dirtside's Techdirt Profile

dirtside

About dirtside Techdirt Insider

dirtside's Comments comment rss

  • Aug 24, 2026 @ 10:40am

    The Inverted Inverted Pyramid

    I'm really starting to understand why traditional reporting starts with the thing being reported on, and then fills in the background later, rather than starting every article with half a dozen paragraphs of context before getting to the point.

  • Aug 19, 2026 @ 06:29pm

    Of course it's true; it's been true for decades. A low-budget movie being an unexpected breakout hit has happened many, many times, going back to before any of us were born. The idea that this is new, because of Obsession and Backrooms, is silly.

  • Aug 19, 2026 @ 06:14pm

    Who cares what you use it for?

    The first question we should be asking is, "Is the LLM you're using ethical to use?" Since it's Claude, the answer is: No, absolutely not. Those tools were built on mass copyright infringement, and are explicitly intended by their creators to further concentrate power into an unaccountable fascist technical elite class. "The purpose of an LLM is to give wealth access to skill without giving skill access to wealth." As a judge might say, we don't even need to reach the question of whether the way you use the tool is effective or not, or what negative effects it might have: Using the tool itself is already so hilariously unethical that the actual task at hand is irrelevant.

  • Jul 21, 2026 @ 10:19pm

    This time, for sure

    Every time there's a couple of low-budget hits, people start saying "You don't need big bucks to make a blockbuster!" and then there's a flood of low-budget movies (chasing whatever perceived characteristics the hits had) that aren't hits, and the cycle starts all over again. It's amusing to have this article come out right after The Odyssey (a big hit, with a budget of $250 million) and right before a mega-budget Spider-Man movie, which is going to make a zillion dollars (No Way Home made almost $2 billion worldwide). No no, this time, it's the end of big-budget filmmaking. For realsies.

  • Jun 23, 2026 @ 09:37pm

    That is, LLMs, not "LLMm" /facepalm

  • Jun 23, 2026 @ 09:36pm

    Generative tools are unethical

    The generative models (LLMm, diffusion etc.) from the big tech companies were created unethically (mass copyright theft, abusive exploitation of third-world labor for tagging), and their primary intent is to hurt worker power while consolidating more power in the hands of Big Tech. In that light, whether they are "effective" at any particular task is irrelevant. Using them, even just a little, is morally wrong.

  • Jun 22, 2026 @ 11:53am

    Scofflaws!

    And those, like me and my friend, who think that scofflaws are increasing exponentially
    Ted and his friend are fucking morons. Hey, Ted! Go look up some actual crime statistics for the past couple of decades, you brain-damaged turd!

  • Jun 02, 2026 @ 11:08am

    "If you, like me, believe that AI is going to have an important role in the future" If by "AI" you mean the current corporate LLMs, then the only "important role" it would have is much the same as a shark attempting to eat you has an "important role" in your beach activities. It's not a good thing, it's not going to help or make anything better, and there's quite a lot of unavoidable and unacceptable negatives in its very presence!

  • May 27, 2026 @ 04:20pm

    One of the big advantages of RCV is that you don't need primaries. You can just have one election. If you want to restrict that election to one candidate per party (plus any number of independents, who by definition have no party) then you could still have a primary process, but that should be internal to the party to run however they want. If they want to have a convention to select candidates, or have the party's leadership just pick, or whatever, they can do that. If two people want to run as a Democrat then they would need to vie for the Democratic Party to submit them.

  • Apr 30, 2026 @ 05:51pm

    "I don’t think most U.S. journalism is journalism." I mean, yeah. Most U.S. "journalism" is from outlets owned by the billionaire oligarch class. That class does not want a well-informed public, and so the news outlets they own do not do proper journalism (except a little bit, as a treat, so they can point at the occasional story and say "look, we do real journalism!" while the rest of their output is a torrent of propaganda). Get your news from independent sources. It's easier than it sounds.

  • Mar 08, 2026 @ 11:34pm

    Not quite

    Utah has no right to restrict the communications of a private company to its customers Utah does in fact have some right to restrict the communications of a private company to its customers. While this is balanced against First Amendment concerns, state governments do in fact have the right to regulate what companies can say in a business context, as well as mandate the inclusion of certain language in certain circumstances. The idea that state governments can't regulate commercial speech at all is total nonsense.

  • Feb 22, 2026 @ 04:30pm

    NotebookLLM is powered by Gemini and (for reason well-established) is unethical to use in any capacity. Whether it "does the job" is moot.

  • Dec 24, 2025 @ 03:05pm

    We have an LG from, like, 10 years ago. Still works fine. We've never once connected it to the Internet because we don't trust the software, and I know things are exponentially worse now. We do have an internet-connected streaming device attached to it, for better or worse, but no way are we putting the TV itself online.

  • Nov 19, 2025 @ 11:14pm

    So call it something else

    There's all sorts of names that other eateries could use for the same thing, that could just become widespread. Denver-style pizza, Rockies pizza, whatever. If I was a competitor to Beau Jo's I'd probably do it out of spite.

  • Nov 19, 2025 @ 11:13pm

    applause

  • Oct 22, 2025 @ 04:30pm

    So did I! I loved Reader so much that when it died I wrote my own RSS reader implementation, which I still use to this day (I tried some other readers and didn't like any of them). When RSS exists I don't get the appeal of newsletters.

  • Oct 22, 2025 @ 12:29am

    Ownership. That's the key. The legacy media companies are all giant corporations controlled by billionaire oligarchs; their news is thus inherently untrustworthy and does not make anyone well-informed. To actually be well-informed you need to get news from a number of outlets that are owned by different people, and those outlets need to be doing actual journalism.

  • Oct 06, 2025 @ 11:58pm

    Actual professional historians disagree: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/

  • Oct 02, 2025 @ 12:26pm

    Header image sure looks like AI. Also, the subtle message: engineering is for men only.

  • Oct 01, 2025 @ 05:55pm

    Corporate villains will never stop being corporate villains; the system they live in incentivizes villainous behavior. The system has to be changed by the rest of us, because the people who benefit from it will never change it voluntarily.

More comments from dirtside >>