hack the planet

Finished stitching my Oversight series.

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

That's called a joke. It's supposed to be funny.

Whether or not I am pro-AI is a question that I can't answer without a spreadsheet and at least four hours of discussion (please see my four hour twitch stream from earlier today that was largely about massive problems with AI and massive problems with the way that people react to and report on AI. There are research papers and citations in it and everything). Define what YOU mean by AI and maybe I can get that down to twenty minutes and some bullet points.

Perplexity's Incognito Mode is a Sham, Lawsuit Says - People don't read ToSs and don't understand how computers work.

OpenClaw gives users yet another reason to be freaked out about security - It is profoundly irresponsible for businesses to be using 'AI agents' that have either elevated access rights or privilege escalation permissions and the fact that they were unaware that the agents would be able to do this is a good indicator that the entire concept is fucked (it is bugshit insane to expect a program given commands in naturalistic language to act like a program given commands through a programming language, we have set up amelia bedilia ass robots and don't realize what permissions we're handing them because it feels like talking to a person who understands norms and expectations but the entity you are theoretically giving instructions to is actually deriving its instructions from a black box process that you don't understand and isn't capable of knowing things so it doesn't know that it's a big problem for you if it emails your boss copies of your nudes. Do not use the malicious genie to get your airline tickets what the fuck)

AI Can now prescribe you psychiatric medication in Utah - El problema es el capitalismo AND that could be a phone tree instead of an AI app why are we calling this "AI" it is literally responding to a fifteen question form, is this even AI or is this calling some basic automation AI and charging patients $20 for access to a tool they don't need that is only being used to paper over the fact that we are dealing with a doctor shortage because of a cartel? In short: AAAAH. But not for the reasons you might have thought! (The robot can only give you prescriptions you already had and can't refill anything addictive, so the ADHD havers among us still have to deal with calling the office or going in and paying a copay and then remembering to do that every month. The AI is not the problem here the everything is the problem here).

Claude Source Code leaked via error, Hackers are taking advantage of claude source code leak to spread malware, people are getting hit with spurious DMCA takedown notices because Anthropic is shotgunning nastygrams into the void in an attempt to get their code taken down. Lol. Lmao, even. In my perfect world none of this is a problem because the shit was open source from the start. Information wants to be free, and life finds a way. (it was a human who accidentally leaked the code). Also fuck the digital millennium copyright act, all my homies hate the digital millennium copyright act.

Really, you made this without AI? Prove it - this is an article about human creatives trying to settle on a way of labeling their work as human made. As a human creative, I think this is just going to fuel anti-AI scrutiny toward all creative work. This is a shit approach, I think people should worry less about whether what they're seeing is AI and more about if what they are seeing is good, or evocative, or true, or compelling. I think that most lazily-made AI art and writing is both obvious and bad, and AI-assisted art and writing that humans put effort into is pretty much just art, but sticking a human-made label on your art feels both performative and futile. Like, on the one hand I don't care, do whatever. On the other hand ugh. This is going to be used to harangue people into accepting the standard or dealing with constant accusations of being AI and IDK i think it's kind of bullshit to spend time counting the fingers on a CGI article header on a facebook post when there is actual shit going on in the world. This is, more than anything, annoying. There's a great line in the article "The machines sure as hell aren't motivated to label their work, but the creators at risk of being displaced most definitely are." Friend. The machines aren't motivated to do anything and the companies that are profiting off the machines will be very much motivated to copy your logo. Stop worrying about being displaced by robots and start worrying about media consolidation and newsroom layoffs, which have been driven by profit-seeking for the last twenty years, not AI.

"Cognitive Surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds - that's a pretty significant overstatement of what the research found and also the research is largely centered on creating a model of thought systems that is heavily based on a pop science book about decision theory written by an economist that has suffered pretty significantly from the replication crisis but is beloved by baseball scouts so you know it's good. We spent a lot of time trying to be charitable here but basically I'm unwilling to accept the validity of the basic premise of the book (that there are two modes of thought, intuitive and deliberative, and this is in some way meaningful) so I'm unwilling to accept the extension of the premise (there is a third way of thinking, and it is robots, and it makes people intellectually lazy on timed tests but does not make them lazy when you give them prizes for getting individual answers right on tests). Also I think the research was pretty poorly designed because I don't think they demonstrated how the AI assistant used in the study arms was meaningfully different than an encyclopedia or a google search. (the way the study worked was that they looked at people responding to a test either with their brain only or with their brain and an AI, but on one arm of the study they seeded the AI with incorrect answers and then looked at when people relied more on the AI or less on the AI; however the comparison of human+AI to human alone doesn't really tell us anything about cognitive surrender, it tells us about tool use and reliance on tools when tools are available - is it 'cognitive surrender' to not check an incorrect answer from a wikipedia page? It seems like it would have been simple to have a group that was given access to a set of correct articles and a group given access to incorrect articles and compare how THAT group stacked up against the human+AI arm). (also I am DEEPLY skeptical of any paper written on AI that has 80% or more citations from before 2020)

Anyway, I think I have two new rules:

If you are going to implement an AI tool in your workplace, you have to get approval from someone who can demonstrably make a functional calculator in no fewer than three programming languages

If you are going to denigrate AI you have to define AI and limit your complaints to AI that meet only those criteria

I've been talking a lot more about AI than I expected to when I started streaming and so far the things that we keep coming back to are:

Everyone means something different when they're talking about AI

People don't understand how AI works

People keep anthropomorphizing AI and expecting it to behave like people because they don't understand how AI works

People don't know how computers work

Because people don't know how computers work they don't know that most of the stuff that is getting hyped as AI could be accomplished with simple automation or a database

People are, generally, dogshit at fact checking and are easy to mislead with twitter screenshots, let alone AI articles on AI content mill sites, and maybe that it something that needs to be addressed more urgently than concerns about "what if ask jeeves was a stupid robot that hates you?"

So, am I pro AI?

TODAY IS A GOOD DAY.

STARTING OFF. BAD.

Why is that you might ask. Well you see. There are many Rules and Laws and Regulations about the use and exchange of personal healthcare data.

Which is why of course this guy, seeing a well-thought-out and tested technical position, decided "what if i get all of them at once and also the 2FA codes and stored them ALL in the same place with no encryption whatsoever"

Up until the mid 2010s, there was a thriving discussion around how the arts should work in the 21st century, using the internet in positive ways to further human potential. People experimented with different ways of organizing communities online and the internet’s various potentials as a creative space. This discussion ended not because these problems were solved, but because the structure of the social media-driven internet became so suffocating, it seemed to preclude any hope of other possible ways of living. I see no reason why we are not capable now, in this era of mass dissatisfaction with the way the internet works, of trying again.

And I also see people mentioning in the notes too wanting an apology for how trans women are treated here, but I think they probably don't remember how after photomatt's hammer and car rampage, some staff actually did make an apology post about it. I would try to find where that went if I had more time because it's worth a read. It's not exactly common for currently working staff to break rank and say stuff like they did, that could get them fired.

I just have this overwhelming feeling that probably nothing they do will ever be good enough for everyone. That it'll still probably come off as insincere and a token effort no matter what words are used. Because things will continue to happen that are never explained or made transparent enough, because they simply can't be.

So...

Once more, Tumblr wins over all other platforms by not doing anything.

@staff

For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.

Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.

Erasure of Creator Visibility

Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.

If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.

On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.

Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly

This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.

When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.

Impact on Collaborative Conversations

Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.

If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.

The Disincentive to Create

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.

For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.

This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

EXTREMELY BAD HOLY FUCK.

But this. This changes the data architecture. This changes the SINGLE THING that makes tumblr the "... yes and" website. This KILLS THE COLLABORATIVE POSTING THAT MAKES THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER MEDIA PLATFORMS.

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."