Asparagus Gazebo

Art & Culture

[mf-dude]

[bogleech]

This is how uncanny close to reality ai videos have gotten. We're like weeks away from them smoothing out the last mistakes and officially rendering video footage meaningless anymore 😩

[insane-bad-idea-person]

generative ai, beyond being generally wasteful and creating an economic bubble the likes of which has not been seen since perhaps the tulip bubble, is fundamentally disastrous due to the effect it has had on our ability to trust photos and videos as truth. for more than a hundred years, human civilization has been built on the foundation that a video is either accurate or painstakingly hand-edited over dozens if not hundreds of hours. the ability to conjure any video from nothing has destroyed our confidence in the reality of videos. that we can no longer look at a video of a cat being cute and go "aw, cute cat!" but instead must analyze it like a fucking fae is unforgivable and unconscionable.

[bogleech]

Yeah everyone who says "but photoshop already existed!" or "but movies and fiction already existed!" is a dumbass because those things took effort and skill. Someone had to work hard to fake something convincingly. Now bots can just flood all channels and platforms with things that never happened for literally no purpose other than farming engagement numbers. Soon you'll just never again know if cute, silly or amazing clips represent delightful things really going on in your world. This really is a dark, bleak, horrible shift.

We're the last people who got to enjoy a world not overrun with what will, withon a few more years, probably be billions more fake slop videos than real ones. Documentation of real things will be *dwarfed,* in no time, because it's that quick and easy and automated bots are already let loose to do it on their own.

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”

As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species

[targetedknowledge]

[cryoverkiltmilk]

How to disable Copilot in Windows 11

Completely disable Copilot in Windows 11

You too can get the satisfaction of maiming or killing a spy embedded in your organization.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

[aetherograph]

Oh! Then I know the EXACT person you should be mad at! Michael O'Rielly! He's the one that gutted the Children's Programming Rules, which covered internet as well as television.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

HELLO?

[aetherograph]

#so the death of the Saturday morning cartoon is THIS motherfuckers fault?????

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

And a side note: Things like KOSA and SCREEN and all those other censorship bills that use "think of the children" are not going to protect children at all; if you want to protect kids online, there is already a way to do that it's called the Kid Vid Rules and the FCC is the one that can update and change them to keep up with the times! It doesn't need a congress vote, it already got voted on in 1990!

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

*Pushes her old-lady reading glasses up on her nose*

Actually, Michael O'Rielly is only continuing an attack on children's media that was begun during the 2nd Reagan Administration.

Via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, here's an article from the New York Times about it:

Reagan Vetoes Bill Putting Limits On TV Programming for Children (Published 1988)

Before then, there were not only Saturday Morning cartoons, there were also weekday late afternoon cartoons (shows to watch after you got home from school, and before dinner). After then, that time slot was filled up with rage-bait talk shows.

(I remember that time. It was not pretty. I credit that era with the seeds of the right wing rage-mongers. Because anger for the views took up a lot more space in the background noise of people's homes, instead of The Bugs Bunny Show and The Mickey Mouse Club.)

[blackarachnya]

Who the fuck is still watching these jurassic world movies

[blackarachnya]

[medusadyke]

academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches

[medusadyke]

"you're just scared your diploma is going to devalue" i'm afraid you dumb bitches are going to become my colleagues and drag social services to hell

[ebb-is-learning]

being anti ai is making me feel like in going insane. "you asked for thoughts about your characters backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas". studies have proven its making people dumber. "i asked ai to generate this meal plan". its causing water shortages where its data centers are built. "ill generate some pictures for the dnd campaign". its spreading misinformation. "meta, generate an image of this guy doing something stupid". its trained off stolen images, writing, video, audio. "i was talking with my snapchat ai-" theres no way to verify what its doing with the information it collects. "youtube is impletmenting ai based age verification". my work has an entire graphics media department and has still put ai generated motivational posters up everywhere. ai playlists. ai facial verification. google ai microsoft ai meta ai snapchat ai. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least-" "but it does-" "but you can-" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the evil machine. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?

[kindalikerackham]

every day, elon musk breaks world records for how divorced a guy can be

[cipheramnesia]

I think "slop" is a strong contender for world of the year 2025, as it seems to be universally recognizable as a description for the majority of output produced in the name of Return on Investment.

Sure it means algorithmically generative slop now, but look at housing construction, durable appliances, food, automobiles, you name it and tell me it's not just more slop. If enshittification is the process, slop is the result.

[churchrummagesale]

Exiled

[animentality]

[dorian-they-ao3]

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) • JIMMY STEWART as George Bailey and LIONEL BARRYMORE as Mr. Potter

[dorian-they]

wait WHAT 😳 i mean that feels accurate but still…. WHAT.

[dykecostanza-deactivated2024112]

here’s the official fbi memo about it! you can view the whole document here

the fbi presented these “findings” to mccarthy’s house unamerican activities committee (huac) in an attempt to get it’s a wonderful life pulled from theaters but huac decided not to take any action

[halorvic]

[halorvic]

[mollyjames]

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

[lesbiananimeism]

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

[rageagainstthechristine]

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

[sonichedgeblog]

City Skyline Casino Night Zone ‘Sonic The Hedgehog 2’ SEGA Mega Drive Support us on Patreon

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

You ever think about the MOVE bombing and then think about the fact that so few US Americans even know that the MOVE bombing like. Happened.

[sizhens-deactivated20250415]

"The United States is dedicated to moving bombs away from people who would use them for nefarious purposes! Google MOVE bombing to learn more!"

[lagtrainzzz]

jesus christ 😐

[technofeudalism]

this also doesn't come close to telling the whole story.

the Philadelphia police harassed the MOVE organization for over a decade. MOVE began with peaceful protests against conditions at long-term-care facilities and against the city Zoo's mistreatment of animals. in 1972, police classified the group’s use of profanity as riotous and designated them violent threats to public order. the actual reason was their radical abolitionist message.

the Philadelphia police department had a brutal, corrupt, and racist reputation long before MOVE entered the picture. despite that fact, MOVE’s claims of police brutality typically fell on deaf ears, even when they had undeniable proof of mistreatment. the bombing is only one part of the story both because it is the culmination of violence between MOVE and the police and also because it is part of the broader narrative of police brutality in Philadelphia that is still largely played out today.

in 1957, two Black men were beaten by three off duty and allegedly drunk police officers, putting one in the hospital for 19 days. the commissioner at the time testified that all officers were trained in "race relations," which involved things such as having officers brandish shotguns out the window of their patrol vehicles as a show of force in so called "shotgun squads." the three officers were not convicted of any crimes.

in 1960, shots indiscriminately fired by officer Robert Marinelli killed two innocent Black bystanders. Marinelli was charged, tried, and then found not guilty on all charges by an all-white jury.

in 1967, a guy named Frank Rizzo became the police chief. his nickname while working in West Philadelphia as a captain was "The Cisco Kid," which referenced the fictional cowboy who "killed for the love of it or any other reason that came to mind." he referred to "vermin" in Philadelphia as the source of the crime and decline.

shortly after he was appointed, he sicced 300 officers in riot gear on Black students and advisors protesting the Board of Education who were protesting the lack of Black studies and Black teachers. Rizzo ordered the officers to "get their Black asses." 57 protesters were arrested, dozens were beaten, and 15 were hospitalized. Frank Rizzo was elected Mayor of Philadelphia 3 years later and during his bid for re-election in 1975, he said that he would "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot" once he was reelected.

so yeah, not only is the MOVE bombing virtually unheard of by the average person in America (and it's not much better in academia, for that matter), but the story that is often told when people do hear about is that this all happened in a vacuum "due to the actions of a violent Black resistance group." in reality, it was the culmination of over 50 years of brutality against Black people and minorities in Philly.

[reactionimagesdaily]

[imsobadatnicknames2]