Author | Lightnews

Ovis Ex Machina

@sheepmachine.bsky.social

190 followers 110 following 540 posts

I get paid for engineering so I can lose money doing photography. Opinions probably aren't my own but I couldn't tell you precisely where I got them from. Grateful to hug my wife and kids every day.

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · Jan 18

The #architecture at the #seattleferryterminal goes so unnecessarily hard and I love it!

#photography #blackandwhite #streetphotography

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 1d

Comics are CLEARLY not the actual person. AI deep fakes look like the actual person and can reasonably cause reputational harm. This is like using a celebrity's face to endorse a product that they didn't actually ensure. It's not parody and not protected.

Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

Todd Stein @toddstein.bsky.social · 1d

The Fugitive Slave Act legalized bounty hunting.

It’s crystal clear what Make America Great Again really means.

Sanho Tree @sanho.bsky.social · 1d

“Under the plan, bounty hunters may receive “monetary bonuses” depending on how successfully they track down their targets — and how many immigrants they then report to ICE.”

Or ICE could just fund the Klan directly.

ICE Plans Cash Rewards for Private Bounty Hunters to Locate and Track Immigrants

Companies hired by ICE would be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate — and paid cash bonuses for performance.

theintercept.com

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Paul Killeen @pkilleenphoto.bsky.social · Jul 13

'Surviving The Elements'

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 4d

Imagine if a thing where you sample the people and look for the majority opinion were protected from sampling the money and looking for the biggest pile. What would you call that? ;) :P

🗽LOLGOP🗽 @thefarce.org · 4d

Everybody gets that Bloomberg is the main reason Cuomo is still afloat, right?

archive.ph/4sE8g

Donors opposing Mamdani
Name Amount Donated Group(s) Supported Net Worth
Michael Bloomberg $8.3 million Fix the City $110 billion
Joseph Gebbia $3 million Fix the City · Defend NYC · Put NYC First $7.9 billion
Lauder family $2.6 million Fix the City · Sensible City $25.9 billion
Bill Ackman $1.75 million Fix the City · Defend NYC $9.2 billion
Tisch family $1.2 million Fix the City $10.1 billion
John Hess & family $1 million Fix the City $2.4 billion
Daniel Loeb $775,000 Fix the City · Defend NYC · NYers for a Better Future $3.8 billion
Barry Diller $500,000 Fix the City $5.1 billion
Steve Wynn $500,000 Fix the City $3.9 billion
Marcella Guarino Hymowitz $400,000 Fix the City · Put NYC First $2 billion
David Walentas $350,000 Fix the City · Empower NYC $2.3 billion
Reed Hastings $250,000 Fix the City $6.5 billion
John Fish $250,000 Fix the City $2.3 billion
David Lichtenstein $250,000 Fix the City · NYers for a Better Future $2 billion
Alice Walton $200,000 Fix the City $115 billion
Deborah Simon $200,000 Fix the City $11.6 billion
Jerry Speyer $150,000 Fix the City $2.2 billion
Stephanie Coleman $150,000 Fix the City $7.1 billion (family)

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 4d

This is only a problem because SORA is also getting away with illegally representing real life celebrities against their will. Glad Cameo can get a trademark lawsuit going but sad it is even needed.

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 5d

The snake eating itself machine goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrf

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 5d

OpenAI-Microsoft deal: Microsoft gets a 27% stake, access to its AI models until 2032, including AGI-level models, and OpenAI will buy $250B of Azure services (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · Jun 19

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 6d

First of all, welcome to the reality of modern farming in the USA: most of them are millionaires, actually.

Second of all, they won't feel the pain on soybean sales evaporating until next year so this is just FUD.

Please though, recognize that most farmer owners are wealthy.

Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 6d

Such deranged, casually fascist shit.

House Republicans want to strip Zohran Mamdani of citizenship, possibly deport NYC mayoral frontrunner over form omissions

The first immigration case Zohran Mamdani may have to confront as mayor could be his own – as Republicans fire up calls to probe his sworn statements on citizenship forms and “deport” t…

nypost.com

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Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 6d

for context: the second edition of "Observability Engineering" starts off swinging with an opinionated chapter called "The Fundamentals of Building Good Software".

which begs the question... what IS ✨ good software ✨?

i'll drop my answers 👇 but curious to hear others.

Hazel Weakly @hazelweakly.me · 6d

@charity.wtf asked a great question on LinkedIn today. Her question was: "What is ✨ good software ✨?"

I'd love to hear your answers, but I'd also like to share mine. So if you'll allow me a moment of indulgence... 🧵

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 6d

My wife and I have been laughing about this all night.

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 6d

Utterly shocked when they invented a process requiring class action to block federal judges from national-wide injunctions just to protect this regime. Such bonkers stupid legislating from the bench.

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 6d

There's a lot of "we're just going to assume good faith and leave out any recourse for legal challenge" included explicitly or left there implicitly in US laws.

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 7d

They're so little and cute. 🥰

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 7d

I'm so excited for a familiar face. The short eared owls are back to the Samish flats for the winter.

#birds #photography

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 8d

It's also possible Rob Schneider is not a great person to consult for opinions about public health policy. Maybe.

Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 10d

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 10d

God damn this is amazing. I particularly appreciate how they didn't merely choose a movie where the character's race is part of the story, they made clear with their substitutions the whole idea is racial.

Looking forward to a customized GLORY (1989) where Denzel Washington is replaced by Kid Rock.

Jeff Yang @originalsp.in · 10d

I don’t know if there’s a more perfect illustration of the utter fucking nonsense that creative pollution by AI will produce than this choice to illustrate the power of Paramount’s new “localization” and “customization” technology by face-swapping Brad Pitt into the lead role of GET OUT

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Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 10d

It’s worse than most people comprehend:
1. They want to replace human interactions with human-like bots.
2. The uncanny valley exists for an evolutionarily critical purpose.
3. There is no such thing as a humane algorithm; all AI bots are sociopathic

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 10d

SORA needs to be banned until it has an opt-in system for ALL REAL PEOPLE. You shouldn’t build a system that can reproduce someone’s likeness and voice and let the public do whatever they want with it. Self-applied watermarks are NOT a safe replacement for actual regulation.

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 10d

You know, it's a pretty high bar for a public individual to win a defamation case here in the United States, but this might get over that

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

OpenAI's Sora 2 Can Generate Videos of Celebrities Appearing to Shout Racial Slurs

OpenAI's Sora 2 video generation model can be exploited to push misinformation and depict public figures behaving badly despite promised guardrails.

www.rollingstone.com

Ovis Ex Machina @sheepmachine.bsky.social · 11d

Remember, AI is primarily sociopathic as a human interface. Don’t give AI anything you wouldn’t want to give to a sociopath with a conflict in interest.

Geoffrey A. Fowler @geoffreyfowler.bsky.social · 11d

ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it.

@eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome.

My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC

Column | ChatGPT just came out with its own web browser. Use it with caution.

OpenAI’s Atlas promises AI-powered convenience. The price? Letting ChatGPT track and store “memories” of what you do online.

wapo.st

Reposted by Ovis Ex Machina

Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 11d

We’ve updated our story with an additional comment provided by the United States Justice Department.

At 4:10 p.m., she texted me: "By the way-everything I ever sent you is off record. You're not a journalist so it's weird saying that but just letting you know."
I responded: "I'm sorry, but that's not how this works. You don't get to say that in retrospect."
Halligan was unpersuaded: "Yes I do. Off record."
"I am really sorry. I would have been happy to speak with you on an off the record basis had you asked," I said. "But you didn't ask, and I still haven't agreed to speak on that basis. Do you have any further comment for the story?
To my surprise, she kept going: "It's obvious the whole convo is off record. There's disappearing messages and it's on signal. What is your story? You never told me about a story."
I didn't respond. It was time to publish my story. I'll text it to her.
Postscript: Read the full exchange between Lindsey Halligan and Lawfare's Anna Bower here.

Highlighted text: “Hours after Lawfare published this article, Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre provided the following additional comment:

“Thank you for including my statement in your story. I just realized I spelled Lindsey's name wrong in the initial response, would you mind correcting?

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Diedrich Bader @diedrichbader.bsky.social · 11d

The shock of the French Revolution is not that it happened
It’s that it took so long to happen

Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley.bsky.social · 11d

He bulldozed the White House during a government shutdown to build himself a ballroom, then sent a letter to the states saying that SNAP benefits for 42 million people may not go out in November to those who rely on it to eat.

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Stone Cold “Crazy” Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 11d

The AWS outage interfered with our cats’ automatic feeders and yes I am already embarrassed I assure you I have adequate shame already

Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 11d

The AWS outage bricked people's $2,700 smartbeds, leaving them in a reclining position or with the heat up. People were unable to use them, basically. A GitHub repo exists that lets people operate their beds without reliance on the normal infrastructure

www.404media.co/the-aws-outa...

The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds

When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.

www.404media.co

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🦇 dylan baker 🦇 @dylnbkr.bsky.social · 11d

We're seeing lots of headlines about the catastrophic impact of massive data center expansion. But what else could data centers look like?

In my perpetual quest to seek out alternative technofutures, I want to highlight the really cool work of Keolu Fox.

🧵

A worker sorts through a large pile of e-waste in an industrial facility,
highlighting the environmental impact of discarded electronics.

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