I’ll use this to scrape the bottom of barrels looking for more friends.

Here’s their full explanation: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942

It’s pretty long and includes some insightful details about implementation (making the blocklist’s usage at the discretion of the instance admin though not transparent of its contents and defaulting it to enabled) but this quote boils down the underlying sentiment pretty well:

“These are all rough edges of the threadiverse which I am attempting to round off so we might actually be able to retain some level headed people instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel by being a dumping ground for people rejected by civil society."

When you examine the list, by and large, it’s pretty reasonable. Lots of false news, state propaganda, spammers, etc. But also the entire lemmy.blahaj.zone instance (where many of lemmy’s trans denizens call home). We’re included in what the lead developer describes as “bottom of the barrel” “people rejected by civil society.”

Though I do fear the backlash. You’ve got a bunch of malicious spammers, hate-mongers and blackhat state actors who now have an open window to cause a lot of harm (harassment & general sowing of discontent) with the convenient smoke screen of upset trans folks who it can be blamed on.

We’re all witnessing a terrifying game of musical debt. At some point the music is going to stop.

> Erik is now playing Fallout New Vegas
> Erik is now playing Fallout New Vegas
> Erik is now playing Fallout New Vegas
> Erik is now playing Fallout New Vegas
> Erik is now playing Fallout New Vegas
> Erin is now playing Fallout New Vegas

Kokaku’s website is blocking my VPN connection. Here’s the text of the article.

George Lucas Goes To The Dark Side, Says AI Is ‘The Future’

By Kenneth Shepard Published July 14, 2026

The Star Wars creator compares not using AI to riding a horse in the face of cars

I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but it feels like we’re getting new stories of someone partnering with or advocating for the use of artificial intelligence as the future of cinematic storytelling every day. The newest addition to the list? Mr. Star Wars himself, George Lucas, and man is his reasoning a bummer.

In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discussed his career and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening this fall in L.A., which will be showcasing decades of human-made art and spotlighting, as its website calls it, “stories and people who tell them.” In the lengthy interview, Lucas shares some meaningful insights into filmmaking, discusses his collaborations with people like Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg, and even offers some pithy observations about the pitfalls of testing films with focus groups and whether or not the average viewer is actually in touch with what they like about movies.

“If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why,” he says. “But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell and is passionate about it.”

Jarringly, this advocacy for human-led storytelling is followed by claims that AI is “the future,” and Lucas compares not using the new technology to relying on antiquated transportation in the face of cars.

“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he tells A Rabbit’s Foot. “It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”

Though he acknowledged the risks of using the plagiarism machine when A Rabbit’s Foot questioned him further, he doubled down by highlighting other benefits he believes AI will provide in the future.

“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognized. It’s just like real life.”

There’s a scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker is training alongside Yoda and learning the ins and outs of being a Jedi, and he asks if the dark side of the Force is stronger than the light side. Yoda replies that it’s not, but that many fall to it because it is “quicker, easier, more seductive.” That movie was released 46 years ago, but it is certainly illustrative of the logic Lucas is using here.

He advocates for the importance of human-made art, but then argues that using technology that is notorious for stealing from humans and whose results generally look like shit compared to work made by hand would make the filmmaking process “easier.” It’s “the future” and there’s “nothing you can do about it”? It’s contradictory to believe both that it’s the human spirit that makes great films and also that a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process is the future of making movies. If that makes me naive and means I’m fighting against the inevitable, then I will go down swinging.

Consequences in 1… 2… 2 and a half…

I have a suspicion that Netflix is messing with the episode order for some folks.

My partner and I were on the phone with their mom when she mentioned that she just started watching Black Mirror. I had a silent freakout moment and half-apologized for the early episodes being “pretty gnarly” but she mentioned the first one she saw was a USS Callister or something else.

Badonkarina of Time

😥 😭 😭 😭

We’re in the throes of a few crisis in the US:

1. a professional backlash against the over-prescription of opiates that were advertised as “non-addictive” which was actually a lie,
2. the monster the above crisis created: a domestic population of drug addicts who are either seeking drugs themselves or looking to non-addicts to acquire them,
3. constriction within the health insurance marketplace, demanding more and more justification for care and drug access,
4. an entire political system that’s in the pocket of said industry who are incentivized to manufacture a world that maximizes health care spending while minimizing actual health care delivered.

Monoculture is an antiquated form of agriculture.

Slavery is a barbarously cruel crime against humanity.

Perhaps people will say similar things about industrial meat production and billionaires in a few hundred years.

Chehalis. Checks out.

I once texted the phone number on an elote stand to ask when they were open, got a polite response, then accidentally sent them fetish furry porn by accident a week later. I immediately apologized. I’ve still never visited that elote stand. Too ashamed.

TROUBLE AHEAD FOR THE CEO OF SEX

The only acceptable response is “I heard he was good at making bitches wet.”

60 minutes of self-congratulatory blathering from olympic-level athletes in the sport of failing upwards.

They’re speaking with the underlying presumption that agi is a real thing that will happen. It’s not, and it won’t. https://www.404media.co/google-deepmind-paper-argues-llms-will-never-be-conscious/

On the topic of Google’s influence over Mozilla being the primary source of their funding: “It’s complicated, it’s entangled, but it seems to be working alright.” JOURNALISM!

Any-LLM platform: Mozilla’s new middleware for developers allowing them to hop between models and LLM companies.

Mozilla data collective: Mozilla’s marketplace platform (platform?) for making “training data” (any content of value to LLM companies) monetizable for the owners of that content.

In resposne to the loaded question ‘hey, isn’t it bonkers that your “rabid” users forced you to build a “dont do AI shit” setting in Firefox?’:

“It’s being reactionary to our community and reactionary to our users. They’re asking us for that. And so I think in some ways, both we need to respond to that and we need to lead them through it, but we need to provide these other alternatives.”

Because, clearly, the user’s aversion to these tools is a childish phase that they need to get over.

44:10: The ex-head of self-driving at Uber talks about letting his Tesla self-drive, with his kids inside, trying to take over driving and having the car crash into a wall at 30 mph. Lesson learned: “I’m not blaming the software” and (human) “passivity is bad.” Remember when that guy got shot in the face by Dick Cheney, then he held a press conference and apoligized about getting shot?

Some grade-A Texas sharpshooting around “could AI invent punk rock?” They argue no, but they’re misunderstanding the premise. Punk didn’t get a cultural foothold because of the music alone. The philosophy, the artists, the choices, the industry and the scene behind and around the music made that happen. LLMs are a million monkeys on a million typewriters, just like artists. Given enough time and resources one will evenutally fart out something unique that resonates with the culture and captures peoples’ interests, and we all conveniently forget about all the failures. The brilliance of human artists is that our failure rate is significantly lower. The reply to this should not be “let’s keep working to make failure cheaper so that it’ll evenutally be economical to retire human creativity.”

They attest that the nightmare scenario is that we all become the fat useless humans in Wall-E (which, on its own, is a ridiculously optimistic vision, ignoring the potential hellscape of a ravaged environment, digital feudal lords and impoverished serfdom), but they refuse to stop building all the infrastructure to make those precise futures actually happen.

But it’s ok; we’re going to get lead through it.

Toby Hooper, always pinching those pennies!

Somebody at my last job showed me how to do this to speed up searching within internal tools at work. It’s only saving a few seconds and a few clicks, but it blows people away every time.

I’ve got a ton of them now.