’s unrecognisable; creating, fucking, NFT’s in his image.

Christian at least has the courtesy to wait until Daniel is a few bites in to drop the bomb.

“We think,” a pause, for dramatic effect, “that the best thing for your image right now, would be for you to be in a relationship.”

Daniel pauses.

That was actually something unexpected.

“Okay,” he draws out the vowel, “great to know that you’re concerned with my love life Christian. Got a little problem from the get-go, I don’t want to be in a relationship. Thanks anyway, good chat.”

Christian chuckles, like Daniel’s said something mildly funny; it’s the kind of laugh you do to a little kid when you don’t know what they’re on about. 

“No, Daniel,” and he has this magic ability to sound accidentally — or not so accidentally — condescending. Daniel leans back in his chair, and takes a long sip of his coffee. It’s hot enough that he can feel its path going down his throat, settling in his oesophagus “the idea is that it would be set up with you and someone that we, effectively, have vetted. You go out for a good while, get serious, and then break up amicably.”

“A PR relationship,” Daniel deadpans. It seemed to be all the rage in the industry right now; young, attractive, instagrammable couples popping up all over the place with mutual benefits in the fame-game. Daniel had thought — naively, it seems — that he would be able to avoid it. 

“A PR relationship,” Christian confirms. He has the decency to give it to Daniel straight when they get to the point of it.

“And—“ Daniel rubs at his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. He can feel a migraine brewing, purely brought on by this conversation, “why would I do this? Like, I’m really leaning towards a fuck no right now Christian. This sounds like a really shit idea, just being honest.”

“Well—“ Christian’s always been good at keeping his head when Daniel is about to blow his top like this. He leans forwards towards him, hands spread wide and looking completely non-threatening in his stupid knit jumper, “I— we, don’t see it that way Daniel. We think it’ll re-invigorate your brand, generate interest, good promo before your next feature.”

“Uh huh,” Daniel says blankly, “this is still not answering my question Christian, because all of those things are do-able with a regular press circuit.”

Christian hesitates. 

Another bad sign, red alarm bells ringing.

“With the awards season coming up,” he says delicately, the precision of a surgeon dressing a wound, “there’ve been a few communications, that in order for you to be a solid candidate—“

“Oh my god,” Daniel says, and the realisation is an anvil coming down on his head, “you want me to date some nothing person for a year to win an Oscar. What the fuck Christian. And, this is a real question, what the fuck are you thinking?”

“In order for you to be a solid candidate,” Christian interrupts him, calm even tone as if Daniel hasn’t said anything, “you need to demonstrate some maturity, and solidity, and a relationship would help you do that.”

“I am fucking mature,” Daniel says, and tries not to feel like a toddler throwing a tantrum as he takes an angry bite of his bribe-croissant, “people can be single and mature Christian.”

“People,” Christian is decidedly not making eye contact with him now, “can be single and mature, if they aren’t coming off the back of a public relationship breakdown. To be clear, by public relationship breakdown, I do mean the restaurant incident.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Daniel says, immediately, “and it’s blown over now.”

“Has it?”

A pause.

Daniel shuts his mouth. He knows when he’s pushing something too far and more than that, he knows when he’s being a bald-faced liar. He switches tack.

“Okay. Who is it then, this hypothetical girl I’d be seeing.”

“Well,” Christian says, and he seems relieved to be back on script, “first of all, it’s not a girl. It’s a man, an up-and-coming model.”

Daniel has to fight not to groan.

“Is this some fucked up revenge plot for coming out as bisexual while I was dating a girl Christian, because I get that you couldn’t generate the kind of narrative you wanted from that but it was still, like, a big deal.”

It’d gotten him on the cover of multiple pride magazines and a Vanity Fair exclusive, which to Christian was like winning the Lottery. Daniel still thinks privately that the social capital of having a bisexual multiple time Oscar-nominated client probably gives him a — perfectly professional — managerial boner. 

Christian just laughs again, doesn’t really respond to what Daniel’s just said. It’s a tried and true tactic of his.

“We think you’ll like him,” he barrels on, without interruption, “he’s nice enough Daniel, and it’ll be good for his career too, being seen with you.”

“Sure.”

Daniel has his own thoughts on this, on the YSL-too-skinny-simpering-personality guy he’s already made up in his brain, that he’s about to be saddled with for months. He knows that Christian can read them all on his face but— the most frustrating thing is that Daniel can see how this works too.

He knows the problems the Academy has with him. Daniel isn’t the type — the stupid, oblivious type — to not notice getting nominated three times and never winning, walking into the Dolby theatre and its gilded stage losing its luster every time. 

Daniel used to relish coming off as free, and changeable, and real. 

It was like a superpower, to be able to do whatever he wanted, get as drunk as he wanted with his friends, as high and wasted as he wanted, and have it come off as a dazzling star in his 20’s living a life that everyone would be jealous of. Only, the articles started to go from fun-loving, to problem-seeking, to commitment-phobic, to photos of him hungover in the mornings sunglasses on and holding up a hand against the paparazzi. 

He stares at the grey listless sky, clouds fat with rain and nods along to whatever else Christian’s saying, logistics and press and staged shoots. 

“—so I’ll send you his details, and we’ll set up an initial meeting then?”

An initial meeting; what a way to talk about a future fucking paramour. 

“Yeah,” he says, phone buzzing with a google alert, “sure.”

[sevarix-blogs]

anyway gen ai is stupid, it's just a fad, it's gonna die eventually. it's just like blockchain and nfts. a stupid fad and buzzword

[iron-sunrise]

Just unfollowed someone for making the mind numbingly stupid assertion that being against NFTs and also being against "AI" is somehow a hypocritical position

As an artist I would really like to shove this person into a locker.

Your "But you're supposed to be anti IP and anti copyright" position aint shit but telling me to my face that its okay to grind creatives deeper into poverty while the tech sector and all its shitty bro use a scam they're incorrectly labeling AI to steal our labor and laugh about it when we protest.

If you like using the art stealing stochastic parrot go right the fuck ahead but dont try to wrench it into the morally superior Leftist/Anarchist/Communist position. So erveryone else owns their fucking labor and has value UNLESS their labor is creative/entertainment I guess. Everybody gets to be a worker but us.

Asshole. Just say you like the dopamine hit the stolen art generator gives you and fuck all the way off. The people benefitting the most off this shit are techbros and billionaires and you're gonna call us fucking hypocrites? They're seizing OUR means of production and labor but we're not allowed to complain because you love your new toy huh? Anyway. Glaze your art, people. Glaze it good.

[numbknee]

Enough of the suffering thru the asks abt all the other cartman ships, what abt your brain rot? 🥺 what *are* your thoughts on kyman?? Go ham dude

ooooh dear... where to begin with the kyman brainrot....... I guess I’ll start at the beginning. VERY LONG POST under the cut. this is basically my kyman meta magnum opus lmao

I’ve talked about this ad nauseam before, but I really, REALLY didn’t want to get into south park. I had only ever watched like 2 full episodes before 2021 and I simply did not understand the appeal. I just thought the draw to the show was the shock factors: gross-out humor, children swearing and committing violence, and blatant bigotry played for laughs. I didn’t understand how it could be so popular other than “well I guess there are lots of horrible people out there who like this horrible show.” 

I grew up in a very WASP-y town and had peers in elementary/middle school who learned about the existence of antisemitism and other bigotries through south park. because kids are stupid and don’t understand satire, many of them took it at face value and were able to have shittons of words added to their vocabulary to put people down and insult them. it was horrible tbh. and I hated the show for that, even as a young kid. I personally wasn’t perfect by any means but even as a snot-nosed, extremely sheltered little white girl I knew that you just shouldn’t do that shit. our school system in particular lauded the “golden rule” constantly (we had to do a school-specific pledge after the pledge of allegiance every day... yeah I know, very american) and I was like “cmon, you guys can’t even follow that ONE RULE to be a semi-decent human being?? really??”

anyway at the end of 2021, my younger brother asked me to watch the post-covid specials with him and he was very excited about it. I was immediately hesitant, especially because in recent years he has become alarmingly incel-y and took a hard turn to the right while I became a leftist. I reluctantly agreed to sit through it to try to understand him more because, even though his political ideology sucks ass, he’s still my brother and I do love him. 

so I watched the specials, and I came out the other side of it shell-shocked with how surprisingly good the writing was. THIS stupid show, the show that all this time I thought was bottom-of-the-barrel comedy, was... GOOD??? particularly regarding CARTMAN?? 

the only things I knew about cartman going into it were the following: he’s fat, he says the name “kyle” weird, and he’s a horrible antisemite. and they made him grow up to be a freaking RABBI. it completely caught me off guard and *gasp* actually made me laugh???? what???? 

there were plenty of other things I loved about the post-covid specials, like my depressed ass relating WAAAY too hard with stan, the extremely on-the-nose satire of the state of advertisement/capitalism with the stupid “denny’s applebee’s max” restaurant chain gag and all the old people being shoved into a giant prison retirement home once they aren’t productive anymore, kenny getting sick of the gang’s bullshit and writing “FUCK THESE HOES” on a beloved childhood photo, butters become a snake-oil salesman for NFTs, kyle being told to “think like a kid” and like 2 seconds later realizing they need to look up kenny’s ass. I could go on but you get the point. 

I liked it way more than I thought I ever would. and obviously, I often find south park funny for different reasons than my brother does because matt & trey are very good at toeing the line of appealing to both sides of the american political spectrum, but it’s become a point of bonding between us in the year since I started watching the show and I’m grateful for that. 

of course, since i’m terminally on tumblr and ao3, I also started to dive into the fandom of south park. I had heard about the whole creek thing years ago and waved it off as a stupid gag but then I realized wait, holy shit, there’s actually a GIGANTIC shipping culture around south park??? at first I got into style because of the interesting concept of post-covid kyle and stan reconnecting after decades apart and not being the same people they used to be but trying to make it work anyway (I even wrote a fic about it ahahaa...) 

but after a while I got tired of the ship because as I watched the rest of the show, I realized their relationship just wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. like they’re best friends but... why? because they’ve known each other forever? they both like video games? they make fun of cartman together? the fact they’re “super-best-friends” is kind of taken for granted by the show and the audience, but imo matt and trey never really explore the intricacies of their relationship very much. y’all can disagree with me on this but idk, all I know is that I got bored with style as a ship after like 2 months.

while scrolling through ao3 and tumblr, I ran across kyman fics/fanart for the first time back in february or so. at first I was appalled because... why the everloving fuck would you ship the blatant antisemite with the jewish kid??? really???? isn’t style a much better choice??? but sheer curiosity got the better of me, so I did what I always do when I’m curious about a ship: select for fics with kyle broflovski/eric cartman, sort by kudos, and read the first result (or in this case the second because the first had creek as the main ship). y’all know which fic that is if you’ve even slightly gotten into kyman. it was interesting, but I personally didn’t see them as the actual characters from the show in that fic. they were fandom versions of kyle and cartman, with their personalities changed enough to fit the standard mlm shipping dynamic that’s popular in fandom spaces (particularly regarding dom/sub aspects). I’ve seen it happen in plenty of other fandoms so I wasn’t surprised, but I still couldn’t see how it could possibly work if one were to use their canon character depictions. 

all the while I was making my way through episodes of the show cuz it’s long af, and over time I became more and more intrigued with kyle and cartman’s relationship. cartman quickly became my favorite character in the show because of how fucking complex and layered his personality is (see my tags on this post), and though kyle despises cartman in countless ways, he still is the only one who consistently tries to find goodness in him, tries to make him change for the better, saves him when no one else will, and remains his friend despite everything. it’s a remarkably complex dynamic.

little hints of kyman started creeping up on me: cartman being frequently queer-coded as a closeted gay kid. kyle getting extremely jealous of cartman and heidi’s relationship. both of them on separate occasions saving the other from death or injury without wanting any credit for it or lording it over each other. “we've been through a lot together, and... maybe that alone doesn't make us friends, but it makes us something” 

needless to say, I started to get it. and then I encountered the straw that broke the camel’s back: “know your enemy” by elsen on ao3. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve read that fic probably over a dozen times. it was shockingly well-written and so in-tune with the style and tone of the show that I was like “is this person spirit-channelling trey parker or something wtf???” and all of a sudden, I could see how, in a different universe, kyman could actually be an endgame ship. 

what sold me on it the most was how in-character it seemed for cartman to be a repressed, denial-ridden sub, especially regarding his desired relationship with kyle. there’s plenty of canon evidence that cartman has a secret crush on kyle (see this vid by johnny 2 cellos), but there’s no way that kyle could reciprocate those feelings, right?? imo kyle would probably rather die than enter a romantic relationship with cartman where he had to submit to him all the time, but if cartman would want kyle to be dominant over him??? where kyle has control and is able to curb cartman’s problematic behavior as he sees fit??? that opens up a whole other door of possibilities.

I think what kyle wants more than anything else in the world regarding cartman is for the goodness he sees deep down inside him to come to the surface, and for kyle to be the one to guide him (or force him when necessary) to becoming a better person through love and patience and inherent understanding of his fucked up little head??? I can definitely see kyle wanting that (especially since I see kyle as a repressed, denial-ridden sadist/dom lmao; see this post for my thoughts on that). 

it was all downhill from there. I found tons of other cool kyman shippers on tumblr and twitter whose writing and fanart helped suck me in even more and I’ve been stuck in kyman hell ever since. special shoutout to the asker for her kyman analysis posts that inspired this fic I wrote! love u boo <3

ANYWAY that’s how I became a whore for kyman lolololol ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿ have a nice day everybody

[jaebernardblog]

Ethereum is in deep trouble

UNI moving off-chain is only the final nail in the coffin, all apps are moving to competing L1s & L2s instead

Collapsing ETH revenue, UNI was ETH's biggest fee-paying customer!

Now ETH is being left behind, irrelevant & broken; Ethereum is cooked 🧵

What did we expect would happen after pushing all usage to competing chains ("L2 scaling")

A cucked course of action from the perspective of ETH

Betraying ETH's cypherpunk dream for the sake of L2 VC funding, as the ultrasound money meme has now been thoroughly defeated by "L2 scaling"

It is as clear as day from the moment Dank Sharding was implemented, as you can see in the chart below:

It shows that when users move off the L1 significantly fewer fees end up on the L1, decreasing the burn rate. This should have been obvious from the start. This usage & resulting revenue is now getting captured by rent-seeking L2s instead!

That is what makes it parasitic, as only a fraction of the fees ends up back in the L1, while for-profit companies get to keep the rest. All while these same parties lobby to keep ETH's L1 block space constrained

This chart released by Unchainedpod even shows how for every dollar paid to the L1 OP gets to keep 300 dollars! If that is not extractive, I do not know what is:

EIP-4844 only accelerated that process, by giving L2s a cheap place to put their data while entirely ignoring L1 users, that is why UNI is forced to move elsewhere

The fact that a swap cost over $30 on ETH now is completely unacceptable, as well as a $60 NFTs sale fee, what is this clown world? 🤡

It is all effectively a giant middle finger to the incredible achievements of ETH DeFi, as they break up the kingdom into smaller parts for the sake of selfish profit. High fees kill utility & innovation every single time:

UNI should move as far as possible away from ETH as possible as far as I am concerned

The UNI L2 will have its own validator set anyway, so it will be entirely possible for them to pivot to becoming an L1 in their own right in the future, or they will deploy the uni app natively on an alternative chain eventually

The only reason left to deploy on ETH is the security, however, security is based on revenue in the long run. This is why ETH is on a steady path to nowhere with its current roadmap, as L2s are sucking all of the life out of it

Bait & Switch:

We all noticed it, we are not stupid, just like we also noticed it for BTC, as the light of truth exposes all of the corruption

As instead of a "global computer"; a single composable state where all DeFi could interoperate; ETH is now a fragmented ecosystem of centralized service providers...

The complete opposite of what ETH was supposed to become, to make it even worse: Remember ETH 2.0? Scaling the L1 through execution sharding;

That has now been successfully implemented on NEAR & EGLD with more soon to come. All while purely parallelized chains make a decent case for not even needing to implement sharding & still keeping up with massive demand!

As the technology has advanced so far we can even say that we have solved the classical blockchain trilemma in practice, making all of the compromises inherent in ETH's "L2 scaling" entirely unnecessary

All while the ETH core developers claim that scaling the L1 while preserving decentralization is "impossible", an unbearable state of affairs

Conclusion:

Ethereum is effectively bankrupt, not just intellectually & ethically but also economically

Still riding on the laurels of its past success, most cannot see the writing on the wall

At this point, Ethereum deserves to lose, as it has been doing over the last year, losing ground to its technologically far superior competitors. The success of UNI is no longer correlated with the success of ETH

The numbers do not lie, ETH has made itself irrelevant & it will continue to decline as it continues down this self-destructive path. The future now belongs to the countless alternatives that are open for business now!

[bitchesgetriches]

Hey Bitches! I’m sorry of this is something you can’t answer, but I wanted to ask an opinion anyway.

My college major is everything UI UXdesign/coding/game dev/etc. everything that is directly in the line of fire with the rise of AI, and it completely terrifies me. I don’t know what else to study or what to do. One of my professors says she has ‘hope that this generation will fight back, unlike the previous one’ but that doesn’t assure me at all. I can only hope that AI isn’t here to stay (like crypto and NFTs) but in the meantime, I’m looking to change my major to something that won’t be that affected. I just wanted to know what your advice about this ordeal is, if any.

Thanks so much for everything you do!

Bold of you to assume crypto and NFTs are here to stay. Because, well... here's Molly White's review of a16z's recent "State of Crypto Report." Spoiler alert: the state of crypto is not great!

Also, we famously wrote this, got trolled by a bunch of butthurt crypto bros, the crypto boom crash, and we haven't heard from any of them since: Investing in Cryptocurrency is Bad and Stupid 

Anyway, my point is dear... you don't necessarily have to change majors. ChatGPT and other AI applications have SERIOUS holes. And human beings will need to be trained in all that computery stuff to fill those holes. (And by "computer stuff" I mean what you're studying. I can't emphasize enough how much I am a digital native, NOT a digital expert. I edit financial news for a living, y'all.)

I now open the floor to anyone who wants to dive in and agree/contradict with me!

[nightinghoul]

About this NFT thing...

TL;DR I'm a disabled NFT creator, new to the scene, and it would help me to have followers on my design page, especially if they like cute bunny rabbits and mental health.

This is me: https://zora.co/@sourdoughbun

I'm one of these people who doesn't really like new things. Well, I'm autistic. I often feel wary of new technologies.

I think there's probably a lot of ND people in the crypto and NFT space, but I was skeptical. Plus, some people who are into it present themselves as a bit douchey. Some.

But, I have a person in my life who I consider a friend, but really he's a medical professional who does assisted stretching, and I see him once a week. (I have some really bad issues with muscle spasms. This helps a lot.)

He's young and hip and shit. Really nice guy, too. He started explaining cryptocurrancy and NFTs to me, and I was like, "Uuugh, that sounds stupid and annoying." But I was really catching on? And it started to make a lot of sense to me?

One of my special interests when I was a kid was stocks and bonds, because I liked to look at the graphs. When I was around eight, I decided that whenever I got some money, I was going to invest in gold, because commodities tend to be stable. But then I turned out to be bad at math, and have dyscalcula, plus I never had any money.

Anyway. Fast forward a few decades... I learned that NFTs are made from pngs.l (or can be, anyway). I took college courses in digital art, twenty years ago - got certified; have a degree in computer graphic design... But I didn't enjoy doing digital art until recently, after a lot of progress was made in digital technology. Even then, it took me a few years to find a stylus I was comfortable using. But now, I just do digital art all day. I'm usually working on my unpublished aspiring webcomic. Just for fun, I make several pngs every day.

So it turns out, I've been feeling like a failure for my entire life, but my brain is wired for the NFT scene. So I got four audio books on NFTs and cryptocurrancy, and I'm listening to them at double speed while making digital art of cute little bunnies. I also got into some crytpo groups on social media, but immediately felt uncomfortable. In that community, I feel like a real outsider.

Also, I'm not a hustler. I'm a tired person with social anxiety. If I could do this, I would feel like there's something I actually do - Something I could be good at. Narcolepsy keeps me at home - keeps me in bed a lot, and definitely doesn't let me drive. Before this, I was always very physical, and preferred jobs where I was working with animals, and able to be a busy body all day, cleaning up and caring for my shelter kitties. My skill set is all very physical and something I can't do anymore.

Except for this. This, I can do at home. I don't have to keep a set schedule. I don't have to work with other people who think I do everything weird. I don't have to worry about offending people by having a monotone voice, or not making eye contact. And it makes sense to me.

A lot of people hate crypto and NFTs and want them to go away. But there's this huge community of people who are enjoying themselves and staying sharp with this stuff. For me, it's helping so much with my brain fog to be engaged like this.

I just... I know if people don't see what I'm doing and don't care... I won't make any money; I won't feel like I can contribute financially to my household... I'll feel like a failure, and I'll burn out. And... I don't know how to show people what I'm doing. I don't know how to get my foot in the door.

So, having said all that, if anyone wants to follow me on Zora, or share my Zora page, I would be eternally grateful.

My brand is Sourdough Bun. Yes, it's just a cute bunny in a bunch of different little outfits. No, I don't dress my real life bunnies - They wouldn't like that.

But, I didn't want it to be without meaning, so my Sourdough Bun collections will always say, "Sourdough Bun knows it's okay to not be okay."

Sourdough Bun is a bunny who is usually in a bad mood, but she knows it's okay to express herself, and she finds enjoyment in what she loves. For her, that means wearing all sorts of costumes. She's also a shape shifter, and can appear with different patterns and colors of fur, and different kinds of ears. She does so for variety, rather then to fit in.

If you love bunny rabbits, or hate toxic positivity, you might like Sourdough Bun.

If you actually read all this... Wow! Thanks!

[robcosposts]

idea: could you guys go and buy a bunch of stupid shit since you’ve managed to hack into RobCo? Like tank Mr house’s assets by buying nfts or paying off a bunch of college student loans?

Their finance department is really locked down and we would never buy NFT. We do not support NFTs in anyway we do not want to give NFT owners any money.

[asklittlepip]

Things have certainly happened, and normally I woulda commented on yesterday being "Fallout Day", or more specifically, the date on which the Great War happened, though it isn't exactly 2077 yet. But a whole buncha family health drama happened I don't want to get into, so that dulled the week for me. And then you've got what's happening overseas as I alluded to with the last post, as well as a certain criminal who still roams free..

Ugh. I just wanna play videogames and talk about stupid nerdy stuff that only affects those into that! We live in an age of technology and social progress, yet there continues to exist those who'd drag us back into the darkness, bereft of freedom and innovation. A somehow even more fucked up dystopia where the machines steal creative jobs and the humans do the manual labor, instead of the reverse..

And on that note, stop calling it "AI" generated. It's automated theft! These are just algorithims that are assembling pieces of things they copied from others. They aren't creating it out of anything they didn't steal. Nobody taught these things how to paint, or proper techniques on artistry. And while everybody is inspired by something, if you just start lifting others' work, without permission or payment, that is unacceptable.. so why make excuses for this being ok?

I'm not saying the technology is completely without merit (unlike, say, NFTs, which are utterly pointless and fortunately, continue to fail). A good "AI" art tool could be used by an actual creator to, say, correct seams in textures on a 3D model, or to add more randomness to a repeating surface in a game. But in those cases, it's not really intelligent, is it? It's simply another thing you click in [art program of your choice], that isn't scouring the Internet to rob others of their career or even their OCs.

As for voice-based "AI", which, again, I hate the use of that term since it.. isn't.. more like a VI, really.. there's a small number of uses that aren't wrong. Remember how Stephen Russell recorded a few hundred names for Fallout 4, so that Codsworth could address the player properly? Then had to be called back to the studio for even more, and it still barely scratched the surface of common names, let alone silly ones? That's an application I can see vocal algorithims doing their work in, without impacting the career of actors; it could dynamically construct names based on player input, and respond appropriately.

This is where a computer could actually do it better, because the idea that you're going to get a human to speak tens of thousands of names, all in the correct cadence and presentation, and also store all that.. is absurd. Or using this knowledge to improve text-to-speech programs for the disabled. But when you're having the machine do their actual line readings for them in movies or games, or you're making yet another stupid Youtube video / mod that's having them say absurd or even offensive things.. yeah, no. Stop. Just stop.

Anyways, just some random thoughts, as it were. Hope you're all doing well and continue to DO good, too!