There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

dragontamer

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

dragontamer ,

Non sequitur into strawman?

If you don’t like what the other guy said, you could try responding to their point at least a little bit.

dragontamer ,

I have severe doubts that Al Jazeera would post this kind of story. And with this kind of evidence from IDF, I do think it means that there’s reason to discredit Al Jazeera as well.

Welcome to war. The first casualty is truth as they always say.

dragontamer ,

So you condone the wholesale slaughter of civilians at a music festival?

See what happens when we just post non-sequiturs? The discussion becomes ruined. Its just not helpful. Presumably, if you are discussing things, you want… something… to happen with your words. To be listened to, or for a debate to occur, or whatever. But if you’re just… doing the worst of fallacies and ignoring the points of others, what even are you doing here?

dragontamer ,

Charles Lindbergh was dining with Nazis during Kristallnacht and was a reasonably popular figure in the 1930s.

Yeah, welcome to America. We choose weird heroes sometimes. We have to shame these assholes when they make dumbass moves like this however. We can’t just let people like Charles Lindbergh spread ‘Neutrality’ or ‘America First’ values when actions are needed.

dragontamer ,

Nah. My Republican friends are incredibly well read. It’s just Ayn Rand, Ben Shapiro and the Bible. Real books.

Honestly, Republicans are the types who really worship personalities like Elon Musk or other such people. I’m willing to bet that most Republicans read biographies more and try to emulate the lives of the rich and powerful.

It’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s that their culture is backwards. No matter how much they study, it just shoves them deeper into right wing bullshit.

dragontamer ,

Have you seen the bullshit that Republicans read?

I’d argue reading those toxic masculinity self help books, and all the lives of rich assholes is what makes them act the way that they do.

dragontamer ,

Lets reverse it.

Why must the circumference and diameter of a circle be related in such a way by two integers precisely?

IE: Why are you so confident in “proving” that these two values are related to integers? Especially if you’re a modern mathematician who knows about irrational numbers (aka: can never be represented by a ratio of two integers) or imaginary numbers (which truly appear in electricity: phasors and the like. Just because the name is “imaginary” doesn’t mean that they’re not real!!!)

dragontamer ,

Its actually up right now today. The headline sucks.

Voiding the stock-based compensation means that all other shareholders will automatically get more control of the company. This is actually a good ruling for TSLA shareholders, not that the cult members understand anything about corporate politics, corporate control, or how shares fucking work.

dragontamer ,

During Iraq / Afghanistan, Al Qaeda lost significant power in the terrorist-world. In its place, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq / Syria) began to gain power. This destabilized Syria / Iraq / Jordan. USA put troops in Iraq / Jordan to help our allies (Kurds, Israel) and that’s that.

Iran is also worried about the instability there, and they have their Shia-militia there.

There’s a complicated set of politics between USA, Kurds, Iraq, Israel, Iran (and their militants), ISIS, and Syria (backed by Russia). Its a mess. The important thing is that Iran-backed militants attacked US troops in this region because of this whole Israeli flareup, but the region has been a mess for decades.

dragontamer ,

This one is because “Fuck ISIS” and “Holy shit Syria is collapsing”.

The world is a bit more complex than “fuck Iran”. Iran themselves improved their position against ISIS and Syria as well, because that’s a shitty situation. USA found itself within shooting distance of Syria (aka: Russia-backed), Iran, ISIS, and more. But we gotta protect our allies (aka: Kurds) who helped us out so much in Iraq, as well as Israel.

Its genocides all the way down. Shia want to genocide Sunni. Sunni want to genocide Shia. They both want to genocide Kurds. They all want to genocide Israel.

dragontamer ,

US has bases because we have powerful aircraft. And Jordan lets us have that base because they’d prefer it if our base were there also protecting them from such dangers.

We have a base there because ISIS is a real threat and deserved nearby air-power to counter it. Iran is there because ISIS is a real threat and Iran is rightfully setting up defenses. ISIS is there because Iraq / Syria destabilized (we are to blame for Iraq, but Syria is on its own for their troubles, we had nothing to do with that. ISIS took advantage of weakening Al Qaeda thereby absorbing local militants / former Al Qaeda and becoming a regional problem).

USA countering ISIS is to our benefit in Iraq, and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

We don’t really take power “just to take power”. There’s a reason behind all of our decisions. Arguably, our life could be so much easier if we just took power like the 1800s, but USA isn’t about that today and our politics are way more complex. Unfortunately, its too complex to discuss in most circumstances and most people fail to understand the moves anymore.

dragontamer , (edited )

Islamic golden age and Ottoman rule was relatively stable actually. Sure there was a Crusade every century or so, but its not like the infighting we see today. From the Muslim perspective, it was the Crusader Kingdoms that were the source of that instability as well. But the Crusades were still relatively rare in the great scheme of Year 1 through Year 2000.

A big problem is that us Westerners (as a whole) don’t realize how much these people crave the stability of the Ottomans. Literally centuries of peace, disrupted after WW1. And we ignore their culture and history, and wonder why they hate us… We have to remember the Muslim contributions to the world and the stability and peace that they once knew. Acknowledging that should go a long way towards peace IMO.

I’m not saying the Ottomans were necessarily a good kingdom or empire mind you. They were a middle-age Nobility that somehow survived into WW1 as a world power. But they did offer peace and stability to the regions they controlled, a peace and stability that has been ruined since the collapse of the Ottomans after WW1 treaties. The collapse arguably was going to happen anyway (Ottomans were definitely on their way out and is part of the reason why they lost WW1 so decisively). But I don’t think this attitude of “they were always a mess” is historically correct, or useful in the scope of modern diplomatic discussions.

dragontamer ,

Imperialism is when you conquer a region. If Jordan didn’t want us there, they can kick us out. So its really not Imperialism at all.

If this were Roman times or other such actual Empires or rule of Imperialism, we’d be forcing these states to be paying us directly and they wouldn’t be allowed to kick us out.

dragontamer ,

as the history of US “Manifest Destiny” and colonialism were 100% about taking power. We also have the Monroe doctrine and Rosevelt corollary as examples of the US attempting to take power over an entire hemisphere.

1800s everyone was taking power, even well into 1910s or 1930s. But modern 1990s+ era politics is pretty different. Monroe Doctrine barely applies today (we’ve kept our hands off of Venezuelans even as they collapsed, and I’d prefer if we stabilized South America more actually…)

The history of US power ambitions have essentially lead us to the modern day funding of bases across the world as we spend more on our military than the next ~10 nations combined. I’d argue that with two large oceans on either side and friendly nations north and south, that money is not for “defense” purposes.

Its largely for the defense of trade routes. Look at the Houthis, they’re not exactly a minor entity. They have cruise missiles and other such weaponry. To effectively combat Houthis, it makes sense to attack them with overwhelming might. Even then we aren’t going to really deal with them or stop them from disrupting trade in the Red Sea.

Why the USA? Well, look at Saudi Arabia or Egypt. They haven’t been able to keep the area peaceful by themselves and we now have to step in with Operation Prosperity Guardian. Or what? Are we supposed to just let $Billion cargo ships get boarded by the Houthis?

dragontamer ,

Its not US troops who’d destroy Jordan though. Its all their neighbors (ISIS, Syria, and Iranian Militia).

That’s my point. US Troops are the source of stability here. A good thing for everyone. Meanwhile, actual Imperials were like… I dunno… how the Soviet Union treated the Polish.

dragontamer , (edited )

But in this case, its Jordan who wants to have its border defended from ISIS, and the USA also wants to kill ISIS, so why not make a deal between us where we can have a military base that does both?

Win-win for both parties. This is more like the CEO wanting to give a pay-raise to the employee, and the employee accepting it. Both sides are happy.

Just because there’s a power imbalance doesn’t mean that there’s any ill-will or problem. US-Jordan relations are very close, and have been great for decades.

dragontamer ,

The Iraqi Constitution says that Iraq is in charge of the oil, and what US imported we paid a fair price for.

And most of Iraq’s exports is oil. So how is this imperialism? Iraq keeps it’s most precious resource and we pay a fair price for it despite militarily enforcing the area. In fact, there is a lot of criticism from the Republican base that we didn’t take advantage of the Iraqis.

Are you saying that we SHOULD have take the oil??

dragontamer ,

Sanctions are “I’ve decided not to trade with you”, which hardly constitutes “imperialistic ambitions”. Mercenaries do not constitute proper US policy either.

And yes, I recognize we’ve done some shitty things in the 1950s (“banana republic”), but its difficult to even call those things “Imperialism” proper, especially given their overall effects between our countries. Shitty foreign policy does not necessarily mean that we’re going around trying to conquer people.

dragontamer ,

I’m not denying that we got rid of Saddam. What I’m saying is that the move isn’t as self-serving as many critics try to force. The earlier post is trying to argue that we’ve somehow stolen the resources of Iraq, but no such thing has happened.

dragontamer ,

Then “why are gas prices through the roof?”

You mean, “Why are gas prices so damn low?”, because a giant economic recession in China will CUT gasoline prices as huge swaths of Chinese citizens run out of money for gasoline cars and switch to busses or other cheaper forms of transit.

Economic calamity causes lower gasoline prices typically.

Its not all bad. The real issue is that bad loans can be transferred to other countries through unknown means. Ex: Apple may have had some Evergrande bonds for some real estate issue in China, and then Apple suddenly loses a lot of money affecting S&P500 funds and then cutting people’s 401k accounts or something.

But economic calamity == less consumption of gasoline (fewer trips, fewer vacations, fewer cruises) == lower gas prices typically. As some people like to point out: all an economic recession is, is when the value of cash grows dramatically (meaning the value of everything else: vacation packages, luxury cars, technology, etc. etc. declines). This “everything else” includes oil, because when no one is going on vacation, oil builds up faster than we can use it.

dragontamer ,

And my point is that effects are often deflationary. IE: The great depression dropped the price of goods.

That means when one country has an isolated recession or isolated depression, its something the rest of the world could easily benefit from. Its not all bad. The full effects are extremely unpredictable, and assuming worst-case scenario over-and-over is counterproductive.

dragontamer ,

Yet, there’s an overwhelming historical evidence: big recessions in key world economies lead to recessions in linked countries. So, I’d say, buckle up.

Japan in the 90s as a counterpoint vs US economy.

dragontamer ,

Because this proves that the “AI”, at some level, is storing the data of the Joker movie screenshot somewhere inside of its training set.

Likely because the “AI” was trained upon this image at some point. This has repercussions with regards to copyright law. It means the training set contains copyrighted data and the use of said training set could be argued as piracy.

Legal discussions on how to talk about generative-AI are only happening now, now that people can experiment with the technology. But its not like our laws have changed, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.

dragontamer ,

How did the Joker image get replicated?

dragontamer ,

Is Ai only bad since it can do what a human does better/faster?

Legally speaking, AI is not anything. Its just a computer program. What you’re asking is completely a red-herring.

The question here is if the training-weights constitute copyright infringement. Now look at any clip-art set. Most clip-art is so called “royalty free”, as in you can copy it from computer-to-computer without any copyright issues, because the author specifically said that its royalty free.

But if you have a copyrighted font, then even copying that font from one computer to another constitutes copyright infringement. (IE: Literally, you aren’t allowed to copy this unless you have the permission of the author).

So, when you download Midjourney’s training weights, does that act in of itself constitute a copy that violate’s the authors of “Joker” movie? As far as I can tell, yes. Because the training weights clearly contain Joker images.

dragontamer ,

If it is known, then it is copyright infringement to download the training sets and therefore a crime to do so. You cannot reproduce a copy of the works without the express permission of the copyright holder.

How many computers did Midjourney copy its training weights to? Has Midjourney (and the IT team behind it) paid royalties for every copyrighted image in its training set to have a proper copyright license to copy all of this data from computer to computer?

I’m guessing no. Which means the Midjourney team (if you say is true) is committing copyright infringement every time they spin up a new server with these weights.

Pro-AI side will obviously argue that the training weights do not contain the data of these copyrighted works. A claim that is looking more-and-more laughable as these experiments happen.

dragontamer ,

But where is the infringement?

Do Training weights have the data? Are the servers copying said data on a mass scale, in a way that the original copyrighters don’t want or can’t control?

dragontamer ,

This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.

Its clear that the training weights have the data on recreating this Joker scene. Its also clear that if the training-data didn’t contain this image, then the copy of the image would never result into the weights that have been copy/pasted everywhere.

dragontamer ,

Because copyright law is clear in that computers can’t own a copyright.

The humans at play are:

  1. The artist who created the original work.
  2. The computer IT team who are copying the data behind the scenes between servers.
  3. You who uses Midjourney to recreate “Joker” movie artwork, likely using the data in #2 which falls under copyright infringement.

It doesn’t matter how #2 works. It doesn’t matter if its H.265 or MPEG2 or from VHS tapes, or if its a Neural Network using the latest-and-greatest training weights from a GPU-based datasystem. Its just a computer. The ones doing the copyright infringement are the people copying data from place to place.

dragontamer , (edited )

There response well be we don’t know we can’t understand what its doing.

What the fuck is this kind of response? Its just a fucking neural network running on GPUs with convolutional kernels. For fucks sake, turn on your damn brain.

Generative AI is actually one of the easier subjects to comprehend here. Its just calculus. Use of derivatives to backpropagate weights in such a way that minimizes error. Lather-rinse-repeat for a billion iterations on a mass of GPUs (ie: 20 TFlop compute systems) for several weeks.

Come on, this stuff is well understood by Comp. Sci by now. Not only 20 years ago when I learned about this stuff, but today now that AI is all hype, more and more people are understanding the basics.

dragontamer ,

So let’s say I ask a talented human artist the same thing.

Artists don’t have hard drives or solid state drives that accept training weights.

When you have a hard drive (or other object that easily creates copies), then the law that follows is copyright, with regards to the use and regulation of those copies. It doesn’t matter if you use a Xerox machine, VHS tape copies, or a Hard Drive. All that matters is that you’re easily copying data from one location to another.

And yes. When a human recreates a copy of a scene clearly inspired by copyrighted data, its copyright infringement btw. Even if you recreate it from memory. It doesn’t matter how I draw Pikachu, if everyone knows and recognizes it as Pikachu, I’m infringing upon Nintendo’s copyright (and probably their trademark as well).

dragontamer ,

only distribution of them.

Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?

That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.

dragontamer ,

Copyright was literally invented because its cheap and easy to copy information (ie: Printing Press).

When copies are easy, you screw over the original artist. A large scale regulation of copies must be enforced by the central authorities to make sure small artists get the payments that they deserve. It doesn’t matter if you use a printing press, a xerox machine, a photograph, a phonograph, a record, a CD-ROM copy, a tape recorder, or the newest and fanciest AI to copy someone’s work. Its a copy, and therefore under the copyright regulations.

dragontamer ,

Do I go to jail for every site I visit that uses a fancy font?

If its a fancy copyrighted font without a license to copy… the Website owner gets sued. Because the website owner is the one making mass copies of said font.

Do… you know what copyrites are? They relate to the copying of data.

dragontamer ,

You ever try to do a public performance of a copyrighted work, like “Happy Birthday to You” ??

You get sued. Even if its from memory. Welcome to copyright law. There’s a reason why every restaraunt had to make up a new “Happy Happy Birthday, from the Birthday Crew” song.

dragontamer ,

derived

www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work

Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.

Are you just making shit up?

dragontamer ,

www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work

Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.

The law is very clear on the nature of derivative works of copyrighted material.

dragontamer ,

Understanding the math behind it doesn’t immediately mean understanding the decision progress during forward propagation.

Ummm… its lossy compressed data from the training set.

Is it a perfect copy? No. But copyright law covers “derivative data” so whatever, the law remains clear on this situation.

dragontamer ,

And my argument is that Midjourney’s servers are engaged in illegal copying. So I think your point is moot. Not the Web Browsers downloading images.

The movie Joker’s image is being copied each time the training weights are copied to a new server. Is that not an illegal copy?

dragontamer ,

What the hell is this non-sequitur?

What do browser caches have to do with Midjourney servers and training weights?

I get that you wanna change the subject. But I dunno if it’s because you don’t understand my argument, or if you’ve realized that my argument is solid and therefore you have no actual counterargument.

The copy that people care about are the webservers. That’s why when you run Bittorrent, MPAA or RAII sue the people serving the data. Not the people who use the data. Have you followed any copyright case in the last two or three decades? In this case, it’d be a copyright case vs Midjourney servers.

dragontamer ,

If they’re copying copyrighted works, usually its a fine, especially if they’re making money from it.

You know that performance artists get sued when they replicate a song in public from memory, right?

dragontamer ,

I really do not believe midjourney is storing all the files on the Internet in a humongous database.

Are you sure?

The training weights can literally recreate images its been trained on. That makes them a humongous database, albeit with lossy compression. They aren’t replicated exactly, but they are replicated enough that I’m confident that these “Joker” images passes as copyright infringement before a jury (ie: is substantially similar).

dragontamer ,

Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.

dragontamer , (edited )

You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.

but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.

Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?

dragontamer ,

Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.

Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.

In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.

dragontamer ,

Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright

Because they are legal and they do violate copyright? People keep wanting them to be copyright free, but that’s not how copyright works. There don’t need to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case.

I mean, its obviously heading to the courts one way or the other, but I don’t think just making assertions like that are very good kind of arguing. The training weights here have clearly been proven to contain copyrighted data as per this article. I’m not sure if you’re making any kind of serious case that shows otherwise, but are instead just making a bunch of assertions that I could easily reverse.

dragontamer ,

You’re taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?

Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it’d be impossible to create.

Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today’s universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).

Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.

dragontamer ,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

That is just a website demonstrating the concept of a famous science fiction story. Everything I said above remains true.

  1. No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.
  2. Any computer generated set of text cannot be copyrighted.

Finding any particular book in that “library” would require an index that is the same length / entropy as a full length book in any case. So its a stupid thought experiment to any information theorist. (I’m a Comp. Engineer by trade and have been taught numerous theoretical comp. sci. problems from Nyquist Frequencies, theories on communication, entropy and other such concepts. So this is actually well within my wheelhouse, training an expertise).

Go search for a book in there that replicates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its entirety. The only way that website could possibly work is if the link you give me has the same entropy / information space as all of Hamlet to begin with.

In the case of copyright law, the Website’s code (including its text generating engine and so forth) is subject to copyright. But the Quadrillion-pages of “text” (most of which is random-gibberish) is not copyrightable.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •