So, I've been writing a webcomic, so far only a few pages are posted, and new pages go up every Sunday and Wednesday. You can read it here.
It's a space adventure where no humans, because who needs humans.
Fenryr (white and red guy) is a bounty hunter who was hired to capture Xenarra (blue girl) and take her back to the family she escaped from ten years ago. They'll travel across the galaxy, going from planet to planet until Fenryr captures his prey.
Also there are Star Turtles.
Anyways, go to my deviantart for the higher quality version
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
I feel like all those edits replacing the needle drop in the Supergirl movie finale, along with the tweets complaining about it, are kind of missing the point of that scene.
It's not supposed to be some badass entrance or triumphant victory lap.
It's a moment of serenity.
of safety.
For probably the first time in a long time, Ruthye isn't thinking about survival. She isn't calculating her next move or wondering who's going to betray her. She's surrounded by murderers and human traffickers, and none of that matters in that moment because Supergirl is there.
Not Kara. Not the drunk stumbling he way through fights or depressed in a corner throwing up.
Supergirl.
The cape. The crest. The symbol.
It's the feeling that, for just a little while, the worst people in the room no longer have the most power. The feeling hope has arrived, and because she's here, everything is going to be alright.
The point isn't for Supergirl to look cool. It's letting us experience, through Ruthye, what it feels like to be protected.
like the Aeneid iirc has a much lower level of fantasy content. its pretty humourless. you've got the big dramatic opening w the fall of Troy. its whole Ethos is a lot closer to moral sensibilities. it would work but alas the source material doesn't have the necessary name brand recognition.
Remember early on in the AI boom where people were asking if the same woman appearing in generated images all the time meant there was a "digital cryptid" and then it turns out that AI just inexplicably gets stuck on stuff and keeps making it over and over and
