VonFluffington

maws

While the article makes sense, I think that it’s not just OpenAI, but just the data in general.

For the past decade or so, data has become one of the most important trade goods, and holds an incredible amount of power. Facebook and many other big social media websites were profitable because users gave them their data for free, and they, in turn, sold it to advertisers.

Advertising was perhaps the easiest or most legal option to sell data. With the rise of LLMs, there’s now a huge new market that they can capitalize on: Raw access to all the data and knowledge they have stored.

I’ve been a furry for roughly 15 years, but only really became active in the community 5 years ago.

From my point of view, the most significant change in those years is the networking and spread. Furries are everywhere nowadays. This is probably very related to how much the internet has grown since then.

Back in the day, there was a popular forum that also had a map of furries. The closest one to where I lived at that time was around 50 km away. And that was only one furry. Nowadays, if I look at barq in that same area, there’s more than a handful in the same town, and way more than I can count in the previously empty 50km radius. And that’s just barq alone. There are plenty of furries that don’t use it.

I’ve also seen Telegram chats for regional fur meets where the member count easily outnumbers the entire IRC server that I lurked on, back then.

Aside from that, I’m not sure if the core of the community has changed, tbh. A huge lot of us still seem to be in some IT-related field of work, and to outsiders it still looks like a really weird hobby, I think, albeit more accepted.