Microsoft basically tied with Apple for the title of richest company in the world, by the way.

There are plenty of things that people do every day that contribute to the potential spreading of diseases, from every kind of sex to not wearing a mask when you’re sick.

To single out anal sex as a sign that homosexuality is immoral (despite the fact that vaginal sex can also spread diseases, and despite the fact that anal sex is not exclusive to gay people) is a sign that the person you’re talking to is biased and arguing in bad faith.

Ethically speaking, if someone wants to live by a moral system that differentiates between right and wrong based on the potential to spread disease, then that’s fine, but that logic still needs to be coherent and apply to all things, not just selectively to things that they dislike.

But anyway, if they’re sophists, you probably aren’t going to convince them. If you have to engage with that shit, then your best bet is probably the socratic method: ask them targeted questions to poke holes in their flawed logic until they back themselves into a corner. You know what they’re saying doesn’t make any sense, so simply asking them questions which reveal more contradictions will force them to adjust or abandon their position.

• AI “content” is trivial to make and will soon be everywhere.

• Nobody wants to read, watch or listen to AI generated “content”

Infinite supply, zero demand. Sounds pretty devoid of value to me.

Part of my core philosophy is to never let other people define you. Define yourself and let other people define themselves too.

I’m not conflating anything. Just posting well-sourced and unbiased, objective historical record. Kind of odd how riled up that made you… (Remember, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.)

Frankly I’m not really interested in your interpretation of that history, especially since you don’t seem to have a very good or nuanced grasp of it in the first place. There are plenty of smart, informed and qualified people who have written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No offense but I’ll probably check out what they have to say before I check in with you.

Anyway, have a good one!

Are you under the impression that the Palestinians invaded Israeli lands in 1948, killing thousands of them?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Holy_War

Just in time for nobody to care.

Clearly not. There are a thousand ways to read a person. And they work pretty well.

Unless you can read minds, which you can’t (even with your tinfoil hat off), then you literally cannot know things which are not somehow expressed (through words, facial expressions, body language, actions, etc.). Words are the most direct way that the vast majority of human beings express themselves, as things like body language and action require third-party interpretation, which obviously adds a second layer of subjectivity, and considerable flaws in terms of misinterpretation, bias, etc.

I stated that it is a privileged class of information. One that is excluded from scrutiny because we declare scrutiny, in this case, untrustworthy.

Simply restarting your opinion may make you feel correct (which you’re entitled to feel), but it doesn’t actually change the objective truth:

Feelings are “excluded from scrutiny” not because “we [who?] declare scrutiny untrustworthy”, but because of the simple objective truth (that almost every human being has intuitively understood since the dawn of time) that the internal thoughts and feelings of others are fundamentally unknowable, and that we rely on expression to have a window into the minds of others.

If you believe that’s not true, then answer this:

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry right now, what basis could you possibly have to tell me that I’m not?

If you can’t answer that question, then you straight up have no argument in the first place, and that alone answers your original question.

So now I’ve lead you to water, and it’s up to you whether you drink or not. I’m not going to waste any more of my time on this.

Of course people lie, and they could easily lie about how they’re feeling. But what possible basis do you have to argue against what someone else says they’re feeling?

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry, for example, how could you possibly make an argument that I’m not?

You could see that I just ate a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel hungry. In fact, you could see that I just ate 10 sandwiches, but it’s entirely possible for someone to still feel hungry, based on how the brain and human psyche work.

The best case arguement is the opinion that a person’s actions are seemingly inconsistent with a certain stated feeling: for example a widow who says that she’s crippled with sorrow, only to be caught going on dates with other men. But again, you’re not arguing feelings there, you’re arguing an opinion about the consistency of behavior.

The feelings of others are fundamentally unknowable to us. Expression (words, facial expressions, body language, behavior, etc) is our only window into the feelings of others.

You see how this creates a privileged class of information, right?

No. It simply reflects the reality that human feelings are only knowable to others by means of expression.

If I tell you that I’m feeling hungry right now, what basis could you possibly have to tell me that I’m not?

You have none. How I feel inside is unknowable to others. It is a fundamental truth of subjectivity.

Any information based upon a claim of suffering becomes inscrutable.

Objective truth and facts cannot be argued, only uncovered.

Likewise feelings, while subjective, cannot be argued, only expressed. (Again, because the feelings of others are unknowable.)

If you want to argue something, then I recommend arguing subjective opinions, and hopefully you do so based on a bedrock of facts.

That’s a good argument for disallowing it. It kind of breaks the system.

Disallowing what? Feelings? And what system?

I’m not even sure exactly what you’re asking here, but emotional states like suffering are subjective expressions of feeling, not opinions.

Trying to argue about some else’s experiences with regards to suffering is like trying to argue that someone isn’t happy, sad, cold, warm, hungry, thirsty, tired, scared, etc.

As always the ultimate authority on how a person thinks and feels is the person themselves.

In other words, you can argue opinions (hopefully based on a foundation of unarguable, objective facts), but it makes no sense to try to argue against another person’s feelings.

You could argue, if you do desired, the opinion that people are too emotionally sensitive, but even that seems like a waste of time to me, because it’s very unlikely emotional sensitivity is a choice. (If it was, you could also simply choose to be more empathetic and understanding of others, just in the same way that you want other people to become less sensitive to their own feelings.)

Personally I have better things to do with my time than argue about other people’s feelings.

Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM©™!

There’s no doubt that Russia are backing Hamas and doing so mainly to divert resources and attention away from Ukraine.

At the same time, the war in Ukraine is slowing down while the situation in Israel/Palestine has rapidly escalated.

Copyright is an artificial restriction

All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.

AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There’s no having it both ways.

What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves.

I’m a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.

Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else’s code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you’ll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.

I’m also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a “fair use” of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it’s baked into the license.

Long story short, whether it’s code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as “fair use”.

tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright

TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I’m advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.

If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you’re entitled to think that.

But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don’t get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they’re doing is fair use.)

And when you add it up and realize that “AI” is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won’t someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!

If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

That’s because I’m a human being. I’m acting on my own volition and while I’ve observed artwork, I’ve also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I’m not owned or beholden to any company.

“AI” “art” is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

All of these are factors in determining whether it’s fair to use someone else’s copyrighted material, which is why it’s fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it’s not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else’s copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

AI training is using people’s copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that’s absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people’s copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is “fair” under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don’t get to unilaterally decided what people’s art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

Take Spotify for example, artists don’t get paid a lot per stream and it’s arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it’s worth it to be on those platforms. That’s not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that’s because it probably is–another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

Well, why shouldn’t they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?

There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.

Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else’s copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.

So again, what makes AI “fair use” and why shouldn’t companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?

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I like Flatpaks and AppImages for application delivery and here’s why:

1. Software doesn’t just magically appear in various distros’ repositories. There is a considerable amount of work (time/effort/energy/thought) that goes into including and maintaining any given program in a single distro’s repo, and then very similar work must be done by the maintainers of other independent repositories. To make matters worse, some programs are not straight-forward to compile and/or may use customized dependencies. In those cases, package maintainers for each distro will have to do even more work and pay close attention to deliver the application as intended, or risk shipping a version that works differently in subtle ways and possibly with rare bugs. (Needing to ship custom versions of deps for a certain program also totally eliminates a lot of the benefits of shared libraries; namely reduced storage space and shared functionality or security.) That’s part of the reality of managing packages, and the fact is that there’s a lot of wasted effort and repeated work that goes into putting this or that application into a distro repository. I have a ton of respect for distro package maintainers, but I would prefer that their talents and energy could be used on making the user experience and polish of their distro better, or developing new/better software, than wrestling with every new version of every package over and over again multiple times per year.

2. As a developer it’s very nice to know exactly what is being “shipped” to your users, and that most of your users are running the same code in a very similar environment. In my opinion, it’s simply better for users and developers of a piece of software to have a more direct path, instead of running through a third party middle-man. Developers ship it, users use it, if there’s a bug the users report it, developers fix it and add features and then ship again. It’s simple, it’s effective, and there’s very little reason to add a bunch of extra steps to this process.

3. The more time I spend using immutable, atomic Linux distros like Silverblue, the more I value a strong separation between system and applications. I want my base system to be solid as a rock, and ideally pretty fucking hard to accidentally break (either on the user end or the distro end). At the same time I also want to be able to use the latest and greatest applications as soon as humanly possible. Well, Silverblue has shown that there’s a viable model to do that in the form of an immutable and atomic base system combined with containerized applications and dev environment. What Silverblue does may not be the only way of achieving a separation between system and applications, but I’ve never been more certain that it’s the right direction for creating a more stable and predictable Linux experience without many compromises. I don’t necessarily want to update my whole system to get the newest version of an application, and I certainly don’t want my system to break due to dependency hell in the process.

4. The advantages of the old way of distributing applications on Linux are way overblown compared to the advantages of Flatpak. Do flatpaks take up more drive space than traditionally packaged apps? Maybe, I don’t even know. But even if they do, who the hell cares? Linux systems and applications are mostly pretty tiny, and a 1TB nvme ssd is like $50 these days. Does using shared library create less potential for security flaws going unfixed? Possibly, but again, sometimes it just isn’t possible or practical for applications to share libraries, Flatpaks can technically share libraries too, and the containerized nature of Flatpaks mean that security vulnerabilities in specific applications are mitigated somewhat. I’m not a security guy, but I’d guess that Flatpaks are generally pretty safe.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now. I really like Flatpaks and to some extent AppImages too. I still think that most “system-level” stuff is fine to do with traditional packaging (or something like ostree), but for “application-level” stuff, I think Flatpaks are the current king. They’re very up-to-date, sandboxed, often packaged by the developers themselves, consistent across many distros, save distro maintainers effort that could be better used elsewhere, easy for users to update, integrate with software centers, are very very unlikely to cause your system to break, and so on.

It would be really hard for me to want to switch back to a traditional distro using only repo packages.