404 Media has caught giant payment-processing company Stripe turning a blind eye to AI-generated porn while actively seeking out and banning sex workers from their platform. Sites like CivitAI and Mage.Space allow users to "generate non-consensual sexual images of celebrities, sometimes by using the same models on CivitAI, by simply typing in a prompt naming specific people and sex acts". It costs between US$4-15 a month and they collect payments for it via Stripe, which has a pretty strict no adult content policy, even for sex work that is legal in many places around the world - but this AI-deepfake porn is illegal in most places, yet Stripe happily takes their cut for this nonsense.
Stability AI, the mob behind the popular Stable Diffusion image generation platform, has a new AI model for music - Harmonai. It lets you make CD quality music by providing a prompt, e.g: "epic trailer music intense tribal percussion and brass" or "lofi hip hop beat melodic chillhop 85 bpm". They worked with stock music provider AudioSparx to train this new model on over 800,000 audio files and 19,500 hours of music. Also in AI-land, I saw people use HeyGen to translate their videos from English to another language. Not only does it turn what you say into a different language, it keeps your voice and even modifies your lips to match the new sounds of a different language. Pretty amazing. Here's an example in French and here's one in German.
Sony's got a new update for the PS5 with a few interesting features. First up is Dolby Atmos support. Why this wasn't already support is beyond me, but better late than never. Apps like Netflix or Disney+ need an update to take advantage of it. PS Remote Play can now stream to a Chromecast with Google TV (4K) as well as other Android TV OS 12 devices (i.e: Nvidia Shield, TCL/Sony TVs). You can pop in an 8TB M.2 SSD if you can find one. Finally, there's a new "Use Second Controller for Assistance" feature that'll let you "assign a second controller to one account as an assist controller, and use two controllers to operate your PS5 console as if you were using a single controller", opening a "a new way for you to enjoy games collaboratively with others or help a friend or child navigate a particularly challenging section of a game".
OVH is kinda the low-end option when it comes to cloud computing. Azure/Google/Amazon are the top, then there's Digital Ocean/Vultr/Linode in the middle, with OVH just a step above the lovable junk on LowEndBox. It was interesting then to read a brief interview with OVH's CEO in an Australian blog, ARN, outlining their plan to spend a few million bucks to build a water-cooled data centre in a NextDC building in Sydney and fill it with 10,000 servers. According to the CEO their watercooling tech is what keeps operating costs lower than rivals that use air conditioning. I just wish they'd speed up their control panel. It's so damn slow to the point of unusable. At least it's cheap.
Dick Smith's Fun Way Into Electronics Volume 2 - 1980 (Jongleur / Internet Archive)
📻 Lost Cause - Cosmic Psychos
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