Entities care about art… as much as they can benefit from it. Large entities make sure to get the rights for peanuts, small ones are fine with dropping it and replacing with someone else’s, still without paying. Pretty much the only way for small artists to get a fair compensation, is from people who want to support them… a case in which —ironically— copyright is irrelevant.

It isn’t US centric either. Corporations have used the US to pressure everyone into accepting a similar set of rules, with similar effects all over the world.

But I’m not even strictly against copyright itself. I’m against how the laws have been pushed over and over towards a twisted parody of the initial goals, while the real world has been going in a completely different direction.

I’m running ollama in termux on a Samsung Galaxy A35 with 8GB of RAM (+8GB of swap, which is useless for AI), and the Ollama app. Models up to 3GB work reasonably fine on just the CPU.

Serendipity is a side effect of the temperature setting. LLMs randomly jump between related concepts, which exposes stuff you might, or might not, have thought about by yourself. It isn’t 100% spontaneous, but on average it ends up working “more than nothing”. Between that and bouncing ideas off it, they have a use.

With 12GB RAM, you might be able to load models up to 7GB or so… but without tensor acceleration, they’ll likely be pretty sluggish. 3GB CoT models already take a while to go through their paces on just the CPU.

Is it protecting “small artists”, though?

Suing for copyright infringement, requires money, both for lawyers and proceedings.

Small artists don’t have that money. Large artists do, small ones don’t, so more often than not they end up watching as their copyright is being abused without being able to do anything about it.

To get any money, small artists generally sign off their rights, either directly to clients or studios (work for hire), or to publishers… who do have the money to enforce the copyright, but pay peanuts to the artist… when they even pay anything. A typical publishing contract has an advance payment, a marketing provision… then any copyright payments go first to pay off the “investment” by the publisher, and only then they give a certain (rather small) percentage to the artist. Small artists rarely reach the payment threshold.

Best case scenario, small artists get defended by default by some “artists, editors, and publishers” association… which is like putting wolves in charge of sheep. The associations routinely charge for copyrighted material usage… then don’t know whom to pay out, because not every small artist is a member, so they just pocket it, often using it to subsidize publishers.

Copyright laws, as of right now, primarily benefit publisher dynasties (like Disney), then large publishers, then large studios and large artists, a few lucky small artists… and leave most small artists SOL.

Doesn’t seem to work on Firefox on Android. Do I need a YouTube API key?

Settings (gear icon) → Audio Track → (whatever) original

It’s still “world-changing great”. All the knowledge sharing, all the collaboration, all the scientific advances, have been growing at the same rate as the “commoners” have been joining it and getting trapped in the slop.

The only change, is the Internet is not just for nerds anymore, it’s also for preachers, scammers, and the average brainwashed populace.

It used to be easy to ignore the peasants from inside an ivory tower’s echo chamber. The Internet has brought those voices out for everyone to hear… and to realize humanity is not as idealized as they thought. Time to put some real work into fixing some real problems.

Overclocking usually requires overvolting to keep things working. Underclocking though, is a good way to gain stability.

(Σ (max TDP of all system components) ) + 20%

Rationale:

• PSU works best at 20–80% load
• Component TDP are an average; actual power usage can go way down, but also spike above spec for short bursts
• Brownout is one of the messiest issues to troubleshoot

Additional considerations:

• Check the PSU rail distribution
• If separate rails, make sure the GPU rail can meet GPU’s TDP+20%
• If multiple rails, each should meet whatever is connected to it +20%
• If using HDDs or other start-heavy components, factor in the initial power spike (staggered start is also an option). GPU starting at almost idle should compensate for the overall power requirement, but still factor it into the rail calculations

Therapists are not supposed to bond with their patients. If you find one whom you can stand for half an hour, then take what you can and leave the rest, they’re not to be your friend or lover. The fact that chatbots let people fall in love with them, is a huge fail from a therapy point of view.

Bouncing ideas back and forth is a good use though. A good prompt I’ve seen recently:

I’m having a persistent problem with [x] despite having taken all the necessary countermeasures I could think of. Ask me enough questions about the problem to find a new approach.

If you worry about privacy, you can run an LLM locally, but it won’t be fast, and you’d need extra steps to enable search.

You can use local AI as a sort of “private companion”. I have a few smaller versions on my smartphone, they aren’t as great as the online versions, and run slower… but you decide the system prompt (not the company behind it), and they work just fine to bounce ideas.

NotebookLM is a great tool to interact with large amounts of data. You can bet Google is using every interaction to train their LLMs, everything you say is going to be analyzed, classified, and fed as some form of training, hopefully anonymized (…but have you read their privacy policy? I haven’t, “accept”…).

All chatbots are prompted by the company to be somewhat sycophantic so you come back, the cases where they were “too sycophantic”, were just a mistake in dialing it too far. Again, can avoid that with your own system prompt… or at least add an initial prompt in config, if you have the option, to somewhat counteract the company’s prompt.

If you want serendipity, you can ask a chatbot to be more spontaneous and suggest more random things. They’re generally happy to oblige… but the company ones are cut short on anything that could even remotely be considered as “harmful”. That includes NSFW, medical, some chemistry and physics, random hypotheticals, and so on.

Aren’t copyright laws awesome?

• Buy digital copy… no you can’t, you can only license one
• Buy physical book, now you have a copy
• Want a digital copy? No you can’t, copyright forbids it…
• …unless you destroy the physical copy in the process, then it’s only a format migration
• Donating the books after digitizing, would be “stealing”!

And still, they are suing them for migrating formats without authorization 🤦

All hail Disney’s lobbying and the 150 year copyright term!

Next campaign:

“Save the games, save the CHILDREN!”

• Let your children have a better childhood
• Play your favorite childhood games with them
• Don’t let publishers decide what’s best for your children
• Make sure your children can play the games with their children
• Childhood is the time to play, think of the children!

…wonder how successful that would be.

The Play Store has become way more restrictive, they’ve purged tons of old and/or “inactive” apps… including some I happened to have bought some time ago.

It’s made me even more of a fan of F-Droid.

replacement cycles for phones extending past 40 months

Rookie numbers. Unless disaster strikes, I fully expect to ride my current phone for the 60 month official support period I was promised.

Another one to the list:

Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse

Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm

BTRFS, with periodic snapshots and scrubbing, in RAID 1, only accessible remotely.

Just saying, that can be a “2”.

Works on Android:

• The Play Store exists
• All apps run in secured containers
• Sketchy* apps run in VMs
• Rooting disables banking and security apps

(* including all versions of Windows)

Hm, makes sense, but I feel like we’re still missing something.

I saw comments about Durov, similar to this investigation, maybe around a month ago.

With the xAI partnership news, I looked into it and found this nice thing:

• Tool to delete all your messages from chat/channel/ conversation on Telegram without requiring admin privileges - https://github.com/en9inerd/tgeraser

In Telegram, you can clear them one by one, or date ranges, or use disappearing messages, but this tool still found some I had missed.

(Disclaimer: I got pulled into Telegram by some friends leaving WhatsApp with the policy changes of 2021, my threat model is less one of FSB, and more one of indiscriminate AI siphoning for ad targeting)

How does this fit into these two pieces of news?

• May 28, 2025 - xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
• June 10, 2025 - Russian MPs back new state messaging app to combat WhatsApp and Telegram

In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.

Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…