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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

    Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

    If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.


  • Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

    I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
    Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
    I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

    Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

    You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
    Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

    Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

    I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
    If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.



  • As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

    You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

    Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.



  • "I, like so many Americans, worked in a fast food service job. Unlike so many Americans I was able to pursue a career in the field my degree was in, which is an opportunity not given to far too many of our younger citizens. While pursuing those opportunities I tried to focus my resume on the achievements most relevant to the jobs I was applying for. Only after working in law and politics for years did I see that a dozen things needing your immediate attention with a constant time sensitive to-do list was a bit more relevant than those hiring managers would have been able to see. " Then some chatter about not expecting her time working there to come up as an attack, since resume writing and a job not aligned with your aspirational career are pretty normal occurrences, and not knowing that is kinda weird.

    I don’t think it’s too hard to politely say that McDonald’s was not the career she was aiming for. It’s basically an acknowledgement that her parents weren’t rich and hiring managers get picky about resumes. Which is honestly a relatable narrative to a lot of people.





  • Attributing loosing or making preposterous strategic mistakes to some sort of 5D chess is a weird choice to make.

    I don’t know why so many of you people have such a hard time accepting that the popular conception of Russia as an Eastern counterpart to the US was inaccurate. Turns out that if you consistently invest less in your military equipment and personnel, you have a less capable military. It’s been 40 years since their expenditures have been comparable, and quite frankly it shows.

    Using your old equipment for an invasion would actually be a pretty novel strategy. Ukraine consistently used the best equipment available to them. That that was leftover NATO hardware doesn’t mean Ukraine was choosing to hold the good stuff in reserve.

    If they’re trying to use a “let the reservists die and then send in the competent soldiers” strategy, it doesn’t seem to be going very well. They’re somehow not holding the territory they took very well, and churning through a lot of what was presumably reserve hardware.

    Failing to execute a gulf war 1, and so deciding to chill in a Vietnam situation for … Some reason … for an indeterminate period of time is just not a strategy that any sane strategist would pick.

    If Russia has the ability to just handwave their way to victory if things got too rough, they’ve done a pretty terrible job of demonstrating it.
    I honestly can’t comprehend what you might have seen of this whole affair that would make you think they had that ability, beyond clinging to the notion that a former superpower must still be a superpower.
    They just don’t have the economy or the equipment to be able to afford to burn through endless waves of soldiers like you seem to think they’re intentionally doing.
    They didn’t even get air superiority, which is just embarrassing.



  • An all out war is unlikely, since if NATO involvement was going to kick that off it would have done so by now.
    The next point of escalation that could start something bigger would be stuff like NATO openly sending troops or actively providing fire support.

    US hesitation to allow our hardware to be used for this type of attack is much more to do with the political issues surrounding the war being framed as a proxy war instead of defensive support.
    The electorates support for “saving the day” and “superior US hardware helping keep a country free” is high. Support for a protracted and complex proxy war without clear right and wrong sides is exhausting and hits too many Iraq/Afghanistan buttons for people to care.

    Asking for and publicly being denied permission to bomb targets adjacent to the capitol does just as well at communicating “we can bomb your capitol” as actually doing it.


  • I wouldn’t say there’s no such thing as a labor shortage, we just don’t really have one now and haven’t for a while. It’s like saying there’s no such thing as a food shortage because in periods of high demand you can always just pay exponentially more money and get it.

    If the rate at which labor costs are rising far outstrips the rate at which demand is growing across an industry, not just a business, that’s a sign that the supply of workers is lagging behind the demand growth. Usually seen when there’s a time lag between when demand can start to rise and people from other sectors can move over, like in medical fields or fields with high technical requirements.

    It’s still not the workers responsibility to take lower wages to keep a business afloat, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been times when it’s been legitimately infeasible to fill a position.
    Businesses and in some cases governments just need to be forward thinking and give incentive to start training for the career before demand starts to outstrip supply.
    Smart places with nurse shortages will do stuff like pay for your training in exchange for a set number of years working for them at a market wage.


  • There seems to have been some policy miscommunication between political and military parties of both nations.
    The US has maintained that the restrictions have been to not allow offensive use, or specific long range missiles for targeting well inside Russian territory.
    Ukraine understood this to mean using them to fend off an attack, and only targets within a specific distance from the border.
    In the past few months it seems that much of this has been clarified, and Ukraine is now using US munitions for a proper US “preemptive defensive action inside enemy territory”, because a Russian base in Russia is full of Russian soldiers who will be ordered to attack, therefore an attack is defensive.

    If it was an actual miscommunication or a pivot is unclear, but the US language seems to have not changed, and a policy that acknowledges that almost anything Ukraine does in this war is inherently defensive is much more reasonable.