#tech dystopia

[wanderingaldecaldo]

Standards

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit. source

Looked this up today for work and realized it applies Cyberpunk's modding community and bodies. No, we didn't actually need that last one, thanks.

[chipped-chimera]

Well fuck you too Windows. Wonder why they're pushing this-

Ah. That's why.

Anyone got some good Linux resources for someone who hasn't touched that shit in their entire life? My big concern is whether I can even move my huge game library over + software or if it's just going to be a massive headache.

Otherwise the only thing stopping my PC from actually working with Windows 11 is installing a chip onto the mobo.

[kerynean]

So the impending Midjourney deal -

First up, if the shit about scraping data without telling users and then telling us retroactively is true, sincerely fuck you.

Second - I will be deleting this blog shortly. I will be remaking it but it'll honestly be the fastest way to delete my posts. I know they will hang around in the reblogs, I don't know another way round it. Can't do shit.

What I will be doing on remaking is reuploading everything poisoned. Whether I will disclose that or not on remaking is up in the air, because honestly as someone disabled, below the poverty line in terms of income and stuck living with my parents so I can just have a semblance of a comfortable life with dignity because otherwise I'd be dead - I very much do like the idea of fucking up a big corpo's dataset. If you want clean data? PAY ME FOR IT ASSHOLE.

Til then I'm on my other account @chipped-chimera where I shitpost and ramble, I'll probably hold the Kerynean username on there as a sub-blog until I get shit set up for reupload. I'll probably alert people there too when the account has been remade.

[aroclan]

“tech guys” try to convince me that google isn’t listening and they’re sure it’s a coincidence that “how to care for your monstera” showed up in my partner’s news suggestions … the day after I asked verbally if she wanted “this monstera” I got in Animal Crossing. (she said no. so they're listening, but badly.)

[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.

[pixelins]

helloooo? 2005??

[whereserpentswalk]

Oh, YouTube is taunting humanity with weird hyper capitalist browser games.

[cyberneurotism]

I love this version of capitalism where you don't own anything, you just lease it from companies.

[global-twilight]

Cyberpunk Moments

[zadokthepriest]

by arqui9

[chipped-chimera]

Mkay I'm writing this here otherwise it's gonna be a tag wall. Here are all my reasons why I hate Apple/iPhones:

It's 100% a status symbol because you are being charged for the brand, not the phone. You are literally paying extra for the same tech. (So exactly like she said)

They purposely want to keep their users in the dark about how their tech works (why you can't build a Mac like a PC) because then they can charge extra for fixing things.

They purposely roll out updates to slow down older phones.

I consider them predatory because at least for high schools where I live, they pushed for contracts to be the suppliers for school laptops that they give students. Basically getting them onto the Apple UI early, which as someone who has had to learn the differences between Windows and Mac OS for education in creative industries (yeah expect a lot of Mac takeovers there too, if the two different university/trade schools I went to were anything to go by) I feel is done entirely on purpose. Makes the idea of transitioning to the other system too difficult and unattractive.

A further case in point to this: I finished high school before they handed out those laptops. My sister got one. She is a 100% Mac and iPhone user. I'm on windows and android, I have basically BUILT my own PC and I know how to troubleshoot and fix all my tech and hardware problems. I'm known as the 'tech person' in the family but the second you come to me with a Apple related problem? Shit out of luck mate, can't help you. Go pay them for help.

Apple is straight up the reason Tumblr got hit with the porn ban. No seriously. It's also why tag censorship gets out of control even now. And it's also why we'll probably never get NSFW content back:

So if you hate the Tumblr porn ban, hate paying 'brand tax' on a product, hate purposeful obsolescence in tech, hate the sanitisation of the internet at large, hate the discrimination sex workers face nowadays -

You should be hating Apple.

[nestedneons]

By Mark Liang

[r-e-d-s-h-i-f-t]

Cyberdump

[technoregression]

(Found on instagram, someone made ‘AI art’ of those two)

Ok.

Well.

I think that’s enough internet for literally ever.

[dipstick-university]

I know I just reblogged this, but that was before I actually read about the fucking ray ban meta sunglasses where everyone is on camera at all times and, according to this Verge writer, the only way to feel better about it is to also have your own meta ray ban sunglasses.

I desperately miss when people were literally beaten up and harassed for wearing this technology in public. none of this should not be acceptable. it absolutely should not.

i hate the "meta glasses" with their invisible cameras i hate when people record strangers just-living-their-lives i hate the culture of "it's not illegal so it's fine". people deserve to walk around the city without some nameless freak recording their faces and putting them up on the internet. like dude you don't show your own face how's that for irony huh.

i hate those "testing strangers to see if they're friendly and kind! kindness wins! kindness pays!" clickbait recordings where overwhelmingly it is young, attractive people (largely women) who are being scouted for views and free advertising . they're making you model for them and they reap the benefits. they profit now off of testing you while you fucking exist. i do not want to be fucking tested. i hate the commodification of "kindness" like dude just give random people the money, not because they fucking smiled for it. none of the people recording has any idea about the origin of the term "emotional labor" and none of us could get them to even think about it. i did not apply for this job! and you know what! i actually super am a nice person! i still don't want to be fucking recorded!

& it's so normalized that the comments are always so fucking ignorant like wow the brunette is so evil so mean so twisted just because she didn't smile at a random guy in an intersection. god forbid any person is in hiding due to an abusive situation. no, we need to see if they'll say good morning to a stranger approaching them. i am trying to walk towards my job i am not "unkind" just because i didn't notice your fucked up "social experiment". you fucking weirdo. stop doing this.

[kitsoa]

The Dystopia That Made Trigun

Ya'll the problem with Triguns insanely long speculative sci-fi timeline is the conundrum of trying to imagine exactly how a dystopian Earth could get so bad that massive amounts of folks needed to yeet themselves blindly into space, but could become so advanced that they single-handedly solve the energy crisis and maybe confirm the existence of god at the same time.

I am not a very skilled dystopia engineer, and there are a lot of flavors but I'd like to think the revolution of Plants on Earth has the potential to alleviate a lot of the aggregators in a full (or seemingly imminent) societal collapse. I'm struggling to work ahead of late-stage capitalism doomer scenarios right now which maybe puts me at a century out. I'm placing Trigun's timeline at 5 centuries out, But the tech advancement can pause at like 3 centuries in since 2 of those are used for space travel before the Big Fall.

So let's hash this out together

Here's what advancements Project Seeds needs to launch:

bioengineering (prosthetics and augmentations)

cloning and gene editing capabilities

cryosleep technology

advanced space travel

gravity control

supercomputing

Here's the rough and estimated environmental factors to cause them to leave Earth:

Resource scarcity

Environmental decline (like global warming and loss of land, and mass extinction)

[speculative] imminent doom from societal factors [like nuclear war and geopolitical unrest]

We know based on the society formed on No Man's Land that capitalism is probably the most familiar and default system used by the immigrants. So we can assume that Project Seeds was created with wealthy benefactors at the helm not only looking for salvation but probably power and influence (cause capitalism gonna a capitalism)-- a true colonial expansion echo despite the optimism.

The Seeds Project strikes me as unaffiliated with a specific country or culture. JuLai and some of the ambiguous ethnicities and lingering languages suggest that it's multi-cultural with English being the primary influence. So it's not a state-sponsored project, but very likely independent-- another point to the wealthy benefactor line of thought. Despite that, those shuttles alone took decades to construct and governmental cooperation to launch so it couldn't have been a completely apolitical endeavor.

Then there's the population. The project's reach is insane, not just in talent, but passenger interest. I'm assuming children were not on board, so you are talking about countless able-bodied adults abandoning their lives knowingly for the promise of a better world. The environmental factors aside, the prep-time for the project had to have been decades in the making. That's a long time to keep the propaganda circling for the promise of better. That kind of interest fades as people age into different stages of life. (Depending on the scenarios we could be looking at a mass draft? Unlikely but very interesting). We know that the survivors of the Big Fall were not specifically tailored to create a society without the comforts they were bringing along or the government of No Man's Land would look a little more stable.

So, what kind of society could form such a vast space immigration project while simultaneously on the verge of collapse?

Well, a desperate one.

The logic follows that as the resources grow scarce and the inequality gaps create vast populations of suffering among disenfranchised people-- fascism rises, which broadly stymies innovation. It's a real roadblock to this scenario. So the jumpstart out of this would be either war or a scientific breakthrough-- or both. There's always going to be interest and innovation in DNA science as a part of the medical field. Even in heavy capitalism that is going to get a lot of money thrown at it. The only thing needed to create Plants is large leaps in gene editing and cloning.

I'll throw out a number, 50 years. We've got cloning and Jurassic Park stuff. Then boom. Angel Mummy discovery. Scientists create the First Entity. But at the same time, geopolitical tensions ramp up because of the destructive potential of this entity. (I mean the First Entity has the Drain ability, that's black hole powers. We're getting wars). But the Plants are developed off of that and the First Entity is destroyed in the Julai foreshadowing lab accident many years down the line. --We've solved the energy crisis and there is probably a huge boom in advancement-- probably those physic-defying advancements to boot. But we have our militaristic flashpoint in technological prosperity, all while the earth is raining hellfire, the cities are flooding, and mass extinction events are occurring. Enough to get Trillionaires with savior complexes to start making Project Seeds.

Aaaand they are probably funding the countless wars so people join the expedition.

Conclusion: Project Seeds is a corrupt colonial project manipulating the hopeful desperation of a beleaguered population, created by the ultra-wealthy to garner absolute control in a humanity reset.

Good thing Nai crashed the ships!