This seems to be mainly about billboards. I’m talking mainly about a sign on your door that explains what your business is. I hadn’t initially thought of this as a form of advertising but it technically is.

I’d be open to discussing a broader ban but my current thinking is that this very basic type of advertising which is primarily informational may be do more good than harm.

Sure. I was thinking of advertising in media but I don’t have a problem with a sign on your business or very basic things like that. So I guess not quite all advertising but the advertising industry needs to go.

Why don’t we just ban all advertising? It’s a waste of human labor that not only contributes nothing to society but actually makes it worse.

I’m not sure I buy this argument but I will admit that I’m not extremely familiar with the hoarding or sharing of trade secrets prior to patents. Any recommended reading on this topic? If your logic is correct, patents should be as short as practically possible to encourage information sharing.

I don’t see how this applies to copyright though. Are you concerned people will create works and then bury them? I don’t see the risk here.

Oh so they’re actually created the same way as a zip file? That makes sense I guess. Thanks.

How do these contain random files like this? Isn’t it just a file that applies some kind of visual effect to the media player?

I’m saying we’ve already allowed corporate exploitation of human culture for centuries. But yes, by all means, if AI is the last straw then I’m with you. But I want people to see the broader picture and not hyperfocus only on AI.

I’m not saying the process is exactly the same but conceptually it’s quite similar. Humans don’t create original ideas. They build on what came before. Maybe a truly brilliant artist or inventor adds 1% new ideas. That’s not enough to justify the extremely broad ownership of ideas that exists in our society. These laws implicitly assume that ideas were created from nothing through the sheer brilliance of the creator. Pure nonsense.

Humans have been freely copying each other for millions of years. It’s how we built everything we have. Ideas and art were not meant to be owned. The very concept of owning something non-physical is violent and authoritarian in nature. Without physical possession, the only way IP laws can be enforced is a global police empire, which the US has successfully created for its own enrichment at the expense of the global poor.

So in that context, the fact that AI is borrowing human ideas and then profiting from it doesn’t bother me any more than that humans do the same thing.

The “issue” is that this logic applies to all human creations as well.

Interesting analysis but it raises a lot of questions.

By focusing on convicts, does this miss a broader distribution of people who are “getting away with it”? Are these people repeat offenders not because they commit more crimes but because they are disproportionately scrutinized or arrested? For example, racialized people, the homeless, etc. may have reasons beyond repeated criminality that they face repeated arrests.

Given that most convicts here are previous offenders, it suggests a serious lack of effectiveness in the justice system. In fact, the data seem to suggest that the justice system may itself be a causal factor in reoffending, which is an idea that has been discussed elsewhere and has some evidence behind it.

But what can be done differently? Locking people up until they pass out of the prime crime-committing years might work but it’s very expensive and arguably not very humane. Other types of rehabilitative justice might be more effective but may have greater up-front costs and haven’t been widely adopted. I would be interested to see data on their effectiveness where they have been tried though, given the failures of the current system.

It is absolutely absurd and I realize that my comment could be seen as endorsing this thinking. I only point it out because such arguments underpinned many of Scalia’s legal opinions and he was a big proponent of this reasoning, not only in the public sphere but in law.

Of course it was all nonsense that was never consistently applied, as this example demonstrates. The real reasoning is that some people like Scalia want to reinforce the dominance of people at the top of various social hierarchies and remove protections for people at the bottom. Since the founders were all wealthy, white landowners, their views are fairly compatible with this ideology, making it a useful fiction for people with such goals. And for the rest of us, it gives us some vague fuzzy feeling to believe our great ancestors will be smiling down on us or something.

Yeah it’s only punishment if they’re guilty. The founders obviously intended that the feds could torture any innocent person for any reason.

What a psychopath. Glad he’s dead.

So he doesn’t mind there being lords and peasants, he just doesn’t like people being aware of this fact. That makes more sense, though it’s no less villainous.

I just cannot fathom how the owner of a huge company that is known for constantly abusing its employees can say that he dislikes situations that create “lords and peasants”. Like what is happening in his brain to make him think that is a sane thing to say?

I don’t think that was really a fair summary of what they said in that comment. Unless there was more missing.

The issue is not that it doesn’t know everything, it’s that it doesn’t know anything. It’s not capable of knowledge in the sense that humans are. All it does is probabilistically predict which sequence of words might best respond to a prompt, based on huge amounts of human text that it was trained on.

Part of the issue is how will you train the model to know which things in its training data are factual and which are not? An incredible amount of human curation already goes into just avoiding the model from repeating offensive things, but the realm of facts is so so much broader than that. I don’t see any way it could be done.

But on the other hand I am only a casual observer of this technology and perhaps the experts will come up with a creative solution we can’t yet imagine.

If and when we switch primarily to that technology we can discuss that but I’m not optimistic about the technology. I don’t believe it’s capable of supplying current demand. We’ll need to greatly reduce gas demand first, then any remainder can come from biogas.

Besides, if Europe needs bio methane, they can produce it locally. The only reason to export from the US is its large fossil reserves.

Literally paid propaganda for the fossil fuels industry. The death and destruction done by climate crisis will far outweigh anything Russia can do in Ukraine. Yet Europe (and the rest of the world) refuse to seriously transition away from fossil fuels despite understanding the necessity for decades now.

Is it because they’re shitty overpriced pieces of junk hawked by a known con artist? Or some other reason?

If I had you as a sibling I would use a lot more foss stuff then lol.