This is kind of irrelevant to the argument, but if I were to provide you with a mix of AI and organically produced music, would you be able to pick them out every time?

I’d like to think much more often than not, yes. People talk about it being able to replicate low level pop and … fine. But that’s not really the kind of stuff I listen to. Maybe there’s a statement to be made there about how far down pop has fallen that it can be mistaken with formulaic AI slop …

It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s “Brillo box” art installation. Is it just a Brillo box he got at the store? Or did he make it himself, thereby creating “art”? Could you know the difference? Would you?

Which I guess is what your point here is. What is art and who is the arbiter of that?

Kind of different circumstances as I see it, though. Andy Warhol still performed the art of the Brillo box. He took something basic and skillfully crafted it into art to prod the artistic community into considering what we think of as art and why. It was in no way a trick but a very deliberate and intentional statement, or question even.

AI on the other hand often feels like a trick. There is little to no intention, no human craft, and an effort to pass it off as a higher form of art than it really is. It’s not asking questions or making statements but an effort to deliver “content” to fill some need. The need for more content.

But like, hey. That’s just my opinion, maaan …

I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don’t see too often so I clicked on it and … it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.

I’m not much of a music person, I’ve been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don’t know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there’s a motif that really struck them. They’ll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It’s very intentional and you can tell.

AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said “complexity” and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn’t doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, “Aw fuck yeah! This is what it’s about!”

That’s how you can tell AI generated music.

Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it’s a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you’ll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you’ll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?

It’s bleak, man. Fuck that shit.

Oh! Amazing guilty pleasure of mine, but Code Vein! Anime vampire Dark Souls!

Everything about the game is a little rough and lackluster, but somehow it still comes together enough to be an entertaining play if you’re willing to give it enough grace to meet it where it’s actually at. I’d recommend getting it on sale for <$20USD or less if you can.

But also check out the amazing Monster Factory episode for it. If that doesn’t sell you on the character creator I don’t know what will.

Furry. Some choices make themselves.

In all honesty, I’ve been in the fandom for years. External opinions fluctuate with the times, but if there’s one thing furries know how to do it’s build community with tech, adamantly support human rights, and be vehemently anti-establishment (EDIT: and apparently not count, I got distracted mid-sentence). A++, love being a stupid animal.

Once you realize this, you also realize that there’s no going back for them either. If by some slim chance there’s enough resistance for them to pause or rollback some features, it’s only temporary. The overall course remains clear and they will continue to move in that direction regardless.

There disdain for you as a consumer could not be made any clearer.

Well, I wouldn’t say great, merely useful.

The rant is because I’m trying to provide a balanced view of it without coming off as a fearmonger. TPM is certainly not without its uses, but it’s a leash that can be yanked on. Under Windows, you’re fully in Microsoft’s world and they will yank that leash. But given the right leverage and circumstances, that leash can and very well may extend into Linux as well if you allow the software through with it.

Be careful. Use it if you will but remember what it is capable of.

Mostly, kind of.

You can use the TPM to automatically decrypt a LUKS root volume at boot just like you would BitLocker, however your recovery keys aren’t automatically uploaded to a Microsoft account, you must manage them yourself (generally I see this as a benefit but the layman may appreciate Microsoft’s “assistance” here). https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trusted_Platform_Module

You can also use it for SSH, https://www.ledger.com/blog/ssh-with-tpm

⚠️ WARNING, what follows is much more my personal speculation on things so absolutely take this with a grain of salt.

The TPM isn’t ever really under the user’s direct control - it’s used by applications that hook into it. On Linux, I anticipate you would be much more protected from the remote attestation aspects of TPM 2.0 phoning out to 3rd party servers for verification because in general that just does not vibe with the FOSS standards and sensibilities. HOWEVER, in my wildest speculations it may still be possible to fall victim to that through proprietary software. Currently things like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or Activision’s Call of Duty don’t work under Linux. If Microsoft gets particularly desperate, I wouldn’t put it past them to actually distribute a native Office for Linux package, or work with Adobe or Activision to do likewise for their programs as a baited hook. Any proprietary, closed-source software can still communicate with the exposed TPM for that remote attestation and refuse to run if they find tampered data, pirated files, or other running applications they object to (I don’t know exactly what form it would take but it could be any or all of these). Effectively they maintain control over your system by right of denial; if you want to run their software you play by their rules.

This of course doesn’t matter if you have no desire to run that software. Again, the TPM itself is not directly malicious and as long as you don’t engage with software that would use it maliciously, it’s fine to have it active and enabled within your OS.

They know they can’t do it overnight and force it down people’s throats, because it’s fundamentally anti-freedom, people will resist, rebel, start to switch to devices and systems that allow them to take back their personal and computing autonomy, using technology to enable their own goals instead of what the manufacturers and services “allow”. So they have to slowly creep it in.

This is exactly what Windows 11 is. I have a background in large scale system deployments and if you want anything to be effective, you have to baseline it. What better way than with a the rollout of a mandatory OS upgrade demanding these features?

You can’t crack the trusted computing whip if everyone isn’t on that same baseline. Mark my words, I’d bet a fucking limb on it, once Windows 11 sees a significant market share the decline will become much more severe, much more quickly. They’re hungry, they relented a bit on Windows 10 in the EU for another year because they’re so close, what’s one more year. They can taste how close it is now …

Trusted computing and TPMs aren’t inherently bad. Like all issues of trust, it comes down to who the trusted parties are and what they’re asking of you.

So for example, let’s start with the idea of a work computer. Say you work for a bank and they issue you a laptop. In order to access all the sensitive data related to a bank, certain guarantees must be made about the environment. The hard drive must have full disk encryption (FDE) so that if it’s ever lost or stolen, the information that may have been on it can’t be compromised. This is not your laptop. This is not your environment. This is for the most part, totally fair.

Now let’s consider Microsoft and your personal device. Microsoft is forcing you into their trusted environment by requiring online accounts and TPM/SecureBoot. And how do you benefit? FDE through BitLocker, sure. But you know there are other FDE solutions and BitLocker results in you losing control of your keys because they are automatically uploaded through your online account to Microsoft for “recovery” purposes. ~Source ~Related What Microsoft is really saying here is that they have a trusted environment, and if you are to be a trusted party in that environment with the “privilege” of accessing their software and services, you must submit your personal device to their rules. Are you starting to feel the icky vibes here?

This is made worse by TPM 2.0 supporting remote attestation.

This of course raises the question, verified to what degree and to whose standards? Are they simply trying to protect us from maliciously crafted software, or is it DRM to prevent running pirated content, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and Secure Boot for Call of Duty. Of course this is ostensibly for anti-cheat, but you see how quickly that moves adjacent to other purposes. How much are you willing to give up to maintain (a sense of) security?

EDIT: One final point. Trusted systems are the general security engineering concept of protecting systems through enforced policies to achieve certain levels of trust. Trusted Computing is a very specific set of technologies with a board of directors worth taking a quick look at …

Trusted computing has been a trap, slowly closing over the course of years. And with so many things like it, it happens very slowly at first, then all at once. The door is closing. Escape their environment before you can’t anymore.

We’ve seen that consumers can no longer dictate the market, they are dictating the market at us. This will not get better, you have to be proactive.

EDIT: Richard Stallman article that is necessary reading on the matter, Can You Trust Your Computer?. Do you find this hard to believe?

I like this one because it helps establish a relative analogy we can all kind of feel and puts things into perspective. We all know what 11 days feels like, and almost all of us know what 33 years feels like. Either because we may have lived it directly or we’ve lived enough of a portion of it to extrapolate that experience.

One trillion seconds is almost 32,000 years. The analogy is broken again as 32K years is already becoming a nonsensical number that none of us can meaningfully interpret. It’s longer than all of recorded human history

Anyways, https://apnews.com/article/musk-tesla-electric-trillion-pay-stock-f2140db92e8032121f4c114234059165

It won’t even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.

The protection of FDE is the carrot they give to get you to enable TPM 2.0. The stick is the remote attestation which can be used for nefarious purposes like DRM and other types of denial/system lockdown at Microsoft’s discretion.

It’s true it’s hard to motivate people into taking a better security posture for themselves but forcing them like this doesn’t come from a good and sincere place.

Valid, but that’s also why I enjoy typing up these posts, too. Sometimes people just kind of intuit that they dislike something and giving them the words to more properly form their thoughts is the first step at breaking out of those patterns. I think for a not insignificant number of people, not being able to properly articulate their thoughts can lead them to believe that maybe they’re not valid.

I mean, yes. That’s what we’re all kind of conjecturing on at the moment.

I want to warn against conspiratorial thinking because I’m always trying to avoid falling into it myself. We won’t ever really probably have direct proof of a lot of this unless there are credibly authenticated insider leaks from Microsoft.

But we can analyze evidence. Things like seeing that the Terms of Service have been updated for so many apps and online platforms to automatically opt-in your work for AI training purposes. The fact that Microsoft is forcing online accounts. The fact that Microsoft is defaulting save locations to OneDrive (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-word-forcing-you-to-save-new-files-to-the-cloud-heres-how-to-stop-it/) and that they are training AI on pictures you’ve saved there and you can only opt out 3 times a year??? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/onedrives-ai-face-scanning-feature-suggests-it-can-only-be-disabled-3-times-a-year-but-that-doesnt-seem-right)

Telemetry is already pretty opaque; it’s hard to tell what data they are wrapping up in it and if I understand what you’re saying correctly, yes. It’s very easy to keep that bottled until the next time the computer comes online so that even your “offline” activities are monitored. Look at Recall or even before that, Activity History was already giving me the heebie-jeebies (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/what-is-the-recent-activity-page-23cf5556-4dbe-70da-82c8-bb3a8d8f8016)

They already consumed the entire internet, probably some time ago it’s been theorized. In order to keep chasing those diminishing returns they are incentivized to chase every new data source because that scales into profit (no it doesn’t, that’s the bubble, but that’s a whole other conversation).

It’s pretty bleak. Use Linux, etc.

This was always my assumption as well. When they quit the project, didn’t they leave some message recommending Microsoft BitLocker as an alternative? Everyone at the time interpreted this as the clearest “they’re already in the room with me” warning sign, given that that kind of project would NEVER reasonably make such a closed source, corporate centered recommendation …

Just from personal experience, I was in a relationship like this once and found it absolutely intolerable for me.

I have many friends and I value them quite a bit. I also manage my time and emotions by spreading them out. I can’t always talk about everything with everyone, nor can I always do the things with friends they want to do or spend all the time with them that they want. It’s a delicate and complex web. It doesn’t take a lot to manage, it’s just simply, “This for you, here and now, while I can” and “This for you, here and then”.

She on the other hand was co-dependent. Cut everyone else out of her life to wrap herself tightly around me and lean her entire emotional weight on me all the time. Any thought she had was run through me and any time she needed attention she’d come to me because she had nowhere else to turn. It literally broke me.

Maybe some people like this or can manage it better than I could, but be aware the toll this may take on your partner as well.

This was my very first thought, too. There’s already something out there he’s aware of and making a call to flood the internet with AI generated videos is going to lose it in the wash. Brilliant move honestly, if you’re a dirty skeezebag without a shred of humanity.

For me a lot of it is just weird motivations. I have a laundry list of games that sound interesting to me - really good in fact! And that I absolutely want to play, but sometimes that particular game just isn’t clicking for me, so I put it back on the list and I’ll try it later. Don’t be afraid to shuffle things around and try out different things until something sticks.

Lately I’ve been trying a lot of different genres that I never thought would appeal to me. I hate the actual sport and concept of playing golf but I will totally obsess over Hotshots. Same with racing. Was never a huge racing fan but something about the simplicity and focus of Trackmania really clicks for me. And bullet hells. Thought I’d find them waaay too difficult for my tastes, but it turns out memorizing patterns and getting into a flow state while some of the best 00’s electro you’ve ever heard fills your ears is pretty therapeutic.

Try changing the way you approach gaming.

Another thing I’ve really been enjoying is setting up EmulationStation Desktop (ES-DE) with RetroArch backend and building out a full retro collection. When I don’t want to play games directly, I can still sift through them. Download a completed Sega Genesis/Mega Drive collection, scrape the boxart and manual data, fix titles, patch fan translations. And if I see something interesting while I’m doing this that I’ve never seen before, I’ll pop into the game and poke at it a bit to see if it clicks and maybe THAT will be my thing for a bit. Look up some articles for best hidden gems on the PS1 and see if there’s something new, or get into a system that you’ve never touched before like the TurboGrafx-16. Discovery can be part of the fun, too.

I know we’re all burnt out and frazzled, sometimes forcing yourself to play that one game that you’ve been meaning to play and want to enjoy is just the wrong ticket and only puts too much pressure on yourself, further disincentivizing you.

People saying “it was the same with 4K” are really missing the point. It’s blatant consumerism pure and simple.

Viewing distance and diminishing returns play a factor .While some people cite upscaling, that can be of various and questionable quality depending on how it’s being done. 8K content is also exponentially more expensive to create, store, and stream and while I won’t say it’ll never happen, I don’t know if it’ll happen before the full collapse of society at the rate we’re going.

This could be a motivating factor for AI-generated content to reduce the cost of production, but I already think AI-generated content is slop and in 8K resolution any oddness or imperfection is just gonna be magnified.

In the end, though, you just can’t argue with some people when bigger number = better.

EDIT: I do admit there is some bias in taste here. I’m a 120hz nut and while I admit I can’t really see the difference between 60 and 120, I can feel it, especially in 3D action games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Psychonauts 2 where you pan the camera around to look at the environment and it’s buttery smooth. It makes playing Bloodborne wanna hurl my guts out from nausea (I’m sorry BB, I love you but you know you’re nasty).