If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47’s adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I’m not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.

Proton works well. But it’s designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be … very … slow.

If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they’re cheaper than Mullvad but it’s held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you’re okay with how it’s set up.

Neither of us are legal scholars, are we. If I pretended to be one, I would say the government acting as a user on somebody else’s platform or the government running its own platform are different enough circumstances not to derive comparisons from.

In summary: you have the cooperation of the parents, you cannot exclude the existence of a mental issues, and you are allowed to spray the item then. These are conditions I put ahead of any other suggestion.

No, I would not want to join such an instance but I wouldn’t mind its existence. Nobody could really federate with it. So you create a niche server in an already niche environment.

I am not convinced the conclusion “if the government runs it, the first amendment has to apply” is apt. Even if the server was run from under the house majority leader’s desk - which I don’t think it would, this smells more like an outsourced undertaking - moderation on the platform is not “making a law.” And proprietors of platforms are legally compelled to moderate in certain cases, e.g. when illegal stuff like child sexual abuse is involved.

There are at least two discussions going on here simultaneously. Is the process of a beefed up spell checker sucking up all the data the same as an artist looking at what had come before, before either of them churn out new art? I’m inclined to agree with you; the process does seem similar enough. The difference remains that one is a statistical model and the other is a human being. So even if the process appears similar enough, they are two different types of player and I can also agree that we should not treat them the same. One is able to throw constant massive amounts of spaghetti at the wall as long as there are chips and power and the other is limited by their health and more limited processing power. So where the compromise lands in this discussion simply isn’t clear yet. And while you and I can discuss this, I can say for myself at least I’m not smart enough to see where this goes eventually.

The other discussion is how all of it collides with existing copyright/trademark law, which is essentially different in every country. Constitutional rights, like freedoms of expression and the arts, are given to real people, not computers. But at least one supreme court in this planet has made corporate money a form of free speech. So eff knows where LLMs end up.

This is new territory we’re in. And I fear that’s why it will take another decade until we get a legal landmark decision or a political compromise that will be similar enough all around the world.

The law mostly disagrees with the memes = theft. A lot of it is covered through freedom of speech and fair use. If you have taken a bit of content, changed it a bit, recontextualized, and reposted it, you are most likely in the clear. Especially if the original content was publicly posted. This gets less clear if you are using the likeness of a private person but this will also depend on context. Where in the world you are, if this content was captured in a public space or from something published - the list goes on, like some stuff can be trademarked as well, and I’m no lawyer. A lot of these things run under the legal doctrine of “no plaintiff, no judge.” I feel artists in general have accepted that anything they post online is just potentially gone. And if no one steals their content to make money off it, they’re not going to hire a lawyer, whom they cannot afford.

And I’m not saying any of this is great but that’s an established status quo.

The reason why so-called AI generated art gets decried is twofold. It’s new and we don’t like new things. And in order for it to be created, the models have to suck in all the training data they can. And they don’t tend to pay for it. So that’s where some people see theft happening. But that’s not settled law yet because it’s fairly new, there are plaintiffs but not enough judges have passed judgement yet. Do they have to pay for stuff that’s publicly available? Where is the line, if any? Is imitation of a style okay if there is more to the work than just copying something from Studio Ghibli or Disney? These questions are going to keep a lot of legal professionals in bacon for a long time still.

This shit is hard. It’s more gray than black and white.

I’ve been thinking about strategies to get Google to back down on this. And I think the most viable strategy is to let them know that we will all move to iOS if they go through with it. If they lock down their OS, then we might as well use the OG locked down OS and turn to Apple. We only have to make this convincing enough.

I don’t want to go to the dark side either. But as the light is going out on this side: I’m gonna need a new phone within the next 12-18 months. For the first time since ditching my blackberry I’m thinking about switching again. And for the first time ever I’m seriously thinking about an iPhone. All my purchases and what not be dammed. LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO, GOOGLE!

I hear you. I’d still be hesitant to let school age kids learn with an LLM companion. If the grownups think they’re talking with a sentient gigabyte, I think the danger is too great to expose kids to this. Which brings me to my big picture opinion: the general public doesn’t need to have access to most of these models. We don’t need to cook polar bears alive to make 5 second video memes, slop, or disinformation. You can just read your emails. No one needs ChatGPT plan their next trip. No one should consider an LLM a substitute for a trained therapist. There are good applications in the field of accessibility, probably medical as well. The rest can stay in a digital lab until they’ve worked out how not to tell teenagers to kill themselves, not to eat rocks to help your digestion, or insert any other bullshit so-called AI headline you have read recently here. It’s not good for people, the environment, and it’s forming a dangerous bubble that will have shades of subprime mortgages 2007/8 when it bursts. The negatives outweigh the positives.

Gosh, are we dumb the world over. Maybe these chat bots are just lowering the threshold for what used to be the “I’m hearing voices or communicate with the supernatural” type of people. Thanks to a chat bot, you can now be certifiable much sooner.

When they use idioms and expressions incorrectly.

YT and TT are platforms that breed weird quirk uniformity. They all grab your attention with the same phrases (“you’ll never believe …”, “what about [insert something outrageous]? Let me explain …” etc.) For a while, everybody had the same Ikea shelves behind them crammed with shit. Then I think we moved on to neon signs. It used to be fashionable to show off your expensive big microphone, probably much to the delight of its manufacturer. And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the manufacturer paid some influencers to hold the tiny mike prominently in the shot like they would hold a dog poop bag filled with poop from a stranger’s dog. And then it was copied.

I’m not talking about models. That in itself is not a YouTube competitor.

I’m not aware if they have announced a platform for this type of video. OpenAI and Meta have and that’s what I meant.

I fear this will be an uphill battle for YT. I have this gut feeling that Meta and OpenAI here are employing the flooding the zone strategy to hurt and maybe displace YT. The sheer flood of slop with the occasional enjoyable nugget of content flooding YT from the pAIrates will be harder to filter out, clog up servers, and users like you and I will get annoyed and gradually consume less content. YT loses market share and some new platform can move in for the kill, operated by Meta, OpenAI and/or other such reputable companies. It’s not easy to monetize this crap, which is a loss leader at this point. It doesn’t look to me like enough people will subscribe to these services to be financially viable. They have to find other ways. So pivot to video 2.0 - this time with so-called AI! Sigh.

If you feel a multi-million dollar need to influence public opinion, mostly in the US, because your current actions have made your approval ratings drop off a cliff, maybe this is more the time to reconsider the actions that led you here?

Other than that, this is probably par for the course now. Russia is surely doing a similar thing. And whichever military conflict the US might find itself in in the hopefully far flung future, they would do the same probably. First casualty of war and all that.

Seconded! LMMS is a good free DAW to get started.

Great headline

You are making assumptions here. Twenty-something year olds are allowed to date anyone older they like, the only restrictions that apply go the other way age-wise. And dating older people doesn’t automatically lead to self-destruction. So what’s your point?

You have to phrase it as a question to get the money. When you buzz in you get something odd like 7 seconds to answer the question. If you just say “Eiffel Tower” then Ken Jennings will now probably just stare at you expectingly to rephrase your reply in that time. I think in the past Alex Trebek may have prompted candidates to rephrase their non-question answers but I haven’t seen that happening in a while (but I don’t watch it that regularly either so 🧂).

The whole point of the show is that the standard quiz show mechanic question->answer gets put on its head. The clue on the wall is the answer and the candidates have to provide a question it answers.

We are already living in a privacy nightmare. Whether you film and then doxx folks with a smartphone, a camera you’ve hidden in your clothing, or one built into the frame of some spectacles really doesn’t move the needle much any more. We’re in the red already. The nightmarish data collection and then sharing is already baked into our internet experience.

And the people at large sit in a chair in a burning room that is this nightmare we’re in, uttering “It’s fine.” It’s been years since the Google glasshole debacle. People are so used now to other people just filming shit all the time. I think these glasses will end up just being tolerated. There won’t be thousands around in your daily life, like smartphones. Society will acquiesce even in occasional perverts and intentional doxxers. The digital Overton window will move on.

What I can foresee is a more enforced no filming ban in certain areas, like restrooms and changing rooms. There could even be a technical solution that garbles recordings whether they are attempted or not.