bouncing

bouncing , 8 months ago

You meet them online, but they’re a vocal minority. Especially when a smaller phone means a smaller battery and worse camera system, two of the consistently top priorities for consumers.

bouncing , 8 months ago

You’re conflating multiple things. Most notably, you’re conflating criticizing Israel with praising Hamas.

bouncing , 8 months ago

They are not conflicting. Yes oil production is higher but that’s mostly in response to OPEC producing less.

Overall fossil fuel use is in decline. Probably not enough decline to arrest the greenhouse effect, but that ship has already sailed.

bouncing , 8 months ago

I don’t even understand what the theory is. Plastic is plastic. What does it matter if it’s attached to the bottle?

bouncing , 10 months ago

Life in plastic. It’s fantastic.

bouncing , 10 months ago

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

bouncing , 10 months ago

Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

bouncing , 11 months ago

It’s a worldwide phenomena. The “Big Dig” is a great example of urban space reclaimed from above-grade highways.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Are we going to magically assume the traffic just vanished?

It’s an underground highway. Out of sight, out of mind. I imagine they probably also improved the overall road design, like Seattle, Denver, and Boston have done (or are doing) with their projects to bury highways below-grade.

bouncing , 11 months ago

That’s surprising to me. I remember at the time, NBC Nightly News and PBS Newshour (my family’s news diet in the 90s) did stories about it, and they both definitely mentioned reclaiming city space as one of the benefits.

I think the Big Dig, while it ended up costing several times what it was supposed to, will go down in history as one of the best highway projects of its era. It also proved infrastructure naysayers wrong. A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.

bouncing , 10 months ago

Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.

It’s probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston’s population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.

Keep in mind, the Big Dig actually reduced the total number of highway ramps, which is part of why it increased traffic flow. And by reclaiming neighborhoods from elevated highways, it reconnected areas. You can easily walk places that were not possible before.

But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.

Boston is far from car dependent; it’s probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.

bouncing , 10 months ago

The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.

I wouldn’t suggest that highways never induce demand, but the idea that people are driving more in Boston because of the Big Dig seems doubtful to me.

A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.

The Netherland has pretty robust car infrastructure too.

And I agree; a city can be bikable, walkable, and drivable all at once. That should be the goal.

bouncing OP , 11 months ago

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

bouncing OP , 11 months ago

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text? I’m not sure what the AI companies are doing is completely right but also, if your position is that only humans can learn and adapt text, that broadly rules out any AI ever.

bouncing , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text?

not even close. that’s not how AI training models work, either.

Of course it is. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, but the way generative AI works and the we incorporate styles and patterns are more similar than not. Besides, if a tensorflow script more closely emulated a human’s learning process, would that matter for you? I doubt that very much.

Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of >> their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools

Having to individually license each unit of work for a LLM would be as ridiculous as trying to run a university where you have to individually license each student reading each textbook. It would never work.

What we’re broadly talking about is generative work. That is, by absorbing one a body of work, the model incorporates it into an overall corpus of learned patterns. That’s not materially different from how anyone learns to write. Even my use of the word “materially” in the last sentence is, surely, based on seeing it used in similar patterns of text.

The difference is that a human’s ability to absorb information is finite and bounded by the constraints of our experience. If I read 100 science fiction books, I can probably write a new science fiction book in a similar style. The difference is that I can only do that a handful of times in a lifetime. A LLM can do it almost infinitely and then have that ability reused by any number of other consumers.

There’s a case here that the renumeration process we have for original work doesn’t fit well into the AI training models, and maybe Congress should remedy that, but on its face I don’t think it’s feasible to just shut it all down. Something of a compulsory license model, with the understanding that AI training is automatically fair use, seems more reasonable.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the author of each individual work get paid out?

Congress has been here before. In the early days of radio, DJs were infringing on recording copyrights by playing music on the air. Congress knew it wasn’t feasible to require every song be explicitly licensed for radio reproduction, so they created a compulsory license system where creators are required to license their songs for radio distribution. They do get paid for each play, but at a rate set by the government, not negotiated directly.

Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?

I’d say no one. Just like Taylor Swift gets the same payment as your garage band per play, a compulsory licensing model doesn’t care who you are.

bouncing , 11 months ago

You’re getting lost in the weeds here and completely misunderstanding both copyright law and the technology used here.

First of all, copyright law does not care about the algorithms used and how well they map what a human mind does. That’s irrelevant. There’s nothing in particular about copyright that applies only to humans but not to machines. Either a work is transformative or it isn’t. Either it’s derivative of it isn’t.

What AI is doing is incorporating individual works into a much, much larger corpus of writing style and idioms. If a LLM sees an idiom used a handful of times, it might start using it where the context fits. If a human sees an idiom used a handful of times, they might do the same. That’s true regardless of algorithm and there’s certainly nothing in copyright or common sense that separates one from another. If I read enough Hunter S Thompson, I might start writing like him. If you feed an LLM enough of the same, it might too.

Where copyright comes into play is in whether the new work produced is derivative or transformative. If an entity writes and publishes a sequel to The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s estate is owed some money. If an entity writes and publishes something vaguely (or even directly) inspired by McCarthy’s writing, no money is owed. How that work came to be (algorithms or human flesh) is completely immaterial.

So it’s really, really hard to make the case that there’s any direct copyright infringement here. Absorbing material and incorporating it into future works is what the act of reading is.

The problem is that as a consumer, if I buy a book for $12, I’m fairly limited in how much use I can get out of it. I can only buy and read so many books in my lifetime, and I can only produce so much content. The same is not true for an LLM, so there is a case that Congress should charge them differently for using copyrighted works, but the idea that OpenAI should have to go to each author and negotiate each book would really just shut the whole project down. (And no, it wouldn’t be directly negotiated with publishers, as authors often retain the rights to deny or approve licensure).

bouncing , 11 months ago

these companies who have been using copyrighted material - without compensating the content creators - to train their AIs.

That wouldn’t be copyright infringement.

It isn’t infringement to use a copyrighted work for whatever purpose you please. What’s infringement is reproducing it.

bouncing , 11 months ago

There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.

That’s part of the allegation, but it’s unsubstantiated. It isn’t entirely coherent.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Yes. I do. And I’m right.

bouncing , 11 months ago

If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers.

Well, if OpenAI knowingly used pirated work, that’s one thing. It seems pretty unlikely and certainly hasn’t been proven anywhere.

Of course, they could have done so unknowingly. For example, if John C Pirate published the transcripts of every movie since 1980 on his website, and OpenAI merely crawled his website (in the same way Google does), it’s hard to make the case that they’re really at fault any more than Google would be.

bouncing , 11 months ago

The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.

Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I very much agree.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Derivative and transformative are quite different though.

bouncing , 11 months ago

The published summary is open to fair use by web crawlers. That was settled in Perfect 10 v Amazon.

bouncing , 11 months ago

reuters.com/…/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-…

bouncing , 11 months ago

No, it isn’t. There are enumerated rights a copyright grants the holder a monopoly over. They are reproduction, derivative works, public performances, public displays, distribution, and digital transmission.

Commercial vs non-commercial has nothing to do with it, nor does field of endeavor. And aside from the granted monopoly, no other rights are granted. A copyright does not let you decide how your work is used once sold.

I don’t know where you guys get these ideas.

bouncing , 11 months ago

A better comparison would probably be sampling. Sampling is fair use in most of the world, though there are mixed judgments. I think most reasonable people would consider the output of ChatGPT to be transformative use, which is considered fair use.

bouncing , 11 months ago

If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.”

You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.

It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I haven’t been able to reproduce that, and at least so far, I haven’t seen any very compelling screenshots of it that actually match. Usually it just generates text, but that text doesn’t actually match.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Her lawsuit doesn’t say that. It says,

when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works

That’s an absurd claim. ChatGPT has surely read hundreds, perhaps thousands of reviews of her book. It can summarize it just like I can summarize Othello, even though I’ve never seen the play.

bouncing , 11 months ago

It wouldn’t matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don’t think anyone’s really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.

The stronger argument is that LLM’s are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.

bouncing , 11 months ago

If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say “unlicensed reproduction.”

The RIAA is indeed a litigious organization, and they tend to use their phalanx of lawyers to extract anyone who does anything creative or new into submission.

But sampling is generally considered fair use.

And if the algorithm you used actually listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, and fed existing patterns into a system that creates new patterns, well, you’d be doing the same thing anyone who goes from listening to music to writing music does. The first song ever written by humans was probably plagiarized from a bird.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Yeah, that’s basically it.

But I think what’s getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn’t. That’s true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I honestly get it. Apple has been excruciatingly stubborn to adopt RCS.

I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.

At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I think if you try to have regulators come up with standards for things like airdrop or location sharing, it’s going to be a bad time.

RCS you can just regulate as a telecom feature. It’s contained. It doesn’t touch things like finance (which vary by country).

bouncing , 11 months ago

That still does touch on the problem. The RCS group was formed in 2007. Let that sink in.

bouncing , 11 months ago

Is that site still around?

bouncing , 11 months ago

Posting your band’s tour dates on Facebook doesn’t really even change your privacy status that much.

Whether you have a Facebook account or not, Facebook tracks you around the web. Data brokers sell your data. Your cell phone company sells your location and browsing history, etc.

People over-estimate how much not using any given social media app really matters.

Now granted, installing it on your phone gives them a level of data they wouldn’t have from a web browser. That’s probably why Threads is phone-only.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I disagree.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.

bouncing , 11 months ago

ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.

ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?

its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam

That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.

What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.

bouncing , 11 months ago

They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.

It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.

Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.

Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.

This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.^

Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.

bouncing , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

They will do it to us, not just Threads users.

Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?

Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.^

Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?

Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.^

An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.

Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.

If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.

There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.

bouncing , 11 months ago

I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).

Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.

Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.