this duck LOVES pink drink

Interesting article by The Guardian

The most interesting aspect of the controversy, though, is the effrontery of Huffman’s attempt to seize the moral high ground. What’s bothering him is that the data on Redditors’ interests and behaviour over the decades that is stored on its servers constitutes gold dust for the web crawlers of the tech giants as they hoover up everything in training their large language models (LLMs). Providing a free API makes that a cost-free exercise for them. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman told the New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Note the sleight of mind here. That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service. So it’s a bit rich to hear him complaining about LLMs which were – and are – being trained via the largest and most comprehensive exercise in intellectual piracy in the history of mankind. Or, to coin a phrase, it’s just another case of the kettle calling the slag heap black.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

another BBC Merlin thing we were robbed of: Arthur becoming used to Merlin's batshit power levels and then holding every other sorcerer he meets to those insanely high standards. what do you mean you can't stop time with your mind or summon lightning to the palm of your hand or blast away entire armies? Merlin can! the assassination attempts don't actually stop once the magic ban is repealed because Arthur continues to piss off a different warlock each week just by being himself