What Is This About The Tumblr Staff Wanting To Sell Art Data To Midjourney?

What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.

More Posts from Theboomr and Others

1 year ago

Three days left

Just your reminder that these (ebook) prices will be on offer for only four more days... until at 23:59 Irish time on New Year's Eve, all prices in the store go back to their pre-discount levels.

Why not duck in there now and get a whole heap of reading while it's still cheap? And keep your local online semi-indie author from getting overly broke. :)

Here's the link:

Ebooks Direct Whole Store Bundle
Ebooks Direct
By popular demand! This ebook bundle contains our complete inventory of non-new-release* works. All our ebooks are DRM-free, and come with t

Please & thank you! :)

1 year ago

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

2 years ago

Gahhh @dduane has been teasing us about this YW "thing" for at least several years now and I do my very best to be a patient reader but omg I am so READY 😅

Could you please confirm you were joking about having that twist from Overture in your head for 20 years I'm very bad at telling when people are joking

22 years. 1990 to 2013. I had a lot of Overture in my head waiting for a very long time.


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1 year ago

Legendary U Washington bookseller Duane Wilkins is drowning in medical debt

Legendary U Washington Bookseller Duane Wilkins Is Drowning In Medical Debt

Nearly every sf writer who's ever toured the west coast knows Duane - he's the encyclopedically knowledgeable sf buyer for the U Washington Bookseller, who has organized some of the best sf signings in Seattle history. He's a force of nature.

He's also broke. A two-week hospital stay left him drowning in medical debt - despite being insured! - and now he's being threatened by a collection agency.

Now, Duane is forced into participating in one of the most barbaric of contemporary American rituals, fundraising to cover his medical debt. He's raised $6k of the $10k he needs (I just pitched in $100).

If you can afford to help out someone who's done so much for our community, please kick Duane whatever you can spare.

1 year ago

HEY!

Back up your computer!

Go get the external drive you bought specifically for this purpose and then left in a drawer somewhere and RUN A FULL BACKUP.

There are lots of posts that make the rounds reminding us to sit up straight, stretch, drink water, refocus our eyes, take our meds, etc. But while this may not be about your health, it's still super-important.

Back up your whole-ass computer. If you can afford a second backup drive, buy one so that you have one SSD and one HDD, and back up to both of them (you can back up just the current important stuff to the SSD and let the HDD do the heavy-duty lifting).

Do not rely on 'the cloud' or the internet to keep jack shit.

AND BACK UP YOUR GMAIL AS WELL HOLY SHIT. The last thing you want is a catastrophic issue where literally every single thing you have in gmail is gone. It's happened. It happened to a friend of mine and basically her entire life was in there and now it's all gone. 20 years of it.

Reblog to save a life.

2 years ago

We’re extending the Ebooks Direct “Get Our Whole Store For $44″ Sale by 5 hours

We’re Extending The Ebooks Direct “Get Our Whole Store For $44″ Sale By 5 Hours

…Because we can. (And because it looks like some extra people will be wandering in due to an unexpected crossposting on Twitter…)

This means it’ll be closing down at 23:59 Irish time / 12:59 Hawai’ian time, today, 1 September 2022.

For those of you who haven’t seen them before, the details are below:

Just for Tumblr users – for the next 5 hours or so (until 12:59 Hawai’ian time on 1 September 2022), get 20% off the price of the already-discounted package containing the entire contents of our Ebooks Direct store. With the extra discount, that’s $44 for the whole thing!

I had some murmurs in my ask box over the last ten days or so from folks who were sad that they’d missed out on earlier iterations of this sale, for one reason or another. And when I mentioned this to @petermorwood, in his usual direct way he shrugged and said, “Well, why not just do it again?”

…And frankly, that made perfect sense. Some people are getting ready to start one version or another of the New School Year, and might possibly enjoy having some extra reading to distract them. And other people might just want to top up their electronic TBR piles on the relatively-cheap. And who knows how many other reasons people might have. So why not?

Therefore: if you’d like to avail yourself of this genuinely around-the-bend bargain price* on the whole-store 35-book package, just go to this URL, put  one of the “I Want Everything You’ve Got” packages in your shopping  basket (make sure to tell the page which ebook format you want/need:  Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks/Apple or generic .epub), and then proceed to the checkout. (The fully discounted price won’t show until you get there: this is just the way the store behaves when we’ve already got an across-the-board discount running.)

In the checkout page you’ll find the store has applied your extra discount  automatically, like this:

image

…Then you just make the payment by whatever method you prefer (we do credit cards via Stripe, as well as PayPal), and the store emails you the download links for the files. (If you need assistance with getting the files into your e-reader or app, we’ve got a page at the store with useful advice on that.) And  from over here I will applaud you for your general wonderfulness, and get back to work.

(BTW, in  case anybody accidentally just goes straight to the main product link  [which doesn’t auto-attach the discount], the added-discount code is EVERY24. That way  if it’s missing from the field in the checkout page, you can put it in  yourself.)

Anyway: Enjoy, all! And if this offer’s of no  interest to you, would you kindly consider reblogging it for the attention of others  who might like to know about this? Those reblogs really help.** Please & Thank You! :)

(Oh, by the way—! UK people, one [sad] thing:  we can’t include you in this offer… please forgive us. Due to Brexit  we can no longer sell direct into the UK. Details on that are here. …My apologies for that.)  :(

*Because seriously, $44 for 35 ebooks isn’t too bad…

**Especially since I don’t really care to Blaze posts like this. Properly speaking, Blaze is for shitposts. (Like the Duckie of Light.)  :)

2 years ago

For me I'm sure it was something like:

1 + 2. Dream Theater + Opeth (these were basically equally my favorites)

3. Chevelle

4. Breaking Benjamin

5. Not totally sure on this one, maybe Godsmack or Avenged Sevenfold or something

Mine Would Probs Be: One Direction, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, The Script And Coldplay 

mine would probs be: one direction, taylor swift, ed sheeran, the script and coldplay 

1 year ago
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
The Huffington Post
For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti

"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

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