Yes, I mainly wanted to rule out the opposite. Because the multi billion dollar companies currently do some lobbying as well. Including the same manipulation and narratives, just the other way around. They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights, little to no oversight… And that’s just inherently unfair.

As I said. Copyright might not be something good or defendable. It clearly comes with many obvious flaws and issues. The video you linked is nice. I’d be alright with abolishing copyright. Preferrably after finding a suitable replacement/alternative. But I’m completely against subsidising big companies just so they can grow and manifest their own Black Mirror episode. Social scoring, making my insurance 3x more expensive on a whim and a total surveillence state should be prohibited. And the same rules need to apply to everyone. Once a book author doesn’t get copyright any longer, so does OpenAI and the big tech companies. They can invest some $100 million in training models, but it’s then not copyrighted either. I get to access the model however I like and I can sell a competing service with their model weights. That’s fair and same rules for everyone. And Höffner talks to some degree about prior work and what things are based upon. So the big companies have to let go of their closely guarded trade secrets and give me the training datasets as well. I believe that’d be roughly in the spirit of what he said in the talk. And maybe that’d be acceptable. But it really has to be same rules for everyone, including big corporations.

I believe my WebOS version is so old, they stopped any update or data collection servers. I had developer mode running before. That’s perfectly alright. Just a bit annoying to constantly refresh, and somehow my attempts to automate it failed. So one day I rooted it and now I have full ssh access, a homebrew channel… And I would have liked to use that to run an Ambilight, and that requires root. Sadly it requires a newer operating system version so I still don’t have any LEDs in the background.

Or maybe AGI turns out to be harder than some people thought. That might be simultaneously the prospect, and the reason for the bubble to burst. That hypothetical future is similar to today, minus some burnt money, plus a slightly more “intelligent” version of ChatGPT which can do some tasks and fails at other tasks. So it’d continue to affect some jobs like call center agents, artists and web designers, but we still need a lot of human labor.

Youtube-webos is the single reason why I’ve resumed watching YT in the livingroom. I had stopped when they introduced the second pre-roll ad and a lot of things became unskippable. Now my old TV is rooted, it doesn’t really phone home, it doesn’t show ads and it’s a breeze. Let’s hope it stays that way, because Google is already trying to fight the adblockers for some time now.

And they even changed more around for developers. A revised structure of the SDK. Demoting Pixel devices from being primary developer platform and now devs should use the emulator… We don’t get easy access to device trees for GrapheneOS any more…

I think that’s more a thing whether you appreciate law and order and a government following rules. An individual might be really bad. But are we a civilised democracy and follow the procedures that come with it? Or are we some dictatorship or a bunch of barbarians and do whatever feels right on a given day? That’s not really concerned with Epstine specifically. But we need to pick one if the two options.

I’m not sure whether he would have been provided with a reduced sentence. Maybe a proper trial could have convicted more people, and help understand how these things can be tackled in the future. Instead they chose the easy route and this won’t happen.

It’s likely not the end of Reddit, though. It’s just going to be booming business for VPN providers. And other people will just upload their selfie. Last time I was asked to do something similar, I used AI to generate one and that worked fine.

Is your stands limited to AI or do you generally condone paying a levy? Like towards Spotify or Netflix or Hollywood, because I could as well skip that and watch the newest movies without obeying their copyright…

I mean it’s not nothing, there is some effort people put into things. Like the Wikipedia is super useful for machine learning. My computer code on Github teaches AI programming. And I can see the crawlers at my own server and today I had to update my config because it’s been hammered by Alibaba. Dozens of different IP addresses, fake user agent and they completely overloaded my database with requests. It’s not like I don’t contribute or am part of a different world?!

I’m afraid that won’t help. That was like 6 years ago and all the hardware isn’t available any more. It’s a Xeon 4 core, an affordable workstation/server mainboard that happens to be very efficient in idle, 48GB of RAM and a bunch of harddisks. I started out with 6TB and then bought the best size/price hdds, which should currently be somewhere in the 12-14TB range if I’m not mistaken?

I got the idea from the German computer magazine c’t. They occasionally test mainboards and do recommendations for self-built home NAS, office or gaming rigs.

I’m a bit in the science/facts bubble. I mean sure, advertisements and narratives are effective, and I’m not exempt. But I’d like to know the truth. And have politics based on scientific evidence. The goal is to strive and have a nice life, eveyone should be happy if possible. And then we use science to tell what kind of laws we need. Are all students delegating their homework to ChatGPT and they don’t learn anything anymore? Find ways so school achieves it’s goal. Do we confuse reality and fiction? Find ways to mitigate for that, e.g. watermarking. Do we loose all artists and creative people? Find ways so they can be part of society… I mean sometimes we can have a cake and eat it too, especially with technology. But we need to be clever.

I mean in the past we’ve adopted to new technology. One example which is often cited in context with AI is channging from horses to cars. That was very disruptive as well. I think today’s situation is a bit different. And for example copyright barely works in the digital age. But AI is likely going to have a massive impact on society. Maybe we need to re-think capitalism. That’s not necessarily good or bad or a “narrative”. But somehow things need to be addressed.

I think you’re either looking for a tunnelling solution or a Web Application Firewall. And there are several options. ModSecurity, or SafeLine, BunkerWeb, Coraza, open-appsec. For (AI) crawlers and bad bots we have Anubis, Iocaine… or something like more traditional blocklists or something like OpenResty which is some modified Nginx plus modules…

The tunneling itself can be done with a simple reverse proxy like Nginx, Traefik, Caddy…

I’ve messed around a bit with ModSecurity. But I’m still looking for something aganist the crawlers.

I eventually moved to an energy-efficient PC. It has a large case and 6 SATA ports and lots of RAM. That replaced pretty much everything I had before. I try to buy the largest hdd I can afford every time I need a new one. And the old NAS and smaller harddrives get a second use as backup space and for experimenting.

Yeah, that news is a bit more than 2 weeks old already. IMO a great way to say “Fuck AI”.

Sure. I mean we’re a bit different at both sides of the Atlantic. Europe regulates a lot more. We’re not supposed to be ripped off by big companies, they’re not supposed to invade our privacy, pollute the environment unregulated… Whether we succeed at that is a different story. But I believe that’s the general idea behind social democracy and the European spirit. We value our freedom from being used and that’s also why we don’t have a two weeks notice and we do have regulated working hours and a lot of rules and bureaucracy. The US is more freedom to do something. Opportunity. And in my eyes that’s the reason why it’s the US with a lot of tech giants and AI companies. That just fosters growth. Of course it also includes negative effects on society and the people. But I don’t think “right” and “wrong” are fitting categories here. It’s a different approach and everything has consequences. We try to balance more, and Europe is more balanced than the US. But that comes at a cost.

That’s a line by the copyright lobbyists […]

Well, I don’t think there is a lot of good things about copyright to begin with. Humanity would be better off if information were to be free and everyone had access to everything, could learn, remix and use and create what they like.

I think of copyright more as an necessary evil. But somehow we needed Terry Pratchett to be able to make a living by writing novels. My favorite computer magazine needs to pay their employees. A music band can focus on a new album once they get paid for that… So I don’t think we need copyright in specific. But we need some way so people write books, music etc… Hollywood also did some nice movies and tv shows and they cost a lot of money.

I don’t have an issue with AI users paying more. Why should we subsidise them, and force the supply chain to do work for a set price? That’s not how other businesses work. The chocolate manufacturer isn’t the only one making profit, but an entire chain from farmer to the supermarket gets to take part in earning money, which culminates in one product. I don’t see why it has to be handled differently for AI.

And what I like about the approach in Europe is that there is some nuance to it. I mean I don’t agree 100% but at least they incentivise companies to be a bit more transparent, and they try to differentiate between research to the benefit of everyone and for-profit interest. And they try to tackle bad use-cases and I think that’s something society will appreciate once the entire internet is full of slop and misinformation by bad actors. Though, I don’t think we have good laws for that as of now.

Hmmh. It’s a bit complicated. “Fair Use” is a concept in Common law countries, but lots of European countries do it a bit differently. We here in Germany need specific limitations and exceptions from copyright. And we have some for art and science, education, personal use and citations and so on. But things like electronic data transfer, internet culture and more recently text- and datamining needed to be added on top. And even datamining was very specific and didn’t fit AI in it’s current form. And we don’t have something like Fair Use to base it upon.

From my perspective, I’m still not entirely convinced Fair Use is a good fit, though. For one it doesn’t properly deal with the difference of doing something commercially and for research or personal use, and I believe some nuance would help here, big rich companies could afford to pay something. And as AI is disruptive, it has some effect on the original work and balancing that is somehow part of Fair Use. And then the same copyright concept has higher standards for example in music production and sampling things from other songs that are recognizable in the resulting work. And I don’t think we have a clear way how something like that translates to text and AI. And it can reproduce paragraphs, or paint a recognizable Mickey Mouse and in some way it’s in there in the model and leads to other issues. And then all the lines are blurry and it still needs a massive amount of lawsuits to settle how much sounding like Scarlett Johansson is too much sounding like her… I’d say even the US might need more clarity on a lot of legal questions and it’s not just handled by Fair Use as is… But yeah, “transformative” is somewhat at the core of it. I can also read books, learn something and apply the knowledge from it. Or combine things together and create something new/transformative.

I think I used a bit too much sarcasm. I wanted to take a spin on the idea how the AI industry simultaneously uses copyright, and finds ways to “circumvent” the traditional copyright that was written before we had large language models. An AI is neither a telephone-book, nor should every transformative work be Fair Use, no questions asked. And this isn’t really settled as of now. We likely need some more court cases and maybe a few new laws. But you’re right, law is complicated, there is a lot of nuance to it and it depends on jurisdiction.

My idea would be to slightly modify / fine-tune a model and then redistribute that modified version. And claim the same Fair Use, AI companies use to take people’s copyrighted work. Either that makes it Fair Use as well, or the “no originality required” collapses or the entire business model.

Sarcasm Identification

That sounds nice. Can we run it on a microcontroller so I can wear it as an amulet around my neck? It’d certainly help in everyday situations, once I forget sarcasm doesn’t just work on random strangers and it’d light up and tell them I’m being sarcastic and not a weird idiot?!

Big thanks! I’m always looking for recommendations. I’ll check them out. It’s going to take me some time, since it’s very subjective. I used to look at numbers and scores, but they just don’t mean a lot. So I need to use every one for a while and see whether I like what they write. The MoE model is quite an improvement in speed already. It’s 3 times faster…

I think you have to be more specific than that. A lot of people use Linux. It’s used on the majority of internet servers, in some gaming consoles (Steam Deck), and by some minority of people on desktop computers. For privacy reasons, to do office work or for software development. And a wide variety of tasks. Your question is very hypothetical. If you live in a place that singles you out for such things, or you have a specific use-case that makes you stand out in a bad way by using a different operating system than the masses, you might have a problem. If you don’t: You might be just fine and enjoy the benefits of using Linux.