A Blog Like Any Other

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

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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 😂)

I'm just trying to boost this :>

“If you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary. I ain’t giving up. I swear.” 

A report on transgender women athletes in elite sport has found that if UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale] rules are adhered to, there is currently no substantial evidence of any biological advantages for trans women competing in elite women’s sport.

It found there was little evidence that biomedical factors related to male puberty such as lung size, bone density and hip-to-knee joint angle predict an unfair advantage. But some evidence that social factors like nutrition, training and access to equipment do.

These are just some of the key findings listed in an 86-page report titled Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review, which was published in late 2022 and commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), an ethical sport advocacy non-profit with a vision of fair, safe, accessible, and inclusive sport for everyone.

The inclusion of trans women in elite women’s sport has been a hot button issue of late with high profile instances such as Emily Bridges’ attempt to compete in the UK sparking concern and upset on all sides. While the inclusion of trans women has led to protests by those who worry that cis women (the term for women born anatomically female) are at a competitive disadvantage at some U.S. races.

However, the report concluded that “the fears that cis women need be protected from trans women in elite sport are unsubstantiated and misplaced.

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

No $12 fee

That’s the point of free

If you make less than an income threshold you get to file for FREE using various softwares that are REQUIRED to be and stay free or they lose the license to work with the IRS as part of the Free File program

If you make more than that threshold you can file for FREE using the Free File Fillable Forms where you type in numbers and click “do the math” and the website does all your math for you

“What is the budget for this role?”

Memorize it. Internalize it. Practice it like a martial artist with their 10,000 or whatever punches. You need to be able to rattle it off in a moment of panic and that moment of panic is when they ask your salary expectations. Do not be the first person to name a number if you can at all avoid it. You’re gonna drop this baby like the Reverse Uno card you’ve been waiting the whole game to play and you’re going to drop it before even thinking about answering that question first.

Not once has it backfired. No one has gotten angry or offended. Bonus points if you can frame it as you not wanting to waste their time either (makes you sound more senior than you might feel, might not work for someone looking for their very first job but hey still worth a shot).

Every interviewer I’ve tossed this at has been gratified and clear and quoted a number, the only exceptions were when the interview was more exploratory (didn’t have a specific role when we spoke) or they needed to ask a different hiring manager and even then both apologized profusely for not quoting me the number first.

Every single time it has been more money than I would have asked for. Sometimes literally double what I was making before, in calls where the recruiter reached out to me first. I was aghast. As a millennial who got screwed every which way by the recession and still has ptsd over it, finding out what I’m “worth” in this current labor shortage was mind boggling.

(Final disclosure, I’ve been working office jobs for 10 years. This advice might not work for everyone. Many it will work for already know it. But boy howdy, has it been working to levels that have me absolutely floored.)

its funny and its frustrating. youll never convince his fans that hes a fuckin moron, but its a funny move from the pov of people who know that he is a fuckin moron

In case anyone is wondering what's going on right now, Elon banned a bunch of journalists and rival social media companies like Mastodon for "doxxing" him

(Read: posting publicly available info about where his jet goes, which most of them weren't even talking about anyway)

But the suspended accounts could still access Twitter Space, so a bunch of journalists got together in a packed Space to talk about what happened

He shows up, calling in FROM THE JET IN QUESTION, refuses to actually answer any of the questions posed to him, and exits again

Less than half an hour later, (I was in the chat at this time), it goes down - Space is now inaccessible to EVERYONE on Twitter, just because of this one single room

@youcanchoosefreedom heck yes! I’m replying here to help other people find them too.

My top three are:

First and foremost: please watch Hot Coffee. It’s the story of the McDonalds hot coffee case. If you’re only going to watch one of these, watch this one. You can watch it for free at that link, please watch it. I’m realizing as I wrote this that a lot of people on here weren’t even alive back then, but you’ve probably heard the story of a woman who burned herself on McDonald’s coffee and sued. The part they hid (actively!! the doc gets into it) is that she almost died from the burns and only wanted her skin grafts and medical bills paid.

Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? I’m watching it right now, it’s is the story of how Pepsi promised a jet as a prize in a promotion and then refused to honor it when the guy won it. He sued because uhhh, if you buy a bunch of shit in reliance on a deal, it’s fucked up to go “haha no prize” after they have your money, ya know? It’s in the same general ballpark as the “toy yoda” case.

The Devil We Know which is the story behind teflon and how it’s uhhhhh, super not good actually, but also super unavoidable, and why the EPA needs powers, actually. Like stop fucking curbing their powers, we need them.

This isn’t touching on criminal law ones, but honorable mention to:

Freeway: Crack in The System, which is the story of crack in America and also the real Rick Ross. It also touches on his legal battle with the rapper who uses his name for street cred

There are a few lists compiled by other lawyers here, here, and here.  I haven’t seen them all, but there’s a few on here I want to check out.

If anyone has others, please throw them on! I’m avoiding true crime ones because honestly, there’s nothing saying that what you say in a documentary has to be honest, and there’s a lot of… one sided perspective in those, if I’m being polite. But these ones are all independently verifiable and factual, so please, please know your rights and do not believe every take on every case you see in the media.