The Sleepy Archivist

It's not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both because I haven't written a news article in ages (sorry!), but also since everything today is either a mobile app, a cloud service, or powered by generative AI. Who am I kidding, it's all 3 at once!

Lester, developed by Ruben Tous, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is a classic, offline program that fills you with nostalgia just as much as the beloved animation technique it's built for. And I'm not just saying that because it has the ZX Spectrum palette built in!

The algorithms packed in the tool speed up production significantly as all you have to do is click on the areas of the input video you want to create clusters for and it can propagate them to all future frames. The magic is all open-sourced and described in Ruben's research article Rotoscope Animation through Video Object Segmentation and Tracking.

It takes a bunch of time to process the frames and the results aren't (always) perfect, but I'd rather get some extra work done while it's silently purring in the background and then clean up the base animation than manually color over each individual frame myself.

Good luck getting these 167 frames done by hand (although I do miss all the TV shows I managed to watch when doing repetitive tasks like that).

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.

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.

The first kind is that they buy a license for a pre-determined amount of check-outs. I'll just make some numbers up for the sake of illustrating what that looks like: Let's say $20 for 20 borrows. When the ebook has been checked out 20 times, the library has to renew the license and pay more money in order to continue lending out the ebook. The author gets a cut of that $20 as their royalties.

The second kind is literally paying per borrow. (Again just making up numbers here) Let's say the library pays 50 cents every time the book is checked out. The author still gets a cut as their royalties. Is it just 10 or 20 cents per borrow? Yes, but that adds up! AND it means that people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to read my book at all are able to read it, which is great! AND it means that the library is thriving and being used, which is also great!

So yes, authors DO get paid from library activity!!!!!!

Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement. “We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.

Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)

I have flashlights that are borderline unusable because, while the hardware is fine, the company that made them (hello OLight!) demands that you install and login to the storefront before you can access the configuration software.

But they don’t actively maintain the software or provide any of the new utilities that they promise. They are mostly using it as a way to turn off functional hardware to try and force you to upgrade.

We are living in a society where you can pay for something and the manufacturer can turn it off because they’ve decided that you’ve owned it too long .

I’ve just had to warn my family not to buy electronic door locks because the chances are, if they are Internet connected they will be disabled once the company that owns them has decided that they’re not making enough money charging you a monthly fee to open your own front door.

This is part of an ongoing trend to turn money into something that is no longer usable by everybody .

The eventual aim is to be able to pay people company scrip: If you lose your job, or badmouth the company, or disagree with the dictator, they severely curtail what you are allowed to buy, and from who.

And at that point, you have to pick sides – do you want to be able to have drinking water from Coca-Cola, or Pepsi, and whose package allows you to buy Doritos, and use your smart oven to cook food? Because it won’t turn on unless you use the app to scan the appropriate barcode from the company who now owns your ability to eat drink, heat your home, and wear clothes from brands that they approve.

-> Phonics For Adults <-

What should AO3's solution be to the archives become oversaturated with AI-written slop? The LLMs can be used to produce so much quantity it'll be very easy to outstrip not only the current pace of writing, but all the accumulated work that every fandom ever produced.

Their current stance is that they won't ban it, and I've personally come to the conclusion that it may be much too difficult to do so.

Only the ones that aren't well-edited are obvious, and even so how do we prove it? I've even avoided using anti-AI tags, because what's to stop someone who does use AI from using those tags, too? You can't require them to tag, they won't be honest. You can't trust readers to tag or report, because the day someone gets offended by whatever an author writes that isn't exactly what they want they'll try flagging them as AI.

Please, tell me you've thought of something I haven't.

Honestly, I don't see any admin action from Ao3 being able to make a difference in this.

Firstly, the nature of the site. Before I went on 4-year hiatus, I deleted multiple fics from Ao3 because I saw them being plagiarized almost word for word on Wattpad. I suppose I could have tried complaining to admin, but if the copycat tweaks minor details and changes some names... it's such a gray area, you know? I imagine AI is going to be even harder to prove, especially in non-monetized areas like fandom.

i just need yall to know that, if you ever message the mods of a reddit, reddit now automatically includes an AI generated summary of your entire post history with whatever message you send. yes it includes extremely personal information. i mod a support group for victims, the AI summary will regularly list out peoples' child abuse histories along with information on shit like them using reddit to seek out extramarital affairs

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

This reached me through a newsletter I subscribe to (Daily Tech Insider -- I don't know that I recommend it, it's kind of spammy, but does occasionally provide useful intel on AI) and I couldn't find a public version of it to link to so I'mma just copypaste the newsletter's content here:

Meta just launched Muse Image, its new AI image generator, across Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Meta AI app. It edits photos, generates social-ready images, and powers new Instagram Stories effects. Public Instagram accounts are automatically eligible for AI remixing. Someone can tag a public profile and create new images using that person's photos. Meta says users can opt out (currently only on mobile), but the default leaves photos in play. Worse, users aren't notified when AI content is created with their material, and opting out won't delete images that already exist. Meta is, however, applying an invisible "Content Seal" watermark to track AI origins, and a detection tool is available online for anyone to check images.

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

A better subreddit might be r/ArchiveTeam though. ArchiveTeam’s goal is explicitly “rescuing” and backing up digital artifacts in danger of being lost, whereas r/datahoarder is less focused. I see one person has already posted it in r/ArchiveTeam: x

However: I don’t yet see a coordinated effort taking place in any of those 4 threads. Most movement in the first linked thread, but the other three have 0-1 comments atm. Some of the information I see in the comments here on Tumblr might help give it a boost if anyone wants to show ArchiveTeam the scripts they used/scope of effort they calculated.

As a plug: ArchiveTeam lets you run “warriors” (their name for instances of their backup software) that take on chunks of individual archival/backup projects. Your computer/server/NAS backs up the specific chunk of imperiled data you claimed, temporarily using some of your free storage, then clearing it out once your chunk has been uploaded to the public backup destination, which is usually the Internet Archive (same organization that hosts the Wayback Machine).