YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission. As AI quietly mediates our world, what happens to our sha
"It turns out, he wasn't. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.
There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us."
This is why you can’t just call something genAI off a general look. Weirdly sharp highlight/shadow is a reason to look closer, not proof positive. Dismissing real this as AI is also bad. Architecture and logic remain the best method I’ve found
you wanted the Behr paint rant, @say-duhnellee and I hate those fuckers.
So first, you gotta understand that all paint has three necessary ingredients. Pigment - the part that makes it a color; Binder - the part that makes it stick to stuff; Solvent - the part that makes it liquid/not a solid
Pigment is the most important part for this rant. And the most expensive part in almost any paint. There are pigments that are very opaque by default, and pigments that are very translucent. The most expensive, and tbh, gorgeous, colors are single transparent pigments. Alizarin crimson and quinacridone and the pthalos, for instance. So, when you buy a student grade tube of quinacridone violet paint, it has (making it up) 15% pigment by volume. And when you buy an artist grade tube of the same color, from the same company, it has 50% pigment by volume. That means the color is richer, covers better, extends farther. It's just superior in every way. Here's winsor newton heavy body acrylics in their professional line and their student line. The stripes are Heavy application, single streak, and mixed with white.
It's why student paints either take a ton of layers to get full coverage, or the colors are weaker, there's just not enough pigment in there to be opaque or to overpower an opaque you mix it into
Even something cheaper and easier like a raw sienna shows it
Or, Mars Black, which is consistently opaque, but you can still seen the weakness in the pigmentation when you cut it into white
But Strife! you're saying! that's artist paint, not house paint. I know, but you needed the primer and you asked for the rant.
One of the preferred paints used by scenic artists, aka, halfway between fine art and house paint, is Rosco Off Broadway, it has a ton of pigment in it. It's gorgeous, pure pigments. You can extend it crazy far.
A gallon of Fire-red is 100$ :)
I'm using red as the example because red is notoriously hard to get opaque in a pure hue. You can get opaque earthy reds, or if you skew towards orange to get more opaque, but true reds are hard. Its why that barn red color you can imagine? That's pretty neutralized, it isn't a true deep tone.
But in house painting, one of the things they like to market is how quickly it covers, right? 'one coat coverage' shows up a lot. And next to it is a price tag for like, 60 bucks. The upsell for why you should get that one, and not the 30/gal option is that Oh! You''d need multiple coats with that one, so this is actually cheaper overall! That's not untrue.
But there's always a little asterisk next to the One Coat Coverage. It has to be in one of the colors they have on cards for their brand, and for that exact type of paint. None of this scan to match stuff. And the colors available are all fairly neutralized. You're not getting a Behr Dynasty can of fire red.
Look at this shit:
Those are the ones they show as being one coat. They can do other colors, but it won't be one coat.
For instance, here's the 'purest' options of those same colors
Those are 1, not going to be One Coat, and 2, are not actually going to look like they do on your screen. They'll be duller.
However. All that is just business sense, right? The people want one coat, they offer one coat things, and they cover their ass on not claiming a purer tone will do that too. Business.
So. Why was I talking about plumbing?
There are three necessary parts of Paint.
Pigment. Binder. Solvent.
But pigment is the only thing in there that would make it opaque. And pigment is expensive. Thus.
Filler.
Sometimes called 'solids' sometimes lamp shaded as 'additives to prevent mold/stain/whatever' but still. It's extra stuff they tossed in there so the paint has better coverage in a single coat. It fucks up the color saturation, which is why those guaranteed ones are all so fucking dull, but yes. it does make for better coverage. As you go to their cheaper brands, they use the same amount of pigment, but there's less filler, which is why it takes multiple coats, but, you can get more intense colors from it.
hOwEvEr
You, random person painting a room, wash up after you paint, right? You wash your hands, the brushes, the tray, the roller cover (btw don't bother doing that ever, just your hands) And that washes the excess paint down the drain. And yeah, yeah, you know its not great, so if you have a wash room, or a work sink in the garage you use that instead.
You know what we have in full scene shops?
A Paint Trap.
Same principal as a grease trap. It's a bonus section that lts the water from the sink that you're unnecessarily scrubbing a roller cover in flow down into. The outlet is up higher, so the water and solids can separate, and the water that flows out is cleaner. You have to occassionally open up the trap, which will smell like death, and scoop all the accumulated gunk out of the bottom and properly dispose of it. It sucks, it can clog, I've cleaned these dozens of times, it never gets better, but I still throw a tantrum if there isn't one installed. This is actually a picture of a grease trap, but its the same system
Your house doesn't have that. Your apartment building? the initial pipes bringing water to the sewer? they don't have that. Depending where you live and how you dump paint water, there might be nothing like a paint trap between you and the ocean/river/drinking water.
Now, this is true of basically all house paint, I'll admit. After they got rid of VOCs and started bragging about opacity, everyone does some version of this.
Behr is the worst offender. (I have not directly checked if they're using exactly the thing I'm about to describe, but they did for a decade)
When you buy paint, you choose the type, you give them the paint swatch, and you may have noticed they grab different gallons for different colors. White, deep base, medium base, etc. Those are saying how much pre-added Dark Opaque Stuff is in the gallon before they add the tint (that's the color goo the machine squirts into the gallon, its made of just pigment and solvent and if it gets on your clothes, just throw them out bc it will stain everything forever)
You know what's a really good, solid, opaque thing that is naturally available in different neutral colors, is cheap, and is already made of very very fine particles
Fucking Clay.
Clay.
They use goddamn fucking clay as filler in their goddamn paint that is specifically marketed to DIY folk who don't know shit about paint. They literally have you washing clay down your goddamn sink, and since most DIY folk are idiots, I have watched folk straight up pour the rest of the gallon down a house sink. At best, they're cleaning things in a bucket, and then dumping the bucket in the sink. That's clay. You're pouring clay down your sink.
You don't have a paint trap. You have an S trap or a P trap under your sink, neither of which can stand up to that kind of bullshit. Look at these poor babies, they can't handle this
And then they have the aboslute nerve to act like its this decadant goddamn product and you should feel so luxuruious about it. They are out here convincing people that all the actual stylish colors are neutral, they aren't those gaudy intense colors, how gauche. Cause then, you're cool with it being the ugly ass neutral fucking green bc you want to be stylish, so you think hey, i'll buy the expensive paint. But also, you're a DIY guy so you're an idiot, and probably have to do multiple coats anyway, so now! Now you're washing goddamn clay down the sink Twice! Which is actually worse! Because the bit of clay that settled during the first one is still fucking there. and it's not going to easily wash away, its going to just pick up another fucking layer.
They also use chalk btw, but clay is the one that makes me insane because!
That paint trap I mentioned? We had a 30 gallon one. And the show budgets were tiny, so you had to base out with house paint a lot, or a project was entirely house paint, so the trap would absolutely fill up. I'm talking 3 cubic feet of paint goo, filler, and whatever grossness got washed down with it. And they first few inches on top are squishy, its actively rotting, but its soft. You dig that out. Then you get into the heavier stuff. Then. at the bottom, We'd straight up have trowels, bc the clay had sedimented down and was compacted by the weight above because its goddamn clay that's what it does.
'oh look at me, my behr paint on the roller feels so heavy and its super opaque and expensive so it must be high quality and luxurious, just look at how fancy the labelling is' fuck yourself Behr, you added clay dust to it and you're making worse colors for more money and you're fucking up everyones plumbing.
sometimes we are childish. sometimes we do something our 16 year old self would have done, think something our 11 year old self would have thought, cry like our 7 year old self would have cried. why is this so embarrassing? why does it make us feel such shame? when you’re 20, 30, 40, are you not also every age you’ve been before? do all of your previous incarnations not still live inside of you?
Watching MAHA types embrace the idea of making school meals more nutritious and asking why they weren't already doing that, as if these same people weren't furious at Michelle Obama for trying the same thing. Except Obama's suggestions were actually healthy, versus the ravings of a deranged cretin who believes in the miasma theory of disease and thinks changing the oil you fry french fries in makes them not mildly less bad for you, but outright health food
Here's the info from that article (with a lot of heavy editorializing from me):
Don't call or text; you want to leave as minimal a traceable digital footprint as possible and cellphones are extremely traceable. The Trump admin is committed to collecting metadata from journalists who receive leaks and that includes call history and who sent text messages; even if the message gets deleted there is a record of it with the carrier that can be subpoenaed.
If you are going to email, do so from a burner account created for the purpose of leaking/whistleblowing. (my advice: use a service like protonmail that allows you to encrypt messages and doesn't collect any data beyond what is absolutely necessary for an email system to function; email is inherently insecure you have to treat it as insecure, but a burner account at a privacy-focused company like proton that facilitates sending encrypted messages is the best option for email; here's some information about how to use protonmail as privately as possible)
When setting up your burner email, do not use your phone number for 2FA or include any accurate biographical information during the account setup. Set up the account while using a traffic anonymizer like Tor. Here's a PDF about what Tor is and how it works and here's the Tor project's manual explaining how to install and configure the browser for privacy. (The article advises to use Tor or a VPN but that raises the question of whether you trust your VPN provider; if you are going to use a VPN use one of the ones recommended by privacyguides; I know fuck all about VPNs but I know I wouldn't trust most VPN providers in this context).
Don't reach out to the person you're leaking to on social media. I feel like this should be obvious, but it may not be - don't reach out through meta or X or tumblr, these are not anonymous platforms and they can and will be compelled to share messages sent to journalists or data sent from your account. Don't follow the people you're leaking to (unless you already happened to be following them), don't interact with their posts. Do not make any kind of visible connection between you and the person you are leaking to.
Be careful about using encrypted messaging platforms. I personally wouldn't trust telegram or whatsapp, and I haven't heard of Session until now, but generally speaking Signal is one of your safest bets for sending messages. Signal collects the smallest amount of user data it can, and while it does require a phone number to sign up, the phone number doesn't have to stay connected to your username. If you don't already have a signal account, create one NOW because one of the things that they do track and can be compelled to disclose is when an account was created. If an account is linked to you and it was created shortly before a leak, that's suspicious. Create an account now and have it handy for when you need it.
IF you are using signal, be aware that people can still screencap your messages; don't share personally identifying data via signal chats.
Have good opsec about how you collect the data that you're going to leak. For example, don't email yourself a copy of the data from your work email account, take photos of the data on a non-work phone and then strip the metadata. If you require login access to get the info you're looking to leak, figure out if there's a way that you can make the leak more ambiguous about the access by making sure there's time between your access and the leak, or that the time of your access isn't included in the information that is leaked. Take a lot of time to think about how someone might track a leak back to you and take steps to mitigate that.
Don't save copies of the data that you've leaked; once you've passed the message on to people who can get it out there, destroy any copies that you had.
GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop are tools to securely share leaks with organizations that will publicize the information you're sharing while protecting you to the best of their ability. Do not access those sites through your normal browser when you are preparing to leak data, only access them through Tor.
Be cautious about who you leak to. (Look I love the team at It Could Happen Here but you don't share a leak with a podcaster you share a leak with a group like Distributed Denial of Secrets). Focus on groups that have a history of securely sharing leaked info and on outlets that might have some legal protection from sharing information about you. The Intercept and DDoSecrets are the two that spring to mind immediately for me. (In fact I got the screenshot at the top of this thread because I went searching for this intercept article to paste on to a reply to another post but then this happened so here we are). Both of those links have their tips for leakers, btw.
It isn't stated elsewhere here so I'll add it at the end: if you are using Tor, don't log in to personal accounts that are associated with your real name or your private data. If you create burner accounts, don't use them to communicate with accounts associated with your real name or private data.
Also don't tell people - partners, parents, friends, etc. - that you're going to leak something.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, do not tell me or any other tumblr user if you have data you are thinking about leaking or a hack you think you've pulled off. Don't talk about doing crime on the internet and definitely don't talk to me about it. Don't send an anonymous ask, don't send a private message. "The hacker or hacker-adjacent person I parasocially know from tumblr" is not a safe recipient for your leak and tumblr is not a secure or anonymous platform EVER.
How do you feel about skipping the email step by printing it and sending regular mail? (Not printing the docs directly from work obviously - printing your photograph of the thing you are sending.)
I know printers add invisible tracking information to everything, but that does feel like something that's less likely to be traced back than an email - yeah they can probably ask the manufacturer, who knows their reseller, who knows their final customer, but if you print it a month before you send it and you pay cash for the printer (or, even better, buy it used and dispose of it immediately after) that feels like it'd be more secure.
Though of course, "feel" and a nickle will buy you no coffee in the opsec community
It's super easy to fake screenshots and monitor photos so even though you don't want to reveal your identity if you can avoid it, publishers may want you to prove the documents are legitimate by using less sensitive information to verify that you actually have access to the info you're sending, and may need some kind of back and forth to prove the veracity of your leak. I think mailing a leak totally anonymously is probably going to get less traction than using a leak platform because it's going to be pretty much impossible to verify without some communication between the leaker and the publisher.
That said, I think mailing stuff CAN be pretty anonymous with a bunch of caveats. US mail gets scanned in its envelopes so if you're mailing something you don't want to include a return address, and of course there are cameras at the post office and you don't want to pay for your postage with a card linked to your identity and you don't want to send from a post office or mailbox close to where you live or close to your work, but other than that and being cautious about your printers (there are ALWAYS printers at the secondhand stores near me) I think mailing is relatively safe but has the problem that you have no way of knowing whether your message was received.
But, yeah, if you wanted to mail leaks to a newspaper or abortion pills to someone in Texas, there are reasonably safe ways to do it.
*through gritted teeth* the world is GOOD. people are kind. Humans are NOT inheritly selfish. you will make it through this year. recovery is possible. people you don't know yet will love you. You are going to do things you can't even imagine right now. You are going to read a rlly good book. You are going to eat some rlly good food. You are going to experience joy again. Things can get better. Situations can change. You can choose to be kinder. The world can change for the better.
You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit
If people knew what a fucking atom is and how molecules are defined, at least a quarter of all health related cults like movements and scams wouldn't work.
"Ohh it's a different sugar than refined sugar" it's the same molecule.
"Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water" Water is H20. What you're doing is reverse osmosis, and if it's alkaline then there is a substance that's not water in there to make it alkaline. You can't purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.
"Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms." That's called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren't created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.
"Low toxin" what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. "They are endocrine disruptors" what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn't try to sell you something?
"Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits" you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don't have much chemical property. That's a science fair vulcano. And doesn't have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. "My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup" yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.
"There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years" what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? "Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls" what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?
"Just use vinegar it's magic" it's a mild acid. Like, cool, sure, it works for several things, but it doesn't have magic properties. It's just a mild acid. Lemon juice is too. And once again, if you mix it with baking soda, they neutralise each other and you get water. Which cleans a lot of things but you dont need to do *all that* to get your hands on some plain water.
#genuinely: this is what further research into the famous 'marshmallow test' showed#it wasn't that kids who were able to delay gratification were more likely to be successful later on#due to intrinsic qualities#it was that kids who had a stable upbringing were more likely to be successful#and ALSO: those kids had trust that their caregivers would keep promises#which is WHY they were willing to give up one marshmallow now for the promise of two marshmallows later#kids who did NOT have trustworthy caregivers#or who were in a fundamentally unstable situation#DID NOT have that trust so they wanted their one marshmallow NOW#same deal here i think#it's not that Gen Z is bratty#it's that they have no trust in the system and no faith that promises will be fulfilled#and frankly i do not blame them -@cicerfics
People really need to lose the idea that there's any Intelligence going on in GPT etc, or that it knows anything or gives answers to questions. It gives the illusion of those things, by algorithmically chaining words together in an order which looks like what you want.
It's a mimic.
And the unwary will get bitten.
I've encountered several people through work now who have rejected what I - a person who has been in this field for THIRTY YEARS - tell them because their text generator of choice told them something different. Even when the reason they called was that what the machine told them to do didn't work.
Yes, sure, the thing has probably slurped in every single forum post even vaguely related to that thing which has ever been made, and I haven't, but all it's doing is putting out something which looks like answers someone on a forum would give. I KNOW things and understand them, and if I don't, I can take in new information and reason and come to an actual answer.
A text generator doesn't understand the topic, doesn't know how to select which sources are relevant and which aren't, probably doesn't make any value judgements on the sources it's using (and even if it is, it won't be using the same criteria a person would use, especially not on a subject that person has a reasonable understanding of already) and it doesn't and can't check that what it's saying is right, because it has no concept of right or wrong or even that what it's outputting has any meaning, all it can do is use algorithms to determine what a text of a particular type is likely to have in it.
It is, in short, designed to fool you.
And that's no different when what it's outputting is a command or code snippet. I've seen these things give PowerShell commands with options which don't exist for the cmdlet in question, and which will therefore error, but what's worse is when the code doesn't error, but also doesn't do what the user wanted. They're getting the wrong result but they don't know that because they don't know what any of the code actually does or how to check anything. And, increasingly, it seems that they don't even realise they ought to be checking.
One of the calls I had was from someone who was trying to do something in a particular programming language and were using three different development environments to edit various parts of their code. They were asking chatGPT how to do everything and it must have been pulling from multiple environment-specific forums.
Their latest generated instructions told them to run commands which checked the version of the programming language and if those commands said it wasn't found to install it, so they called to get me to do that as it required admin credentials.
I just happened to have started looking at that language myself a few days before. I hadn't got any further than installing it, but I knew it was asking for an old version and so queried what they were actually trying to achieve.
They refused to explain the over-arching goal but said they wanted to use a particular API. A couple of minutes reading the dev site for that API told me it had been retired in 2018 and, when I finally got more information about what they were doing in an attempt to find an alternative, I realised it wouldn't have done quite what they wanted even when it was current.
I showed them that, advised that they could do all of the code in one environment and opened the relevant files in the least resource-hungry one (they'd also had issues with the machine running out of memory), pointed them at the dev documentation and also found them a thread on a forum which covered doing what they actually wanted to. Because I had other people to help and wasn't going to do their job for them.
They seemed satisfied. But before I disconnected from their machine, I saw them closing the browser tabs I'd opened and going back to chatGPT. Not long after that, my boss called because they'd emailed him and their own boss, complaining about me "refusing to help" and saying that I clearly didn't know what I was doing, shouldn't waste their time pretending I did and it was ridiculous to suggest they waste more time reading the "nonsense" I'd pointed them at. My boss had read the notes I'd put on the ticket which detailed what I'd seen and done, he just wanted to check he'd understood.
"Just so we're clear," he said. "You've never used this language, you just spent a couple of hours at the weekend getting to the point of being able to build the abandoned git project you wanted to fix a bug in, and then you spent half an hour on the phone with them, and apparently ended up with a better understanding than they have of how to do what they've spent the last three months trying to do."
"And probably getting paid more than me to do it, yes. Don't worry, I don't monetize my hobbies."
A couple of weeks later I processed a leaver request for them. I assume those things were related.
Asking one of these things might seem like it's a quicker way to get things done, and if you get lucky and get the right answers then yeah it probably lets you get started quicker. But it's only ever going to get you so far.
If you don't spend the time actually learning how to do things, don't make the effort to understand, then you're going to waste a lot of time asking and trying and failing and then asking again and never actually understanding enough to do anything without asking, because what you're being given is all small, disjointed pieces which don't link up enough for you to get a picture of the underlying structure. And without that, you can't figure anything out for yourself. You'll never get to the point where you can just sit down and make a complete thing, you'll always be spending more time querying than doing. You'll never be any faster than a beginner.
It's the opposite of what it promises to do for you.
The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo is HANDES DOWNES the best series of anything to have been made by anyone ever. You’ll laugh you’ll cry you’ll quote it forever and be silently disappointed that a person you thought would know it doesn’t know it & then you won’t know how to accurately convey HOW MUCH it means to you without sounding like you’re overselling something well anyway
army guy comes home even more unstable than before, ruins marriage, scares his kids during visitation, gets his visitation rights limited, murders the children. i feel like this case has played out so many times the exact same way.
if they catch travis decker alive i guarantee you will get two things out of him: sobbing how sorry he is for his big mistake, and his motive being "i was scared of Losing My Kids [so i did the logical thing of zip tying my three daughters' little wrists together, tying a plastic bag over each of their heads and watching them suffocate to death]" absolutely guarantee it. and the response will be A horrible family tragedy caused by mental illness.. nobody will raise a word against the golden calf of patriarchal parental entitlement that inspires fathers to do these things. i'll let parents' rights kill a million children before i permit a bad word on this principle.
btw if you think i'm being excessive, the local sheriff put out a statement to stop being sympathetic to this guy and let them keep doing their manhunt because he's evidently been encountering enough people for whom killing your own children is a mitigating factor that it seemed worth commenting on. the "bitch wife took my kids" defense has been successful in the court of public opinion basically since custody was invented
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