And Beehaw doesn’t have a huge amount of activity, so the prioritization provided by a Reddit-style ranking system is less useful. I think going to a typical forum/messageboard system just makes sense.

Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.

The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn’t just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can’t have that.

At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.

True, I wrote this from a US law perspective, where that kind of behavior is expressly protected. US law is also written specifically to protect things like search engines and aggregators to prevent services like Google from getting sued for their blurbs, but it’s likely also a defense for AI.

Regardless of if it should be illegal or not, I feel that AI training and use is currently legal under current US law. And as a US company, dragging OpenAI to UK courts and extracting payment from them would be difficult for all but the most monied artists.

I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

Relevant

Unfortunately, copyright protection doesn’t extend that far. AI training is almost certainly fair use if it is copying at all. Styles and the like cannot be copyrighted, so even if an AI creates a work in the style of someone else, it is extremely unlikely that the output would be so similar as to be in violation of copyright. Though I do feel that it is unethical to intentionally try to reproduce someone’s style, especially if you’re doing it for commercial gain. But that is not illegal unless you try to say that you are that artist.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project.

If you do this, you limit access to AI tools exclusively to big companies. They already employ enough artists to create a useful AI generator, they’ll simply add that the artist agrees for their work to be used in training to the employment contract. After a while, the only people who have access to reasonably good AI is are those major corporations, and they’ll leverage that to depress wages and control employees.

The WGA’s idea that the direct output of an AI is uncopyrightable doesn’t distort things so heavily in favor of Disney and Hasbro. It’s also more legally actionable. You don’t name Microsoft Word as the editor of a novel because you used spell check even if it corrected the spelling and grammar of every word. Naturally you don’t name generative AI as an author or creator.

Though the above argument only really applies when you have strong unions willing to fight for workers, and with how gutted they are in the US, I don’t think that will be the standard.

And the percentage of homes for sale is quite small compared to the total number of homes. So if investors are buying even a few percent of the homes, that can still be most of the homes that are for sale.

eg wind generator parks take up a lot of space

Though the vast majority of this space can still be used. I live near a wind farm and the area under the turbines still is ranchland. There are cows just chilling under them. The wind company pays farmers for the land in a long term lease agreement: https://www.wri.org/insights/how-wind-turbines-are-providing-safety-net-rural-farmers.

Well, the typical way of measuring q does measure the energy it takes to get the boulder up the hill, but not the inefficiency of the machine to get the boulder up there and the ineffency in extracting its energy as it goes back down.

There’s a lot of unsexy research that could make fusion come a whole lot sooner. More efficient powerful lasers, better cooling methods and design for superconducting electromagnetics, more efficient containment methods and more thought on how to extract energy from the plasma efficiently, and then making it cheap enough to build and maintain that we can actually afford to build them.

Because nuclear is not a threat. This is the first reactor in 30 years. At this rate, we’ll have a fully nuclear grid in 87,000 years, assuming US electricity consumption doesn’t increase in that time.

I’d include grocery shopping in “the process”.

Personally, this was the most exhausting part of cooking for me. My recipes are often complicated and call for a lot of somewhat obscure ingredients. Then the risk of forgetting something or buying the wrong thing is also there. Half the time, by the time I start actually cooking I’m already a little bit tired just because I could not find lime oil or whatever for the life of me.

I’ve started ordering all my ingredients for pickup now. I get a search bar so I’m not walking down isles hoping I’m in the right one, and I can check it against the recipe easily. I can pick it up on my bike ride and it just feels so much better.

You’re right, copyright won’t fix it, copyright will just enable large companies to activate more of their work extract more from the creative space.

But who will benefit the most from AI? The artists seem to be getting screwed right now, and I’m pretty sure that Hasbro and Disney will love to cut costs and lay off artists as soon as this blows over.

Technology is capital, and in a capitalist system, that goes to benefit the holders of that capital. No matter how you cut it, laborers including artists are the ones who will get screwed.

Hopefully, it can also be used to prove that someone was not at the scene of a crime, enabling prosecutors to rule out suspects and innocent people to get off.

The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution

It’s the solution in the sense that it removes it from view of users of the mainstream instances. It is not a solution to the overall problem of CSAM and the child abuse that creates such material. There is an argument to be made that is the only responsibility of instance admins, and that past that is the responsibility of law enforcement. This is sensible, but it invites law enforcement to start overtly trawling the Fediverse for offending content, and create an uncomfortable situation for admins and users, as they will go after admins who simply do not have the tools to effectively monitor for CSAM.

Defederation also obviously does not prevent users of the instance from posting CSAM. Admins even unknowingly having CSAM on their instance can easily lead to the admins being prosecuted and the instance taken down. Section 230 does not apply to material illegal on a federal level, and SESTA requires removal of material that violates even state level sex trafficking laws.

Texas has policies regarding opioids, its treatment of people with addiction and it’s enforcement of drug laws that directly contribute to the crisis. For example, Lt. governor Dan Patrick is responsible for laws that remove protections for people seeking help with addiction, which naturally results in fewer people seeking help. His office is currently stalling a bill (that passed in the Texas House) to declassify fentanyl test strips as drug paraphernalia. These decisions obviously have an impact on the opioid crisis, which was the topic of her lecture.

From the article:

According to one student who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the school, some students wondered if it was when Alonzo said that the lieutenant governor’s office was one of the reasons it’s hard for drug users to access certain care for opioid addiction or overdoses.

A second student who also asked to remain anonymous for the same reason said Alonzo made a comment that the lieutenant governor’s office had opposed policies that could have prevented opioid-related deaths, and by doing so had allowed people to die.

A third student who also spoke on the condition of anonymity said Alonzo talked about how policies, like the state’s ban on fentanyl test strips, have a direct impact on the ability to prevent opioid overdoses and deaths. A push to legalize the test strips died earlier this year in the Patrick-led Senate despite support from top Republicans, including Abbott.

Much of research is supposed to inform the public about issues and risks that we face as a society and examine the effects of decisions, including political decisions.

First off, the first amendment says otherwise.

Second, in this case, it was an expert on the opioid crisis pointing out that the lt. governor had made policies that made it harder for people with opioid addiction to get help or be safe without being prosecuted. And that naturally this had the effect of people not pursuing treatment that could potentially land them in legal trouble. She wasn’t commenting on the personal life of Dan Patrick, she was commenting on his policies and the consequences of those policies on a subject that was the topic of her lecture and her field of research.

Or you’re me, and can use neither trouble-free. I’m basically this man.

Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.

I doubt they will for a while at least. This change was so sudden that a lot of people will just not know what X is. It doesn’t look like a social media icon and a lot of people will just not be familiar with it.

It’s also horribly forgettable, even if I did use X regularly, I might just forget what the icon looked like out of context.

Uploaded videos are now X videos.

For a good while, I’d manually start my X server when I needed it.

I’d use Vim for text editing, and when working from textbooks I was fine. The issue came when trying to use a browser.

After a few months, I went with i3 and started using terminals for everything except image viewing and web browsing. This worked quite well.