#best web scraping company

[outsourcebigdata]

Web Crawling Tools: Optimize Your Data Strategy in 2024

Looking for powerful web crawling tools for 2024? Open-source tools are free, customizable, and highly effective for scraping and data collection. Explore our top picks that help you crawl websites efficiently, whether you're a beginner or an expert.

Contact us to know more: https://outsourcebigdata.com/top-10-open-source-web-crawling-tools-to-watch-out-in-2024/

About AIMLEAP Outsource Bigdata is a division of Aimleap. AIMLEAP is an ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified global technology consulting and service provider offering AI-augmented Data Solutions, Data Engineering, Automation, IT Services, and Digital Marketing Services. AIMLEAP has been recognized as a ‘Great Place to Work®’. With a special focus on AI and automation, we built quite a few AI & ML solutions, AI-driven web scraping solutions, AI-data Labeling, AI-Data-Hub, and Self-serving BI solutions. We started in 2012 and successfully delivered IT & digital transformation projects, automation-driven data solutions, on-demand data, and digital marketing for more than 750 fast-growing companies in the USA, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada; and more.  -An ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified  -Served 750+ customers  -11+ Years of industry experience  -98% client retention  -Great Place to Work® certified  -Global delivery centers in the USA, Canada, India & Australia  Our Data Solutions APISCRAPY: AI driven web scraping & workflow automation platform APISCRAPY is an AI driven web scraping and automation platform that converts any web data into ready-to-use data. The platform is capable to extract data from websites, process data, automate workflows, classify data and integrate ready to consume data into database or deliver data in any desired format.  AI-Labeler: AI augmented annotation & labeling solution AI-Labeler is an AI augmented data annotation platform that combines the power of artificial intelligence with in-person involvement to label, annotate and classify data, and allowing faster development of robust and accurate models. AI-Data-Hub: On-demand data for building AI products & services On-demand AI data hub for curated data, pre-annotated data, pre-classified data, and allowing enterprises to obtain easily and efficiently, and exploit high-quality data for training and developing AI models. PRICESCRAPY: AI enabled real-time pricing solution An AI and automation driven price solution that provides real time price monitoring, pricing analytics, and dynamic pricing for companies across the world.  APIKART: AI driven data API solution hub  APIKART is a data API hub that allows businesses and developers to access and integrate large volume of data from various sources through APIs. It is a data solution hub for accessing data through APIs, allowing companies to leverage data, and integrate APIs into their systems and applications.  Locations: USA: 1-30235 14656  Canada: +1 4378 370 063  India: +91 810 527 1615  Australia: +61 402 576 615 Email: Sales@aimleap.com

[uniquesdata]

Enhancing Business Strategies with Web Scraping Services

Businesses in this digital age rely on data for getting better insights and results. Hence collecting data from the internet is a tedious task for firms. Web scraping services ensure that the data collected from different platforms are accurate, correct and usable. Checkout the latest detailed blog on how business strategies can be enhanced via web scraping services.

[feminist-space]

"Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.

Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point.

“When you put [AI] so much in their face, and then give them the option to opt out, but then increase the friction to opt out… I think that increases their anger level — like, okay now I’ve really had enough,” Jingna Zhang, a renowned photographer and founder of Cara, told TechCrunch.

Cara, which has both a web and mobile app, is like a combination of Instagram and X, but built specifically for artists. On your profile, you can host a portfolio of work, but you can also post updates to your feed like any other microblogging site.

Zhang is perfectly positioned to helm an artist-centric social network, where they can post without the risk of becoming part of a training dataset for AI. Zhang has fought on behalf of artists, recently winning an appeal in a Luxembourg court over a painter who copied one of her photographs, which she shot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam.

“Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary,” Zhang wrote on X.

Zhang and three other artists are also suing Google for allegedly using their copyrighted work to train Imagen, an AI image generator. She’s also a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI.

“Words can’t describe how dehumanizing it is to see my name used 20,000+ times in MidJourney,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “My life’s work and who I am—reduced to meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

Artists are so resistant to AI because the training data behind many of these image generators includes their work without their consent. These models amass such a large swath of artwork by scraping the internet for images, without regard for whether or not those images are copyrighted. It’s a slap in the face for artists – not only are their jobs endangered by AI, but that same AI is often powered by their work.

“When it comes to art, unfortunately, we just come from a fundamentally different perspective and point of view, because on the tech side, you have this strong history of open source, and people are just thinking like, well, you put it out there, so it’s for people to use,” Zhang said. “For artists, it’s a part of our selves and our identity. I would not want my best friend to make a manipulation of my work without asking me. There’s a nuance to how we see things, but I don’t think people understand that the art we do is not a product.”

This commitment to protecting artists from copyright infringement extends to Cara, which partners with the University of Chicago’s Glaze project. By using Glaze, artists who manually apply Glaze to their work on Cara have an added layer of protection against being scraped for AI.

Other projects have also stepped up to defend artists. Spawning AI, an artist-led company, has created an API that allows artists to remove their work from popular datasets. But that opt-out only works if the companies that use those datasets honor artists’ requests. So far, HuggingFace and Stability have agreed to respect Spawning’s Do Not Train registry, but artists’ work cannot be retroactively removed from models that have already been trained.

“I think there is this clash between backgrounds and expectations on what we put on the internet,” Zhang said. “For artists, we want to share our work with the world. We put it online, and we don’t charge people to view this piece of work, but it doesn’t mean that we give up our copyright, or any ownership of our work.”"

Read the rest of the article here:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/06/a-social-app-for-creatives-cara-grew-from-40k-to-650k-users-in-a-week-because-artists-are-fed-up-with-metas-ai-policies/

[comic-art-showcase]

hello fellow comic art fans.

i am the goblin who runs this here blog. otherwise known as @jondoe297

i am extremely bummed that when i do come out and adress the followers of this blog directly it will be with this news. well. here goes:

Comic Art Showcase will indefinitely stop sharing our favorite artists' works until further notice due to the deal tumblr's owner is making with A.I. companies to sell data,enabling the theft of the works of the platform's users to scrape to train their A.I.

and here is a good article about what's going on

while for the over 5 years(!!) now that i have run this page and shared the love of comic art i am so passionate about,through ups and downs,i have kept this page strictly for doing so. not presenting any topics or ideas or even showing my own personality or linking my personal blog(even though i have been flirting with the idea recently. well i guess now is as good a time as any) i feel that if nothing else i have to use this specific platform i have,as it is,to address this topic as it is intrinsic and intertwined with this page's theme or activity. and i will not have it be an open buffet for these greedy corporations to scrape for data to feed the A.I. with which they seek to replace the very artists that i love and admire! even though it may be too late as we don't really know how long they've been doing this. well the inevitable came. and if this page is not deleted it will at least not be posted on for the time being. while we figure out what to do next.

in the meantime we can and have to all do what we can to fight for artists' and creatives' rights. if nothing else by not being a part of the theft and exploitation of them an their work. please do not use any generative A.I. programs for images or text. they work by scraping from databases of artists' and creatives' works without any permission,credit or compensation.

for now we can at least 'opt out' of having our content be shared with the A.I. companies in the settings.

keep in mind this seems to be only available on the web version and not on the app for now!

go to your blog settings from the corner here

ID/image description: a screenshot of the tumblr blog with a red arrow pointed at the options button. end description.

then go to 'blog settings'

ID/image description: a screenshot of tumblr blog settings with a red arrow pointing at the 'blog settings' option. end description.

then go to visibility. and turn ON the 'prevent third-party sharing' option. make sure to turn it ON not off.

ID/image description: screenshot of tumblr's visibility settings with the 'prevent third-party sharing' option turned on. end description.

and you have to do this for each blog and sideblog individually so make sure to do that!

and artists make sure to use Nightshade and Glaze to protect your artwork and images!!!!

here's a link to Nightshade

here's a link to Glaze

the best combination is to use Nightshade first then Glaze on your images.

Glaze creates a protective layer on the image to prevent A.I. from copying it. while Nightshade poisons the A.I. sotfware.

stay safe friends an i will see you around❤

[probablyasocialecologist]

Regardless of what companies and investors may say, artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent in the way most humans would understand it. To generate words and images, AI tools are trained on large databases of training data that is often scraped off the open web in unimaginably large quantities, no matter who owns it or what biases come along with it. When a user then prompts ChatGPT or DALL-E to spit out some text or visuals, the tools aren’t thinking about the best way to represent those prompts because they don’t have that ability. They’re comparing the terms they’re presented with the patterns they formed from all the data that was ingested to train their models, then trying to assemble elements from that data to reflect what the user is looking for. In short, you can think of it like a more advanced form of autocorrect on your phone’s keyboard, predicting what you might want to say next based on what you’ve already written and typed out in the past. If it’s not clear, that means these systems don’t create; they plagiarize. Unlike a human artist, they can’t develop a new artistic style or literary genre. They can only take what already exists and put elements of it together in a way that responds to the prompts they’re given. There’s good reason to be concerned about what that will mean for the art we consume, and the richness of the human experience.

[...]

AI tools will not eliminate human artists, regardless of what corporate executives might hope. But it will allow companies to churn out passable slop to serve up to audiences at a lower cost. In that way, it allows a further deskilling of art and devaluing of artists because instead of needing a human at the center of the creative process, companies can try to get computers to churn out something good enough, then bring in a human with no creative control and a lower fee to fix it up. As actor Keanu Reeves put it to Wired earlier this year, “there’s a corporatocracy behind [AI] that’s looking to control those things. … The people who are paying you for your art would rather not pay you. They’re actively seeking a way around you, because artists are tricky.” To some degree, this is already happening. Actors and writers in Hollywood are on strike together for the first time in decades. That’s happening not just because of AI, but how the movie studios and steaming companies took advantage of the shift to digital technologies to completely remake the business model so workers would be paid less and have less creative input. Companies have already been using AI tools to assess scripts, and that’s one example of how further consolidation paired with new technologies are leading companies to prioritize “content” over art. The actors and writers worry that if they don’t fight now, those trends will continue — and that won’t just be bad for them, but for the rest of us too.

[mavigator]

peter pwease for the character ask game

ahh....the person brave enough to ask the peter guy about peter. step into my parlor.

one aspect about them i love

there's something peter says to flash thompson that basically describes one of my favorite things about spider-man: "you don't quit until ten minutes after you're dead!" like. my god. not "you don't quit until you drop dead" but, even after you're dead, you keep kicking and hitting and fighting tooth and nail. which is, of course, impossible. WHICH leads me to another line that encapsulates the same thing: thanos (long story) says to peter, "it's too late. you can't save anyone anymore. you're trying to do the impossible." for the record, peter is dead here. he's in a confrontation with thanos and Death after failing to save a little girl and, like, having a heart attack and dying. anyway, peter responds, "yeah? so what. so what?" peter has this unfathomable arrogance in the face of death and he has it on PURPOSE. he CHOOSES to look death in the face and say "so?" he's fucking crazy. he literally gets buried alive for two weeks and crawls out of the grave just because he wants to see his wife. what the hell is his problem

one aspect i wish more people understood about them

(concrete scraping) only one? ok. i wish people understood the Audacity he possesses more. i talk a lot about how i wish his anger issues weren't phased out of his character so often, but i think his sheer audacity goes hand-in-hand with that. this guy isn't socially anxious. in fact, it might be for the good of society at large if he was MORE socially anxious. half the reason peter is such a Figure in the vigilante game (from a watsonian perspective) is because since the jump he's been putting his foot down and telling people how things were going to go even if he had no right or position to do so. sometimes this makes him a jackass. sometimes this makes him one of the best of them

one (or more) headcanon(s) i have about this character

his teeth are pretty messed up because he couldn't afford to see the dentist as a kid and he doesn't feel like getting adult braces. he has Wife Merch that he wears in public and points to and goes Guess what? That's My Wife. Jealous? what else....... oh. NSAID painkillers (like ibuprofen) don't work on me so they don't work on him either.

as well as

one character i love seeing them interact with

aunt may :) that's his mommy and he loves her

one character i wish they would interact with/interact with more

hmmm........ ben grimm. the ever-lovin' blue-eyed thing probably reminds peter a lot of his uncle (older jewish guy named ben with a penchant for mischief). i don't think peter sees ben as a paternal figure or anything, i just think he appreciates his company and ben's always the one telling peter he's part of the family. i want them to hang out more and clobber people

one (or more) headcanon(s) i have that involve them and one other character

he's definitely been on Talk Daredevil Down From Mania-Induced Behavior more than once. i know this happens, like, canonically, but the visual of peter trying his best to calm matt down and then sighing loudly and just cocooning him in a web and dragging him kicking and screaming back to foggy is very funny to me.They're buddies

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fediverse (does/n't) solve

No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it’s still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator’s whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good — but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically.

That is, even if you trust Tim Cook to decide what apps you are and aren’t allowed to install — including whether you are allowed to install apps that block Apple’s own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers — you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.

What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It’s a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship. It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from *you, by criminalizing jailbreaking, reverse engineering, scraping, etc.

As thorny as this is, it’s even harder when we’re talking about social media, because it’s social. Sociability adds a new and pernicious switching cost, when we hold each other hostage because we can’t agree on when/whether to go, and if we do, where to go next. When the management of your community goes septic, it can be hard to leave, because you have to leave behind the people who matter to you if you do.

We’ve all been there: do you quit your writers’ circle because one guy is being a jerk? Do you stop going to a con because the concom tolerates a predator? Do you stop going to family Thanksgiving because your racist Facebook uncle keeps trying to pick a fight with you? Do you accompany your friends to dinner at a restaurant whose owners are major donors to politicians who want to deport you?

This collective action problem makes calamity of so long life. At the outer extreme, you have the families who stay put even as their governments slide into tyranny, risking imprisonment or even death, because they can’t bear to be parted from one another, and they all have different views of how bad the situation really is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/the-oppermanns-book-holocaust-nazi-fascism/672505/

The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.

You can visit all manner of abuses upon a social network and it will remain intact, glued together by the interpersonal bonds of its constituent members. Like a kidnapper who takes your family hostage, abusers weaponize our love of one another and use it to make us do things that are contrary to our own interests.

In “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media,” Cat Valente is characteristically brilliant about this subject. It is one of the best essays you’ll read this month:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Valente is on the leading edge of creators who were born digital — whose social life was always online, and whose writing career grew out of that social life. In 2009, she posted her debut novel, “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” to the web for free. Two years, and many awards, later, Macmillan brought it out in hardcover:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/10/valentes-girl-who-circumnavigated-fairyland-sweet-fairytale-shot-through-with-salty-tears-magic/

“Stop Talking to Each Other” is a memoir wrapped around a trenchant, take-no-prisoners critique of all the robber-barons who’ve made us prisoners to one another and fashioned whips out of our own affection for one another and the small pleasures we give each other.

It begins with Valente’s girlhood in the early 1990s, where Prodigy formed a lifeline for her lonely, isolated existence. Valente — a precocious writer — made penpals with other Prodigy users, including older adults who assumed they were talking to a young adult. These relationships expanded her world, uplifting and enriching her.

Then, one day, she spotted a story about Prodigy in her dad’s newspaper: “PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS.” The headline floored her. Even if Valente wanted to buy the weird grab-bag of crap for sale at Prodigy in 1991, she was a 12 year old and had no way to send internet money to Prodigy. Also, she had no money of any sort.

For her, the revelation that the owners of Prodigy would take away “this one solitary place where I felt like I mattered” if she “didn’t figure out how to buy things from the screen” was shocking and frightening. It was also true. Prodigy went away, and took with it all those human connections a young Cat Valente relied on.

This set the pattern for every online community that followed: “Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.”

Or, more trenchantly: “Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control. Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.”

Valente traces this pathology through multiple successive generations of online community, lingering on Livejournal, whose large community of Russian dissidents attracted Russian state-affiliated investors who scooped up the community and then began turning the screws on it, transforming it into a surveillance and control system for terrorizing the mutual hostages of the Russian opposition.

Valente and her friends on the service were collateral damage in the deliberate enshittification of LJ, band the Russian dissidents had it worse than they did, but it was still a painful experience. LJ was home to innumerable creators who “grew audiences through connections and meta-connections you already trusted.”

Most importantly, the poisoning of LJ formed a template, for how to “[take] apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention.”

It’s a template that has been perfected by the alt-right, by the Sad Puppies and the Gamergaters and their successor movements. These trolls aren’t motivated by the same profit-seeking sociopathy of the corporate person, but they are symbiotic with it.

Valente lays out the corporate community’s lifecycle:

Be excited about the internet, make a website!

Discover that users are uninterested in your storefront, add social features.

Add loss-leaders to “let users make their own reasons to use the site” (chat, blogs, messaging, etc), and moderate them “to make non-monster humans feel safe expressing themselves and feel nice about site.”

The site works, and people “[use] free tools to connect with each other and learn and not be lonely and maybe even make a name for themselves sometimes.”

The owners demand that users “stop talking and start buying things.”

Users grow disillusioned with a site whose sociability is an afterthought to the revenue-generation that is supposed to extract all surplus value from the community they themselves created.

The owners get angry, insult users, blanket the site with ads, fire moderators, stoke controversy that creates “engagement” for the ads. They sell user data. They purge marginalized community that advertisers don’t like. They raise capital, put the community features behind a paywall, and focus so hard on extraction that they miss the oncoming trends.

“Everyone is mad.”

“Sell the people you brought together on purpose to large corporation, trash billionaire, or despotic government entity who hates that the site’s community used those connective tools to do a revolution.”

The people who “invested their time, heart, labor, love, businesses and relationships” are scattered to the winds. Corporate shareholders don’t care.

Years later, the true story of how the site disintegrated under commercial pressures comes out. No one cares.

The people who cashed out by smashing the community that created their asset are now wealthy, and they spend that wealth on “weird right-wing shit…because right-wing shit says no taxes and new money hates taxes.”

This pattern recurs on innumerable platforms. Valente’s partial list includes “Prodigy, Geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr,” and, of course, Twitter.

Twitter, though, is different. First, it is the largest and most structurally important platform to be enshittified. Second, because it was enshittified so much more quickly than the smaller platforms that preceded it.

But third, and most importantly, because Twitter’s enshittification is not solely about profit. Whereas the normal course of a platform’s decline involves a symbiosis between corporate extraction and trollish cruelty, the enshittification of Twitter is being driven by an owner who is both a sociopathic helmsan for a corporate extraction machine and a malignant, vicious narcissist.

Valente describes Musk’s non-commercial imperatives: “the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away…[the] viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.”

Not every platform has been degraded this way. Valente singles out Diaryland, whose owner, Andrew, has never sold out his community of millions of users, not in all the years since he created it in 1999, when he was a Canadian kid who “just like[d] making little things.” Andrew charges you $2/month to keep the lights on.

https://diaryland.com/

Valente is right to lionize Diaryland and Andrew. In fact, she’s right about everything in this essay. Or, nearly everything. “Almost,” because at the end, she says, “the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis.”

That’s where I think she goes wrong. Or at least, is incomplete. Because the story of the web’s early diversity and its focus on its users and their communities isn’t just about a natural cycle whereby our communities became commodities to be tormented to ruination and sold off for parts.

The early web’s strength was in its interoperability. The early web wasn’t just a successor to Prodigy, AOL and other walled gardens — it was a fundamental transformation. The early web was made up of thousands of small firms, hobbyists, and user groups that all used the same standard protocols, which let them set up their own little corners of the internet — but also connected those communities through semi-permeable membranes that joined everything, but not in every way.

The early web let anything link to anything, but not always, which meant that you could leave a community but still keep tabs on it (say, by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the people who stayed behind), but it also meant that individuals and communities could also shield themselves from bad actors.

The right of exit and the freedom of reach (the principle that anyone can talk to anyone who wants to talk to them) are both key to technological self-determination. They are both imperfect and incomplete, but together, they are stronger, and form a powerful check on both greed and cruelty-based predation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Small wonder that, from the beginning, the internet has been a fight between those who want to build a commons and those who wish to enclose it. Remember when we were all angry that the web was disappearing into Flash, the unlinkable proprietary blobs that you couldn’t ad-block or mute or even pause unless they gave you permission?

Remember when Microsoft tried, over and over again, to enclose the internet, first as a dial-up service, then as a series of garbage Windows-based Flash-alikes. Remember Blackbird?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

But standard protocols exert powerful network effects on corporations. When everyone is adhering to a standard, when everything can talk to everything else, then it’s hard to lure users into a walled garden. Microsoft coerced users into it by striking bargains with buyers at large companies to force its products on all their employees, and then by breaking compatibility with rival products, which made it hard for those employees to use another vendor’s products in their personal lives. Not being able to access your company email or edit your company documents on your personal device is a powerful incentive to use the same product your company uses.

Apple, meanwhile, seduced users into its walled garden, promising that it would keep them safe and that everything would just work, and then using its power over those customers to gouge them on dongles and parts and repair and apps.

Both companies — like all corporations — are ferocious rent-seekers, but both eventually capitulated to the internet — bundling TCP and, eventually, browsers with their OSes. They never quit trying to enclose the web, via proprietary browser extensions and dirty tricks (Microsoft) or mobile lock-in and dirty tricks (Apple). But for many years, the web was a truly open platform.

The enclosure of online communities can’t be understood without also understanding the policy choices that led to the enclosure of tech more broadly. The decision to stop enforcing antitrust law (especially GWB’s decision not to appeal in the Microsoft antitrust case) let the underlying platforms grow without limits, by buying any serious rival, or by starving it out of existence by selling competing products below cost, cross-subidizing them with rents extracted from their other monopoly lines.

These same policies let a few new corporate enclosers enter the arena, like Google, which is virtually incapable of making a successful product in-house, but which was able to buy others’ successes and cement its web dominance: mobile, video, server management, ad-tech, etc.

These firms provide the substrate for community abusers: apps, operating systems and browser “standards” that can’t be legally reverse-engineered, and lobbying that strengthens and expands those “Felony Contempt of Business Model” policies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

Without these laws and technologies, corporations wouldn’t be able to block freedom of exit and freedom of reach. These laws and technologies let these corporations demand that the state obliterate anyone who gives users the tools to set their own terms for the communities they built.

These are the laws and technologies that transform network effects from a tool for openness — where even the largest, most vicious corporations must seek to pervert, rather than ignore, standards — into a tool for enclosure, where we are all under mounting pressure to move inside a walled garden.

This digital feudalism is cloaked in the language of care and safety. The owners of these walled gardens insist that they are benevolent patriarchs who have built fortresses to defend us from external threats, but inevitably they are revealed as warlords who have built prisons to keep us from escaping from them:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Which brings me to the Fediverse. The Fediverse’s foundation is a standard called ActivityPub, which was designed by weirdos who wanted to make a durably open, interoperable substrate that could support nearly any application. This was something that large corporations were both uninterested in building and which they arrogantly dismissed as a pipe dream. This means that Activitypub is actually as good as its architects could make it, free from boobytraps laid by scheming monopolists.

The best-known Fediverse application is Mastodon, which has experienced explosive growth from people who found Musk’s twin imperatives to cruelty and extraction sufficiently alarming that they have taken their leave of Twitter and the people they cared about there. This is not an easy decision, and Musk is bent on making it harder by sabotaging ex-Twitter users’ ability to find one another elsewhere. He wants the experience of leaving Twitter to be like the final scene of Fiddler On the Roof, where the villagers of Anatevka are torn from one another forever:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

With Mastodon’s newfound fame comes new scrutiny, and a renewed debate over the benefits and drawbacks of decentralized, federated systems. For example, there’s an ongoing discussion about the role of quote-tweeting, which Mastodon’s core devs have eschewed as conducive to antisocial dunks, but which some parts of Black Twitter describe as key to a healthy discourse:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/21/Mastodon-Ethics

But quote tweeting wasn’t initially a part of Twitter. Instead, users kludged it, pasting in text and URLs for others’ tweets to make it work. Eventually, Twitter saw the utility of quote-tweeting and adopted it, making it an official feature.

There is a possibility that Mastodon’s core devs will do the same, adding quote-tweet to the core codebase for Mastodon. But if they don’t, the story isn’t over. Because Mastodon is free software, and because it is built on an open standard, anyone can add this feature to their Mastodon instance. You can do this yourself, or you can hire someone else to do it for you.

Now, not everyone has money or coding skills — but also, not everyone has the social clout to convince a monolithic, for-profit corporation to re-engineer its services to better suit their needs. And while there is a lot of overlap between “people who can code,” and “people who can afford to pay coders” and “people whom a tech company listens to,” these are not the same population.

In other words: Twitter is a place where you get quote-tweeting if the corporation decides you need it, and Mastodon is a place where you get quote-tweeting if the core devs decide you need it, or if you have the skills or resources to add it yourself.

What’s more, if Mastodon’s core devs decide to take away a feature you like, you and your friends can stand up your own Mastodon server that retains that feature. This is harder than using someone else’s server — but it’s way, way easier than convincing Twitter it was wrong to take away the thing you loved.

The perils of running your own Mastodon server have also become a hot topic of debate. To hear the critics warn of it, anyone who runs a server that’s open to the public is painting a huge target on their back and will shortly be buried under civil litigation and angry phone-calls from the FBI.

This is: Just. Not. True. The US actually has pretty good laws limiting intermediary liability (that is, the responsibility you bear for what your users do). You know all that stuff about how CDA230 is “a giveaway to Big Tech?” That’s only true if the internet consists solely of Big Tech companies. However, if you decide to spend $5/month hosting a Mastodon instance for you and your community, that same law protects you.

Indeed, while running a server that’s open to the public does involve some risk, most of that risk can be contained by engaging in a relatively small, relatively easy set of legal compliance practices, which EFF’s Corynne McSherry lays out in this very easy-to-grasp explainer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Finally, there’s the ongoing debate over whether Mastodon can (and should) replace Twitter. This week on the Canadaland Short Cuts podcast, Jesse Brown neatly summarized (and supported, alas) the incorrect idea that using Mastodon was no different from using Gab or Parler or Post.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/843-god-save-the-tweets/

This is very, very wrong. The thing is, even if you like and trust the people who run Gab or Parler or Post, you face exactly the same risk you face with Twitter or Facebook: that the leadership will change, or have a change of heart, and begin to enshittify your community there. When they do, your only remedy will be the one that Valente describes, to scatter to the winds and try and reform your community somewhere else.

But that’s not true of the Fediverse. On Mastodon, you can export all your followers, and all the people who follow you, with two clicks. Then you can create an account on another server and again, with just two clicks, you can import those follows and followers and be back up and running, your community intact, without being under the thumb of the server manager who decided to sell your community down the river (you can also export the posts you made).

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

Now, it’s also true that a particularly vindictive Mastodon server owner could summarily kick you off the server without giving you a chance to export your data. Doing so would arguably run afoul of the GDPR and state laws like the CCPA.

Strengthening these privacy laws would actually improve user rights — unlike abolishing CDA 230, which would simultaneously make the corporate owners of big services more trigger-happy when it comes to censoring content from marginalized groups, and make it all but impossible for those groups to safely run their own servers to decamp to when this happens.

Letting people set up their own communities, responsible to one another, is the tonic for Valente’s despair that the cycle of corporate predation and enshittification is eternal, and that people who care for one another and their communities are doomed to be evicted again and again and again and again.

And *federating these communities — creating semi-permeable membranes between them, blocking the servers for people who would destroy you, welcoming messages from the like-minded, and taking intermediate steps for uneasy allies — answers Brown’s concern that Twitter is the only way we can have “one big conversation.”

This “one conversation” point is part of Brown’s category error in conflating federated media with standalone alternatives to Twitter like Post. Federated media is one big conversation, but smeared out, without the weak signal amplification of algorithms that substitute the speech of the people you’ve asked to hear from with people who’ve paid to intrude on your conversation, or whom the algorithm has decided to insert in it.

Federation is an attractive compromise for people like Valente, who are justly angry at and exhausted by the endless cycle of “entrepreneurs” building value off of a community’s labor and then extracting that value and leaving the community as a dried-out husk.

It’s also a promising development for antitrust advocates like me, who are suspicious of corporate power overall. But federation should also please small-government libertarian types. Even if you think the only job of the state is to enforce contracts, you still need a state that is large and powerful enough to actually fulfill that role. The state can’t hold a corporation to its promises if it is dwarfed by that corporation — the bigger the companies, the bigger the state has to be to keep them honest.

The stakes are high. As Valente writes, the digital communities that flourished online, only to be eradicated by cruelty and extraction, were wonderful oases of care and passion. As she says, “Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.”

“Be each other’s pen pals. Talk. Share. Welcome. Care. And just keep moving. Stay nimble. Maybe we have to roll the internet back a little and go back to blogs and decentralized groups and techy fiddling and real-life conventions and idealists with servers in their closets.”

“Protect the vulnerable. Make little things. Wear electric blue eyeshadow. Take a picture of your breakfast. Overthink Twin Peaks. Get angry. Do revolutions. Find out what Buffy character you are. Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in.”

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh's face has been replaced with Elon Musk's. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. Moses's head has been replaced with the head of Tusky, the Mastodon mascot. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh's audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh's head has been replaced with a Matrix 'code waterfall' effect.]

[halceon]

I've seen the sentiment going around that the moment for Nightshading your art has been missed. In that the companies are no longer scraping the open web, because it's been poisoned by their own output. And the point is solid.

But also, they're trying to buy clean data. Big reddit deal that gave OpenAI direct access, for example. So if you're putting your art on a platform that's been curated and seeemingly unscraped, add some nightshade! Best case scenario – the place never sells out and you've wasted a minute. But if they do. Or go under and their assets get bought out. Or the data just gets stolen, then you get to poison the grift.

Or (if you're a super prolific creator) just sell poisoned data directly. Fuck em up!

[chipped-chimera]

Stumbled on this - so for anyone out of the loop part of Reddit blowing up last year was because it was making use of it's API prohibitively expensive for the average person to use, killing off a lot of (superior) third party apps used to both browse and moderate the platform on mobile.

I don't know if it was stated explicitly at the time, but for me the writing was on the wall - this was purely to fence off Reddit's data from being trawled by web scraping bots - exactly the same thing Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter so he could wall off that data for his own AI development.

So it comes as absolutely zero surprise to me that with Reddit's IPO filing, AI and LLM (Large Language Models) are mentioned SEVERAL times. This is all to tempt a public buyer.

What they do acknowledge though, which is why this video is titled 'Reddit's Trojan Horse' is the fact that while initially this might work and be worth a lot - as the use of AI grows, so will the likelihood that AI generated content being passed off as 'human generated' on the platform will grow - essentially nulling the value of having a user-generated dataset, if not actively MAKING IT WORSE.

As stated in the video - it's widely known that feeding AI content into an AI causes 'model collapse', or complete degeneration into gibberish and 'hallucinations'. This goes for both LLM's and Image Generation AI.

Now given current estimates that 90% of the internet's content will be AI generated by 2026 that means most of the internet is going to turn into a potential minefield for web-scraping content to shove into a training dataset, because now you have to really start paying attention what your bot is sucking up - because lets face it, no one is really going to look at what is in that dataset because it's simply too huge (unless you're one of those poor people in Kenya being paid jack shit to basically weed out the most disgusting and likely traumatizing content from a massive dataset).

What I know about current web-scraping, is OpenAI at least has built it's bot to recognize AI generated image content and exclude it from the scrape. An early version of image protection on the side of Artists was something like this - it basically injected a little bit of data to make the bot think it was AI generated and leave it alone. Now of course we have Nightshade and Glaze, which actively work against training the model and 'poison' the dataset, making Model Collapse worse.

So right now, the best way to protect your images (and I mean all images you post online publicly, not just art) from being scraped is to Glaze/Nightshade them, because either these bots will likely be programmed to avoid them - but if not, good news! You poisoned the dataset.

What I was kind of stumped on is Language Models. While feeding AI LLM's their own data also causes Model Collapse, it's harder to understand why. With an image it makes sense - it's all 1's and 0's to a machine, and there is some underlying pattern within that data which gets further reinforced and contributes to the Model Collapse. But with text?

You can't really Nightshade/Glaze text.

Or can you?

Much like with images, there is clearly something about the way a LLM chooses words and letters that has a similar pattern that when reinforced contributes to this Model Collapse. It may read perfectly fine to us, but in a way that text is poisoned for the AI. There's talk of trying to figure out a way to 'watermark' generated text, but probably won't figure that one out any time soon given they're not really sure how it's happening in the first place. But AI has turned into a global arms race of development, they need data and they need it yesterday.

For those who want to disrupt LLM's, I have a proposal - get your AI to reword your shit. Just a bit. Just enough, that it's got this pattern injected.

These companies have basically opened Pandora's Box to the internet before even knowing this would be a problem - they were too focused on getting money (surprise! It's capitalism again). And well, Karma's about to be a massive bitch to them for rushing it out the door and stealing a metric fucktonne of data without permission.

If they want good data? They will have to come to the people who hold the good data, in it's untarnished, pure form.

I don't know how accurate this language poisoning method could be, I'm just spitballing hypotheticals here based on the stuff I know and current commentary in AI tech spaces. Either way, the tables are gonna turn soon.

So hang in there. Don't let corpos convince you that you don't have control here - you soon will have a lot of control. Trap the absolute fuck out of everything you post online, let it become a literal minefield for them.

Let them get desperate. And if they want good data? Well they're just going to have to pay for it like they should have done in the first place.

Fuck corpos. Poison the machine. Give them nothing for free.

[arcticdementor]

We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper. If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated. Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant. Similarly, the domains where the systems fear to tread mark them out. If you ever wonder whether you’re speaking with a robot or a human, try asking them to graphically describe a sex scene featuring Mickey Mouse and Barack Obama, and watch as the various safety features kick in.

…

And sometimes, the tells are idiosyncratic. In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word “delve” in responses. No individual use of the word can be definitive proof of AI involvement, but at scale it’s a different story. When half a percent of all articles on research site PubMed contain the word “delve” – 10 to 100 times more than did a few years ago – it’s hard to conclude anything other than an awful lot of medical researchers using the technology to, at best, augment their writing.

…

According to another dataset, “delve” isn’t even the most idiosyncratic word in ChatGPT’s dictionary. “Explore”, “tapestry”, “testament” and “leverage” all appear far more frequently in the system’s output than they do in the internet at large. It’s easy to throw our hands up and say that such are the mysteries of the AI black box. But the overuse of “delve” isn’t a random roll of the dice. Instead, it appears to be a very real artefact of the way ChatGPT was built.

…

An army of human testers are given access to the raw LLM, and instructed to put it through its paces: asking questions, giving instructions and providing feedback. Sometimes, that feedback is as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down, but sometimes it’s more advanced, even amounting to writing a model response for the next step of training to learn from. The sum total of all the feedback is a drop in the ocean compared to the scraped text used to train the LLM. But it’s expensive. Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

…

I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

[outsourcebigdata]

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[realdataapi1]

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[uniquesdata]

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[soleminisanction]

Saw yet another post about how all modern comics are bad and the industry is decaying etc. since you’ve seemed at least a bit more optomistic (and want to write yourself) what are your thoughts on comics, things you think are good or bad about the current state of things, and where you think it’ll go?

I don't like making predictions for the future. I make plans and I hope for the best and if the best doesn't come, I readjust.

What's true is that the industry is not exactly robust right now. There's not a lot of money in comics. From what I've heard, most companies' profit margins are razor-thin, and the Big Two may actually be operating at a loss, because their real value is as "test kitchens" for stories and characters who might conceivably spin off into the much more lucrative film, TV or video game markets.

But that's also true for most hobby industries. TTRPGs comes to mind because that's where I'm currently working -- most publishers barely scrape enough together to keep producing their content. You don't go into these markets to get rich, you go into them because you like making things.

People have saying that the industry is dying for longer than I've been alive. Probably the only times they weren't saying that was during the first big Golden Age superhero boom and the 90s speculator bubble. I personally suspect that some form of the industry will always survive as long as there are people who enjoy creating and reading sequential art. It may not be the industry as we know it -- the Big Two may well collapse, or superheroes could go out of fashion again, or the economy could get so bad that the entire direct market crashes and the only survivors will be book publishers putting out full graphic novels. But I doubt it'll get that far.

As for the quality of modern comics, anyone who says they're bad is just ignorant, full stop. If anything, one of the industry's problems on the American side is that they're putting out some really high-quality physical products and it's really pushing the boundaries of how much people are willing to pay for them -- glossy full-color digital printing is waaaaaaaay more expensive than the simple two-tone shading on newsprint that you find in, for example, manga magazines.

But there are great books being made, at the Big Two, smaller publishers, indies and self-publishing, including web comics. There's a lot of high-quality variation, a lot big topics being addressed, and a lot of gorgeous art and great writing from creative pools that are growing more and more diverse with each passing year. And sure, there are plenty of stinkers too, but that's true of literally every era of comics; people just forget that because the shit goes away and the good stuff sticks around.

So yeah, that's my two cents: it's a creative industry, the creative part is great, the industry part sucks, and this is the nature of telling stories under capitalism. Doom & gloomsayers are just too short-sighted to see it.

[lensnure-solutions]

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[lshark-cs]

Iron God Chapter 39 [Kolo]

They arrived at the village of Morning – quite appropriately – at sunrise. Just as Azvalath had promised, it was a place of spectacular beauty. The first rays of dawn were nearly blood-red over the largest expanse of water Kolo had ever seen. Her jaw hung open in awe as she took in the view from the cliffs.

Azvalath grabbed her by the hood and pulled her back. "Hey, don't get too close to the edge."

She swatted at him, indignant. "I wasn't that close!"

Jai-Lag scraped her claws along a stone with a sound that made them both wince.

"Can't be too safe." Azvalath scratched his head. "Though yes, this is the best view in the whole village." Ignoring his own supposed wisdom, he stepped closer to the edge and pointed to something out on the water. "Looks like they're going out fishing."

Kolo looked out and saw boats on their way offshore. They looked miniscule in comparison to the blue vastness.

The man cocked his head. "Have you ever seen the ocean?"

She shrugged. "Not until now." Then she smiled. "I like it. How big do you think the fish can get? You think they get to be as big as horses?" Her eyes widened. "Or as big as houses?"

"I don't know." Aza gave a nervous chuckle. "Not exactly sure I want to know, either."

A white bird with silvery wings and big webbed feet flew past. It squawked and then plummeted down toward the waves.

Kolo pointed it out. "What's that?"

"It's a gull." Azvalath shook his head. "They're everywhere, raucous yelling bastards."

Kolo grabbed him in invisible hands and yanked him back from the edge. "Let me guess. There's a story about why you don't like them?"

He tumbled into the snow, then got up and brushed himself off. "It's embarrassing." He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Got shat on by one last time I was here."

She pictured that happening and laughed. "No way."

"I swear, they aim for people's heads." He turned to the pacing sabretooth cat. "Come on. Let's find this contact of ours."

Kolo ran ahead of him even though she had no idea where she was going. There were already plenty of people out on the dirt roads. The houses were packed tightly together, all their wood bleached grayish from salt. One old man hauling a wagon of firewood stopped to look at her. "Never seen you around. Are you a new neighbor?"

"No, we're just visiting." Azvalath caught up to her and nodded politely to the man. "Good morning, sir. Would you mind giving us some directions?"

"There aren't many places to get lost around here." His wizened face lifted in a gap-toothed smile. "But how can I help you two?"

"We're looking for a man by the name of Talin," said Azvalath.

To Kolo's bewilderment, the man laughed at them. "Oh yeah, you're definitely new here. Talin's a bit of a scarce sight these days." He scratched his gray beard. "But hey, you might be lucky. Whenever he's around, he tends to stay at the lodge where I'm delivering this firewood."

"Perfect." Kolo clapped her hands together. "I'm Kolo, by the way."

"Azvalath." Azvalath extended his hand to the man.

The stranger returned the handshake. "Wymer."

Kolo smirked, thinking that was a very unfortunate name. Sounded a lot like whiner. She imagined his parents must have disliked him for no good reason.

"Need any help?" Azvalath asked.

"Ah, it's always refreshing to hear a younger lad offer help." Wymer dislodged one of the wagon's wheels from a pothole in the dirt. "But I'm doing just fine, thank you."

Kolo almost laughed out loud when she heard Wymer refer to Aza as a younger lad. If only he knew. If only.

She cleared her throat. "Aza, where's the cat?"

"Told her to go somewhere else." Azvalath shrugged. "Do you really think we could all walk here without causing a scene?"

"Who'd cause a scene?" Wymer asked. "I like cats just fine."

"A sabretooth cat," Kolo corrected.

"Oh." Wymer's patchy eyebrows rose. "Well, you two have an odd choice of company. You find her as a kitten or something?"

Azvalath huffed. "Yeah, we go way back. You like cats, though?"

Kolo found the small talk charming for about five seconds before it became tedious background noise. When it didn't include her, she found it about as charming as the wagon's creaking. She glanced around her surroundings. Some children were playing with a dog. Two women were arguing through an open window. Something smelled almost as good as Lalek's bear bread. Then three men ran down the road yelling at the top of their lungs, none of them wearing shirts.

"Put a shirt on!" Kolo couldn't help herself. "It's cold!"

Wymer sighed. "Those are my nephews. Just ignore them."

Awkward silence followed them the rest of the way.

The lodge in question was bigger than all of the other houses and smelled like smoked fish. The door opened and a freckled blond young man greeted them. "Right on time, Mr. Wymer. Thank you so much. What'll you be having today?"

"Whatever you're cooking." Wymer dropped the wagon's handle. "And my wagon back, once you're done unloading."

"Of course." The freckled one smiled. "You'll have it back by tonight."

"I'd better." The old man waved and walked away. "Take care. See you for supper."

"Nice to meet you, Talin." Azvalath extended his hand. "I'm Azvalath and I was told you would –"

"Huh? My name's Dras." Dras chuckled nervously. "Nice to meet you though, Azvalath. And you are...?" He looked down at Kolo.

"Kolo." She waved.

"Welcome to Morning, you two." He gave them each a firm handshake. "Always great to see new faces. Change of pace, you know?" He opened the door wider. "You two go on in. Make yourselves comfortable. It's cold out. I'll put the firewood out back. Just don't break anything."

Azvalath peeked inside, seeming suspicious. "Actually, can we help with the firewood?"

"Of course." Dras beckoned them along. "Well, I don't actually need help, but you can come anyway." He shut the door and then grabbed the wagon.

They circled around to the back of the lodge, where there was a small pile of firewood already beneath the overhang of the roof. Azvalath offered again to help, but Dras still refused. Then Aza asked the question he and Kolo both wanted answered. "When does Talin usually come?"

"Oh, he's sometimes part of the lot that comes around for supper." Dras picked up an armful of logs and stacked them on the existing pile. "I'm not good at much except cooking, so anyone who helps me with anything else gets a plate at my table. Mr. Wymer keeps me stocked with firewood."

"So you do know him." Kolo kicked a hole in the snow. "What's he help you out with?"

"Odds and ends." Dras shrugged. "He's really not all that helpful, but he's great company. Guess that's worth something, right?"

"Oh, of course." Azvalath grabbed a log Dras dropped on his next load. "Sure you don't need help?"

"If you want to join me for supper tonight, I don't need help with the firewood, but I do need a couple extra hands in the kitchen, if you'd be so kind." Dras winked. "You two look smart enough to be trusted with knives, at least."

"Wouldn't be so sure about him." Kolo sneered and nudged Azvalath.

Azvalath averted his eyes.

"But he's trustworthy with a sword? Sure." Dras pointed to the sword on Azvalath's belt. "By the way, can I please hold your sword? I always wanted to know what it felt like."

"It's not a toy." Azvalath put his hand on the hilt.

"Please?" Dras had the expression of a begging puppy. "All right, fine. Let's get out of the cold now."

Dras led them inside. A fire was already burning in the fireplace. Next to it was a large table with padded chairs. A deer skull hung on the opposite wall, slightly crooked. Kolo reached out with an invisible hand to straighten it before it could bother her any longer.

"Renovated last year. Isn't it great?" Dras gestured around the room. "Have a seat. Don't put your feet on the table."

Kolo cocked her head as she took the chair that looked most comfortable. "Who'd put their feet on the table?"

"You wouldn't believe some of the things people do, especially when they're drunk." Dras sat down and crossed one leg over his lap. "Though some people do wild things even when they're sober. Like last week, I saw two women picking death cap mushrooms. On purpose!" He slammed a hand on the table. "Who does that?"

Azvalath sat down and shrugged. "Think they were trying to poison someone?"

"Maybe. Don't know. Not my kennel, not my dogshit." He rocked in his seat. "Well, I like gossip unless it involves dead people."

"But dead people will never hear you gossiping," Kolo pointed out.

Dras raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, but the thing is, there's been a lot more of that lately. I've been to more funerals in the past month than I've been to weddings in my whole life." He put his head in his hands. "Sorry, not trying to be gloomy, but it's been hard."

"It's all right." Azvalath nodded. "What's been happening? If you don't mind me asking."

Dras scratched his blond head. "People keep dying in a certain part of the woods. And we don't know why, because no one comes back alive." He sighed. "Talin told me last week he was going to come and tell me more about it when he could. He lives near there, I think, so he probably knows what's going on."

A knock on the door startled all three of them. Kolo bolted up from her chair. "Talin?"

"Flour!" A woman's voice called. "See you tonight."

Dras ran to the door and hauled in a sack of flour from outside. "Nah, that wasn't Talin. You'll know him when you see him." He staggered with the sack through another door across the room. Then there was a thud and a shout. "I'm fine!" Dras called before anyone could ask. "Damn, I spilled it everywhere. You two watch the door while I clean up. Miss Swift said she'd be by with milk in a while."

"Should we help him?" Kolo whispered to Azvalath.

Aza leaned back. "I don't know about you, but I'd really rather not clean up a spill of that magnitude."

"Hm." Kolo looked over and saw the front door was still open. She closed it with her power. A few seconds later, someone else came to the door. Whoever it was didn't knock so much as thump and scratch.

"Miss Swift?" Azvalath called. "Dras should be there in a second."

The voice wasn't a woman's. "No, it's Talin. And who are you?"

Kolo ran to the door and threw it open. "Talin, we were told to..." When she didn't see a person, she looked down. Then she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Azvalath stood up and drew his sword. "What's happening?"

"It's a rat!" Kolo pointed down at the strange animal on the doorstep, though it clearly wasn't a rat. It was big, gray, and hairy, with a black-and-white striped face.

"Excuse me?" The animal looked up, speaking perfectly like a human. "Do I even look like a rat? I'm a badger."

"You're a –" Azvalath's fright turned to surprise and confusion in an instant when he came to look. "What the hell?"

"Don't be rude. Put the sword away." The badger's ears twitched. "Good morning. I'm Talin. And you are...?"

"Kolo." Her heart rate was gradually slowing back down, but she was still winded. "And this is Azvalath."

"Everything all right out there?" Dras called from the other room.

"We're all fine!" Talin called back. "Just a misunderstanding." Then he let himself in. The badger's claws clicked on the floor. "Close the door behind us, will you?"

Kolo slammed it a little too hard. "Is this some kind of joke?"

"If Xigon left out the bit about me being a badger, I imagine it was so you'd have the fright of your lives." Talin yawned, showing bright fangs. "Anyway, Yayaba did tell me a couple Styzian brats would be coming this way. Don't know why Xigon couldn't just come himself, though. Doesn't he want to see an old friend?"

"You're friends?" Kolo asked.

"Well, of course we are." Talin looked up. "Best friends, actually. Since we were little. Well, as little as Xigon ever was. Is he not feeling well or something?"

"Yeah, he's not feeling great." Azvalath fidgeted, clearly unnerved. "So what's happening out there?"

"That's what you're here for, isn't it?" Talin brightened. "Oh, please, yes. Help these people out in any way you can. They don't deserve to be getting eaten like they have been."

Kolo took a step back. "Eaten?"

"Yep." Talin looked down, almost pressing his nose to the floor. "Eaten right up. Bones and all."

Kolo forced a smile. "So...how would we help?"

"Simple." Talin's ears perked up. "You find the thing that's eating people and make it stop. Right?"

"Fair enough." Azvalath's head turned toward the door. "But first we have to know what we're dealing with. Could you maybe tell us where to look?"

"The woods around the beaver pond are where I've heard it crying," said Talin.

Kolo shivered, remembering Magpie all of a sudden. "Crying?"

"Whatever it is, it cries just like a human baby. But the people who go investigating..." Talin averted his gaze. "They never come back. Not ever."

Kolo swallowed her fear and stuck her chin up. "We'll be the first."