living in a box

Big Media’s lobbyists have been running a smear campaign trying to paint the Internet Archive as a greedy big tech operation bent on stealing books—which is totally absurd. If you’ve ever used the WayBack Machine, listened to their wonderful archives of live music, or checked out one of their 37 million texts, it’s time to speak up. On March 20, everyone is showing their support for the Internet Archive during oral arguments.

Here's how you can help:

The Internet Archive is our library, a massive collection of knowledge and culture accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Don't let greedy publishers burn down the next Library of Alexandria!

For reference, here's images from various steps in training, generated from the LORA trained on the unaltered photos. The further right, the more trained the model is.

Here's the results from the LORA trained on glazed versions of the photos. It does seem like the mid-training images were a bit worse, but, it's still what you'd expect from a normal LORA in training.

And it's definitely a far cry from what Glaze is supposed to be doing.

It's especially disappointing, because Glaze's website claims that things like cropping and blurring and all these other effects don't stop Glaze from working. I didn't even do anything, and Glaze still didn't work!

original url http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/7069/

So, I've talked about these bad bipartisan internet bills in the US Senate before, which all more or less boil down to "censorship in the name of Protect The Childrens," but I think it's important now more than ever to boost efforts to fight them because, as of today (5/9/2023), there's a major push planned by the folks lobbying for these bills, and we need to push back.

Thusly, here's a propaganda poster with the URL of the main hub to fight against those bills. 

As a primer on said internet bills for those who don't know:

KOSA- Aims to create a "duty of care" towards minors that would de-facto mandate incredibly intrusive age gating via drivers' licenses or fucking face scanning to identify said minors, and would likely lead to lots of censorship. Extremely dangerous right now because the people who want it are pushing hard, and it's got a depressing amount of bipartisan support due to the Protect The Children thing shutting off people's brains.

EARN IT- Will remove Section230 for sites that supposedly let CSAM exist on their servers for too long, which might sound good until you remember the inherent difficulties in moderating that on big social media sites that means what they're asking is literally impossible and also the fact that the last time they tried something like this we got FOSTA-SESTA and its associated censorship wave. Extremely dangerous because it's passed out of committee

RESTRICT ACT- The "ban TikTok" bill that basically gives the us government carte-blanche to censor foreign sites they don't like.

STOP CSAM ACT- A similar act to KOSA and EARN IT that is pretty directly designed to weaken encryption, which is dangerous for any marginalized folks especially in a post-Roe era

Beyond the hub for action, badinternetbills.com, if you're in the US, I urge you to call your senators, especially if they're on the Commerce Committee, given that's the one currently looking at KOSA, and even if you can't, boost this to those that can.

AS OF THIS WEEK (Posted on 1/29/2024), you need to start calling your senators and telling them to kill this bill, as loudly as possible.

If you want to give them a piece of your mind, you can contact Snap here (Press the Yes button at the bottom to be sent to the contact form), though I can't find any for Microsoft on their relevant support page (Any help would be welcome).

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It has been haunting me

Here’s a true story about studying for finals.

The culprit: