Run While You Can

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

TURN OFF YOUR OTHER PHONE AND DO NOT TURN IT ON AGAIN UNTIL YOU ARE ALONE AND SAFE BECAUSE THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED ON.

AGAIN I REPEAT:

OCTOBER 4, 2023

THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED BACK ON.

SO ONLY POWER IT BACK ON WHEN IT IS SAFE TO DO SO.

OCTOBER 4, 2023

If this doesn't make sense, then good news it's not for or about you but still reblog it because you never know who may need to know this.

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

@prettypinkdork

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

add the following to your ublock settings.

www.tumblr.com##li.g8SYn.IYrO9:nth-of-type(8) www.tumblr.com##span.ZQMrc:nth-of-type(3) www.tumblr.com##li.g8SYn.IYrO9:nth-of-type(7)

Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?

Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)

It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).

Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).

It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.

The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).

It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)

It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)

IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).

Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)

The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)

When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.

Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)

The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles

From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)

Oh dear.

Okay, you get an answer, because at least you took the effort to write your ask out properly, even if you are hiding behind the grey, sunglassed circle.

Do I, or any fanfic author for that matter, have any legal claims to our work? No, not really, no. (Although if someone took a fic, filed off the serial number--deleted the fandom specific elements--, and then had it published for financial gain, yeah, that would be a case.)

BUT

Fandoms are built on a social contract that says we respect each others work, the effort people put into their art. We don't steal or disrespect the work of our peers. By feeding people's fanworks to AI you both steal and disprect it, and we need to make people realize that before it's too late--before fandom falls apart, because there will be no more real, actual fanworks.

Disrepectfully,

Orlissa

fuck discord.

Turn these off NOW. If you wait they can use whatever you've said or shared with your friends on there until whenever you turn it off, even after you turn it off.

More fun community label "features"! Unlike the new mandatory label for #NSFW, this one is a bigger deal to me because it affects my entire blog and it can't be avoided by just using a different tag.

Apparently on custom blog layouts, if you happen to post or reblog even a SINGLE post that's been flagged with the mature content community label, a full-page warning overlay will appear blurring out your entire blog that must be manually clicked through every single time the page is refreshed. At first I thought this was just a bug due to my older layout but I've come to realize it's not. It's a feature (as confirmed by this recent changes post) that affects all custom themes. The formatting will vary based on your own theme but here's what it looks like on my blog:

I don't know about you but I find this is stupid and annoying. If it could be dismissed once and never seen again that might be one thing, but that's not the case. The vast majority of my blog is not "mature" enough to warrant such an aggressive and invasive warning. I also think pop-ups are obnoxious in general and I'll be damned if tumblr's going to force me to have one on MY blog.

After some desperate googling for a known workaround and being unable to find even a single mention of it, I decided to take on the challenge myself. I'm not a theme coder, so apologies if there's a better way to do this, but luckily it only took me like 10 minutes to figure out a simple fix, which I'm now sharing with anyone else who may want it:

.community-label-cover__wrapper {display: none}

Just copypaste that somewhere in your CSS and goodbye pop-up!

If you're not sure how to access your theme code, check out this help article. You can also add the code via the Advanced Options menu, which is actually even better (if you can get it to work, it depends on how your theme was coded), because it will then automatically be reapplied to a lot of themes without having to remember to manually add it every time if you change your theme in the future.

Obviously this will only remove it from your own blog for anyone who may visit it. If you never want to see this warning again on other people's blogs you can also add this custom filter to your ad block:

tumblr.com##.community-label-cover__wrapper

Unfortunately I do not have an easy tutorial on hand for this one as the method will depend on your specific ad block app or extension.

Some additional notes:

After adding the theme code and saving the changes, give it a minute to update as it sometimes takes a little while for the page to refresh.

The warning overlay only seems to appear if a "mature" post is on the FIRST page of your blog, which is still annoying and makes the whole thing even more pointless and stupid because what if someone visits any other page of your blog, and oh no, happens to see "mature" content they weren't warned about?!

The warning also appears on direct links to "mature" posts.

anyway

🖖 !!!HAPPY 40 YEARS TIL WE MEET ALIENS!!! 🖖

5th april 2023-5th april 2063