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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • “You can’t steal a digital game” is borderline sovereign citizen talk. Artists operate within the structure of society. Just because the medium in which they deploy their art is digital and most distribution platforms feasible have licenses with unsavory terms, theft is not automatically justified.

    That sort of logic could extend to the idea that it’s okay to squat in a particular ocupied house because the owner doesn’t own it, a bank does, and the money is imaginary, and the bank’s policies are unfair. There is something valid and authentic to the sentiment, but practically speaking, you’re still just being an asshole.

    That is to say, extenuating circumstances may modify that. If you can’t afford a game, or if you really hate the developers, more people may agree with you. If you would freeze to death outside of the home, or, if the home’s current occupants occupy it unfairly, then perhaps people would be more empathetic.

    But to declare that the wholesale theft of digital goods as fine just because you don’t like the platform is anarchy without any of the nuance of anarchy.




  • Most mp3s have the artist name in the metadata or title. And, even the most rudimentary platforms show this information front and center. It is not an ad. It is a feature we desire. We want to know who made it, so that we can understand its context, its subtexts, and yes, find the artist for more of their work.

    Image files typically do not make use of these mechanisms, and certainly the platforms we view them on rarely do. The general convention is to ‘sign’ or watermark it instead.

    It is as simple as that. To remove the signature of a webcomic is like stripping an mp3 of all metadata and making the filename a random string. It’s fundamentally an inconvenience to everyone involved. No one wants this.

    (This is not to mention that the wholesale removal of attribution and complete divorce of creator and creation serves the ultimate goals of corporations. They’ve done it with food (where does your milk come from), furniture (who made your chair), and now with art (who made this comic?)

    You seem to be conflating an ad (buy JokoMolk brand milk!) With attribution (this milk was produced at x farm). Perhaps, if we better understood the orgins of things, we might make informed decisions!)




  • I started over doing entry level spray tech work treating exotic plants through americorps and worked my way up. I do a lot of field data collection and gis work now. So, I still utilize my old software skills. I work for my local government doing environmental land management.

    GIS is definitely a software adjacent job that is utilized a lot in land management. But that isn’t the initial route I took. I really did just kind of started over.









  • I don’t know. I worked as a software dev for 5 years and have a BS in CS. I’ve transitioned to ecological work. The progress I’ve seen with Claude Code specifically has convinced me that even moderate gains in intelligence will lead to the functional replacement of several data entry and junior programming jobs.

    It’s true that people overestimate LLM performance in other domains. But, software is easy to generate synthetic data for, objectively testable by adversarial models, etc.