yay one of us! if you want to, feel free to follow @elilla@transmom.love if you want to see me hyperfocusing on crochet details! here are two threads that are particularly infodumpy as I learn the ropes: on turning chains, and on the magic circle and counting

recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.

then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.

in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:

While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.

My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??

before LLMs, auto-captions on Youtube used to be particularly terrible for Japanese. but thanks to the power of Gemini and very energy-intensive, biosphere-destroying giant datacenters, the captions now have become worse than ever.

like I was watching a jidaigeki and the captions kept rephrasing stuff—in addition to the previous class of sound-based error, e.g. saying 行きます when a character is dramatically telling the other to stay alive (生きます), so it sounds like they’re fucking off and running away—which continues to happen like before, Youtube now has brand new and exciting types of error, like, bizarrely, captioning 誇り as プライド, or 冗談じゃないぞ as ゲームじゃないよ. In a jidaigeki. Presumably when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu is taking a break from playing Mario no Super Picross in his Edo-period Super Famicom

Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.

After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:

• Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
• Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
• We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
• It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
• I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
• The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.

Aw dang I was really hoping they’d all start using Supreme Intelligence just because of MAGAs signalling via Kree speech would be funny.