Hazzard

Honestly, I'm a bit relieved at the current situation, because I wasn't nearly as certain he was done. With incidents like January 6th, all the claims of voter fraud, his clear abuse of systems like presidential pardons and executive orders, I really thought Trump had a genuine chance of overturning the 2-term limit and twisting the US into a bona fide dictatorship.

I'm relieved to see his astounding incompetence finally reaping results in his polling numbers again and again, because it's breaking the spell he seemed to have over half the country. Hell, it's even breaking the allure of fascism in the elections of other countries at this point. His gross incompetence during this presidency is single-handedly moving the whole world a little more to the left.

Yeah, the vision of "transferable NFT cosmetics" always struck me as ridiculous, for exactly this reason.

Even if some hypothetical NFT spec did allow a cosmetic to be fully stored in the NFT, such that a game could implement a standard API and support NFTs from different studios, what would the specs on that item be? Is the CoD rifle gonna look exactly like the Fortnite rifle so the skins can work in each? Is the Lamborghini from Forza gonna move exactly like one from Gran Turismo?

Each game has its own engine, its own balancing to worry about, you can't just blindly drag and drop assets like this, and nobody is gonna keep up with bespoke support for an arbitrary number of assets while more are minted everyday.

Definitely one of those "promises" that's just based on sounding cool, without any actual substance behind it, at least not when it comes to anything unique to NFTs.

Amen to that, here's to hoping.

Mhm, fair enough, I suppose this is a difference in priorities then. Personally, I'm not nearly as worried about small players, like hobbyists and small companies, who wouldn't've already developed something like this in house.

And I brought up "security through obscurity" because I'm somewhat optimistic that this can work out like encryption has, where tons of open source research was done into encryption and decryption, until we worked out encryption standards that we can run at home that are unbreakable before the heat death of the universe with current server farms.

Many of those people releasing decryption methods were considered villains, because it made hacking some previously private data easy and accessible, but that research was the only way to get to where we are, and I'm hopeful that one day we actually could make an unbeatable AI poison, so I'm happy to support research that pushes us towards that end.

I'm just not satisfied preventing small players from training AI on art without permission while knowingly leaving Google and OpenAI an easy way to bypass it.

Exactly, it is an arms race. But if a few students can beat our current best weapons, it'd be terribly naive to think the multiple multi-billion dollar companies, sinking their entire futures into this, and also already amoral enough to be stealing content en masse from the entire internet, hadn't already cracked this and locked everyone involved into serious NDAs.

Better to know what your enemy has then to just cross your fingers and hope that maybe they didn't notice this was possible, and have just been letting us poison their precious AI models they're sinking billions of dollars into. Having this now lets us build the next version of nightshade that isn't so trivially defeated.

Eh, it's a fair point. Not trying something like this is essentially "security by obscurity", which has been repeatedly proven to be a mistake.

Wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI or someone else already had something like this behind closed doors, but now the developers of tools like Nightshade can begin to work on developing AI poison that's more resilient against these kinds of "cleanup" tools.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.