Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 284: Back at the DoubleTree for today’s Norwescon planning meeting. In addition to much better weather than last month, we had heat in the meeting room as well! Much more comfortable all around. And since we usually meet on the top floor of the hotel’s tower, the elevators have a really nice view of the hotel property.
Day 283: Just an uneventful work day, so I’ll show off a piece of art I got from Shari a number of years ago.
Day 282: After much of the day had a lot of noise from an event going on in the conference room on this floor, the quiet of the afternoon after they left was almost eerie.
If you have what you consider to be a hard-line stance against AI-generated images, and you post your photos and/or artwork to Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, you should likely either rethink that hard-line stance or stop posting your images.
Zuckerberg’s Going to Use Your Instagram Photos to Train His AI Machines:
During his earnings call for Meta’s fourth quarter results yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear he will use images posted on Facebook and Instagram to train his generative AI tools with.
Last month, Meta announced a standalone AI image generator to compete with the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney.
Meta has already admitted that it has used what it calls “publicly available” data to train its AI tools with.
Essentially, if you have a public Facebook or Instagram profile where you post photographs, there is a strong chance that Meta is using your work to train its AI image generator tools.
Yeah, this sucks, though it’s not surprising. I’ve stopped posting to Instagram, but still post a lot on Facebook, because this is where most of my friends are. I wish Mastodon would get more traction (I’m not tempted by either Threads or Bluesky; Threads is just another arm of Meta, Bluesky is more Jack Dorsey, neither is actually federating yet despite a lot of lip service, and neither currently allows post schedulers to tie in, which keeps me from using them for Norwescon posts), or, even better, that there was more of a push back towards actual self-owned blogs (like this one!) that aren’t locked behind virtual walls. But I don’t want to lose track of all of my friends, so until something major shifts, I’ll stick around, which means I’m probably going to end up shrugging and resigning myself to feeding Zuck’s AI machines, which I have definite ethical issues with.
12/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
Another late-70s children’s book. The Enterprise arrives at a planet to sign a trade treaty, only to find the planet captured by Klingons! Only apparently the illustrator had never watched Star Trek; the main character likenesses are shaky, and the Klingons look hilariously unlike Klingons (and much more like 1950s Sci-Fi villains).
11/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
A late-70s children’s Star Trek adventure. The Enterprise receives an SOS from a lifeless planet, only to find a crowded city being attacked by dinosaurs – or is something more sinister afoot? All the early-reader excitement you can fit in 41 illustrated pages. ;)
Day 281: Just a little light reading before going to sleep. Read both of the two Star Trek children’s books (exclusively produced for libraries in 1977) in my Christmas haul tonight; they were just as good as you’d expect. As long as your expectations weren’t very high, at least. One of them at least had decent artwork; I’m not sure the illustrator of the other had ever actually seen Star Trek.
10/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
This is not a good Star Trek book. The Enterprise, with a crew at risk of what’s essentially violent cabin fever, is dispatched to the Horatius system to investigate a distress call. There, they find three planets: one with a stereotypical Native American civilization (“backward savages”, of course), one with a mid-20th century American civilization, and one with space Nazis. Oh, and there’s a “B story” involving a plague-infested rat loose on the ship. So, no, as a Star Trek adventure, there’s not much to recommend it.
However: It’s the first officially licensed Star Trek novel, and therefore gets a bit of leeway…or at least recognition that the treklit landscape was far different (nonexistent, actually) in 1968 than it is today. Not really recommended unless you’re a collector, but if you are and can track it down (especially if you can find an original rather than the 1999 reprint), it’s a quick read and kind of fun to see where the print side of Trek began.
Day 280: I got to work and the elevator was locked out, so I couldn’t get to my floor until someone from Facilities happened by and could key me up. Then I got to my office and realized that I’d forgotten to bring my computer in with me this morning, so I had to turn right around and drive home and back before I could start my work day. After all that, I think my mug might be mocking me.
Day 279: While seeing my wife off to work this morning, she needed a place to put her scarf as she was putting her coat on, and I was apparently conveniently placed.