Trailer: https://youtu.be/iSF0KGsFuI8?si=ZF7KAiSOFYnADzzk

I really cannot fully express how much I have grown to hate all these motherfuckers and their awful work - and I work in Silicon Valley.

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

What a man of the people.

Just to clarify what I said: I know that there are good people working in these corporations, and I know that good sometimes happens. What I am saying is that the organization itself doesn’t care the way they are often given credit for by their own marketing, media coverage, and public perception. The incentives that are foundational to these organizations are antithetical to achieving anything beyond revenue that is either widespread or long-term in nature. I am all in favor of holding corporations accountable, and pressuring them to be better members of our society, but people should never fool themselves into thinking that meaningful, sustainable change on social or environmental issues will ever result from actions taken by corporations. Those kinds of changes can only come from governments that are open and accountable to their people, and have the confidence to check the actions of private industry.

Anything that corporations do, that isn’t directly oriented toward revenue generation, is window dressing, marketing, and bullshit. They don’t actually care about addressing social ailments like inequity, they don’t care about environmental destruction. While individuals within these organizations may believe in these causes, the machine itself is just lying when they parade these initiatives out. They don’t care about their workforce (beyond maintaining functionality), and they certainly don’t care about their society. If these corporations were people, they’d be considered sociopaths, with ZERO exceptions.

Boycotts are speech. Calling for boycotts is speech. I’ve been told by every corporate leader and the Supreme Court that spending money is a form of speech. I would think that a free speech advocate would appreciate these things. Of course, like all outspoken libertarians, Musk’s positions are not well considered, consistent, nor actually libertarian when it doesn’t suit his own business or ideological* interests. This dude sucks at everything he does and his success perfectly demonstrates the fallacy of meritocracy in this society.

• usually racist

I had very modest needs for Windows. It was not my primary computing device, but there was one application that I ran on an older laptop all the time. All the recent drama pushed me to investigate a bit and I learned that the app is also on Linux. I was able to wipe and install Linux Mint easily despite not really knowing much about either OS. There are a lot of guides on youtube about the process that helped make it easy. Laptop is running well so far. I’m also using this as as a test to see if I can replace much of my Apple stuff with Linux as those devices start to age out. Thanks for the little push Microsoft.

I would like to understand how the size/capability of this proposed facility compares to both CERN and also the never completed Superconducting Supercollider. I will never get over the fact that, as Americans, we could have had a huge lead in this research. We started to build it, then decided to stop.

This seems to happen every time a technology company grows beyond some threshold of size/market share/revenue. I can’t think of a single exception.

Reminds me of some of the anticompetitive behaviors that Amazon has long engaged in. Among other practices, they use their privileged position in the marketplace to gain insight into markets, then force sellers out of business by producing the same products at a loss. In this way, third party sellers on Amazon serve the purpose of conducting market research for Amazon.

It’s remarkable that Apple has been able to generally maintain such a cordial relationship with developers for this long. Hopefully change is coming.

My suggestion, based on more than three decades of observing and interacting with this company: don’t believe a fucking thing they say, ever.

The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.

I’m pretty sure that ‘ideal form’ here is a pair of regular-ish glasses. That ain’t happening in four generations unless you’re going to be real creative about what a generation is. It certainly isn’t four years away, like the analogies to iPhones and Apple Watches implies. That’s going to require an absolutely wild amount of innovation to achieve. And, even if that happens, such new technology is going to take many further generations to become remotely affordable enough to be priced for anything like mainstream adoption. Pile all that on top of the lingering curiosities about what problems this interface model actually solves, and the cultural shifts that will be required to get people comfortable to accept pervasive face cameras in social settings, and you’ve got a product line that has niche appeal written all over it for at least another decade or two.

All those resources available to them, and the biggest idea they’ve come up with in the better part of a decade is that dumb face computer.

Narwhal just went behind the paywhal for me to today. So, I guess I’m finally done with Reddit now? I’ve been in there at least 14 years. It’s just wild to me that I lost Twitter and Reddit after so much time.

This is good news. I’m in favor of anything that makes it more difficult for Amazon to operate.

It should be illegal for entities like BBC to do this. Copyright is meant to be a temporary, limited construct that carves out an opportunity for creators to profit from their works. It is not perpetual legal dominion over specific ideas. Entities that harvest content to train LLMs should pay for access like everyone else, but after that, they can use the information they learn however they see fit. Now, if their product plagiarizes, or doesn’t properly attribute authorship, that is a problem. But it’s a different issue from what the BBC is fighting here.

I think there are some content creators that believe they are owed royalties if you even think about a piece they wrote or drew. That is, of course, absurd in terms of human minds. It’s also absurd in terms of other kinds of minds.

Every time I read a new story about another example of this, I struggle to understand why people are getting outraged. Did you have some expectation of privacy when you published your thing to the world-connected network run by profit-seeking corporations?

If accurate, this is a perfect example of the principle of ‘enshitification’ in action. That is, a good service or product becoming increasingly terrible as its development is continuously perverted by revenue related incentives.

Microsoft demands a level playing field so that its own unfair practices are able to compete in the free market of unfair practices. It’s the American way.

I’m not opposed to new nuclear energy in principle. However Microsoft, an unrelentingly bad organization that consistently acts in bad faith to its customers, employees and businesses parters, and is seemingly dedicated to making awful products that never meaningfully improve, is not something I would trust to do nuclear safely.

Please, please, please leave town.

This should be illegal.

Here is ‘Freedom Downtime’ the 2600 documentary that covers some of his story and the Free Kevin movement. https://youtu.be/B2ac98FUMq8