@bbcwhereareyou

PSA: "Shaxpir" AI writing software: AVOID!

The tl;dr: A guy is selling subscriptions to a software tool to "help you write better novels." And to train it, he's used tens of thousands of novels from authors you know, without those authors giving him permission.

...Sometimes things seem to blow up with unusual speed. This particular shit seems to have hit the fan yesterday, primarily on Twitter, when various authors discovered the guy's website, prosecraft.io. This site featured "clippings" of the authors he'd stolen from... and the revelation that he had scraped their entire books, not just excerpts, to train his AI. ("2,470,720,986 words," his website bragged, "from 27,668 books, by 15,622 authors." The only authors who were off limits, apparently, were people using [or paying for] his software.) Though the website is offline now, if you take a look at this Google search, you can see the covers of just some of the books the entire contents of which he exploited for AI training.

This usage goes well beyond the "fair use" defense that he belatedly (and ineffectively) attempted to employ. It's straightforward copyright infringement, on a massive scale: good old fashioned theft.

The guy took the website down within hours of this news starting to blow up all over Twitter... which is no surprise. But this ain't over yet.

Gizmodo has a goodish breakdown of the broad situation here.

If you search here on the #prosecraft tag, you'll find local reaction, and numerous furious (and sometimes quite funny) responses imported from Twitter. Plainly, at the legal end of things, this guy is about to get nuked from orbit. (Among the authors he made the gross tactical error of stealing from: Stephen King, James Patterson, the Pratchett Estate, and Nora Roberts. This... is not going to go well for him.)

Leverage's John Rogers sums it up succinctly:

Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir software (I'm not adding the URL here) that he trained using stolen goods. So (until someone stops him) you might like to reblog this info for the attention of others here who prefer their writing to stay human-made as well as -fueled, and not to support the seriously ethically-challenged.

And on a side issue: I'm idly wondering how long it'll take somebody to DMCA his still-live site's webhost or his domain registrar with an eye to taking down that down too. Granted, it'd be a temporary solution at best until the big hitters' lawyers can get more permanent solutions in gear. But enjoyable...

for everyone asking for what article this is i actually went back and found it again and you'll never guess who it's about

"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."

"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."

One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.

I think this is something young people in particular are confused about. My dad has always had a slightly off color sense of humor, he always feels the need to privately ask me “boy turned girl or girl turned boy?” if I mention a friend and stress said friend’s pronouns, and yet when we had repair work done in the house and the worker was listening to a podcast discussing the evils of transgender people and how to cleanse society, he went out of his way to contact the owner of the business to discuss his disappointment with that worker’s conduct and stress the negative effect that could have had if there had been trans kids in our home.

Our allies will never be perfect. They will never use the perfect language or have the perfect politics. But we have to appreciate those allies and meet them where they are, especially if they are willing to learn.

I’ll take some random nascar fan calling me a tranny fag while advocating for my rights over some “progressive” with all the right words trying to take my rights away any day.

theft!! crime!!!!

I think game studios should just release their character creators online. For the times when I don’t wanna play the whole game, just the lil dress up part

when i tell you i had an aneurysm

"Average canyon is full of arachnids" factoid actually just a statistical anomaly. Average canyon has a normal amount of arachnids. Spider Gorge-

No No No! 🙀 Don’t take your hands. I feel so comfy. 💕🐊

HOW CAN SOMETHING BE THIS CUTE

But really, though 🥺

As someone who has mispronounced so many words because I never actually heard them. I appreciate this post

This is not for you.

This is a post aimed at me and other people who constantly fall into guilt spirals over all the things they can’t do, and feel they should somehow magically be able to do anyway.

For me, and for the others, this is a gentle reminder:

- Posts asking for monetary donations are speaking to people who have money. Not your broke ass, still worrying how to buy food next month.

- Posts asking you to care about [extreme injustice of the day] are speaking to people who have energy to care. Not you, hanging onto your sanity by the fingernails. 

And, most importantly: posts telling you that you are horrible/cheap/awful/rude/unworthy/unlikable if you don’t pay/reblog/signal boost/care? Those posts can fucking die in a fire.

TL;DR: Posts asking for shit you are not physically or mentally able to give? 

THOSE POSTS ARE NOT FOR YOU. 

i found a bed-frame that looks like something out of star trek the next generation 

advertised as having Storages/Massage/Password Strong Box

absurd piece of furniture

 interior design equivalent of megafauna

Ridiculous, absurd, I absolutely must have one

This doesn’t simply exist in your bedroom; it IS your bedroom.

SO one of the interesting statistics from my aromantic census was that 51% of the so far 1,500 respondents were autistic. that is a huge abnormality and so i designed a basic survey for autistic and arospec people. you can take it here. then all that’s left is a control group to compare to- non arospec autistic people, who can please take the control group survey here.

the only rules are- you can be diagnosed or undiagnosed, as long as you believe you’re autistic. any arospec identity is free to participate and i really appreciate anyone who shares this around- the larger the sample size, the better more reliable results i get. for the control group, any autistic person, diagnosed or not, who isn’t aro is encouraged to participate. if you want to be tagged in the results, let me know!

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

No guys you don’t understand.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing

This is humanity

Happy Birthday, Curiousity.

Happy birthday, Curiosity.

I want more villains who care about their henchmen. I wanna see the bad guy fly into a rage because the hero hurt their very favorite bungling goon and it was nearly his birthday.

"how dare you fail me you miserable oafs!!" should be retired. "How DARE they bully my adorable oafs!!!" should be industry standard.

Underlings having to hold back their dark lord like an overprotective parent because they don't really want a famous hero to get outright murdered just on their behalf.

I had to draw something

I don’t want to go ‘realism in fiction’ bc we all know how much of a dogwhistle that can be. But it really always bothers me that this isn’t the norm. Like, how the fuck do all these dark lords and evil empresses and what not keep any minions or lieutenants or what not around?

Literally, what is stopping them from just walking to Hero and going ‘I surrender, get me the hell away from this asshole!’ when most Heros will immediately turn them in a redemption story and all.

Like, how they hell do the villains keep anyone working for them without a solid health plan, 401K, and recreational facilities? Isn’t that the minimum. Has no one actually read Machiavelli?

Indeed; one of my least favorite tropes is the whole "I don't need you anymore" bit, where a villain backstabs a fellow villain working beneath them, which inevitably ends up with the betrayed villain aiding the heroes in order to spite the big bad.

Luckily, I can just draw something that cuts that bullshit out!

#I love Vexor I love Huntressa and I love the Dragon Queen

psyduck is probably like. the most achievable pokemon probably. like i don’t think i could teach a cabbage to grow legs and be a bulbasaur but there’s probably a certain threshold of mental torment i could subject a duck to that would make a psyduck

this post has gotten like every single kind of response possible but my favorites are just the ppl that have tagged it with “:(“ like yeah. yeah that’s the correct response to the ideas presented in this post and i formally apologize to all of you

128x128 transparent ibuprofen png for when u and the discord server want to take ibuprofen together

dont mind if we do!!!

dnd jokes that will always be funny no matter what your dm tells you

feel free to add more

Happy Baldur's Gate 3 release day!