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

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  • Most voters don’t have a business and never will.

    The value of a net new business is that it creates more jobs and economic activity.
    Most people benefit from more jobs to either work at or drive up labor demand.
    Per that school of economic thought, incentivizing a new business adds more activity to the market and more opportunity for people to find ways to innovate, provide value and become profitable.
    Giving money to an existing struggling business is subsidizing a businesses that’s already demonstrated that it’s not working.

    However, we’re both putting too much into it. The goal is to say $50k for small business, because people like a business friendly atmosphere.
    Trump gets credit for giving tax cuts to businesses for stock buyback, which only helps investors. The goal is to court people who want pro business policies without literal handouts to corporations.








  • 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.


  • Yup. :/

    I looked it up and it’s not unusual for sentencing in New York to take several months, but I would have been much happier if the political realities had pushed things to move faster.

    Having read the prosecutions response to the request for delay that basically said “everything the defense said justifying a delay was wrong, here’s why a delay would actually be a good idea”, it feels hard to blame the judge too much for granting the delay.
    Even though none of the reasons seem to be based on sound legal principles and are at best based on practical considerations.








  • 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.