Took them 30 seconds to throw animators under the bus to make their point.

It’s hopeless. We’re all just gonna eat each other so the billionaire class can go live in a giant space station.

It was the style at the time.

Unfortunately the strike ended just a few days ago – organizers have vowed to come back with a new plan, since Amazon refused to negotiate.

Perhaps, but I don’t read anything on Substack unless I’m subscribed. Reputation is the entire point on Substack, without it, the content will get no traffic.

AI with dedicated nuclear power? I can’t imagine anything that could possiblye go wrong in this scenario.

Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?

Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.

It’s not “inexplicable”.

DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.

It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.

It’s very simple to not have capitalism

I think that if it was simple, we could point to more practical examples.

To make myself 100% clear: I am progressive, I want workers to unionize, I want government to support worker rights to the Nth degree, etc. That’s why I’m here. But I think a working solution is going to converge on something like the German model where corporate governance is a tripartite effort of company owners, unionized company workers, and government.

If there’s a version of this in which the things used to make stuff (from land to machines to patents) are not owned by some entity, I have yet to see it work. And ownership of the means of production IS capitalism. The “capital” in capitalism consists of that land and those machines and patents. Sure, there is room for workers’ cooperatives and such in this realm of owning entities, although I don’t know that it’s something we can force.

With respect to this:

and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian

I’m not really clear on how workers decide what to make, and how much to make, and where to get their inputs. That seems to me a classic case for corporate leadership. You can’t decide what to sell by a worker vote, except in some edge cases. I feel like that’s a classic path back to Soviet-era starvation: not enough people making food or toilet paper, way too many people making crazy military hardware, not enough middlemen/brokers/traders (who, it turns out, are kind of essential to market organization).

I could be convinced, but I want to see it actually work.

We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably)

You’re not wrong. I’ve often said that capitalism cannot plan in any meaningful sense. Nobody in the system cares about stability tomorrow if they can get rewarded today.

I feel that those who jump on anti-capitalism have no real idea how products are made, and how things are bought, sold, marketed.

There seems to be a sort naive belief that we can return to an era of cottage industry, and that somehow we’d still have iPhones and power plants and such without folks owning land and machines and patents. But even if you imagine a power plant built without capitalism – say, built by a beneficient government – the people building it are capitalists. The people mining the coal and shipping it to the plant are capitalists. They want money in return, so they can feed their families and establish their personal economic security, so that they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, etc.

Folks say that history is just a record of the robber-barons robbing everybody, and I tend to agree. It seems likely that this is the case because only the robber-barons actually succeeded. I think the onus is on folks who claim we don’t need the robber-barons to show that a system CAN succeed without them.

I feel like the long term answer is to let the robber-barons do their thing, but only to a degree, and use government directed by democracy to keep the abuses of capitalism under control. This is difficult, but it seems to work in most wealthy countries, except for a glaring few. If there’s a better system, I have yet to see it in operation.

And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.

Do people still use emacs to code, for example?

Umm. Yes.

it’s basically impossible to tell where parts of the model came from

AIs are deterministic.

1. Train the AI on data without the copyrighted work.

2. Train the same AI on data with the copyrighted work.

3. Ask the two instances the same question.

4. The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

There may be larger questions of precisely how an AI produces one answer when trained with a copyrighted work, and another answer when not trained with the copyrighted work. But we know why the answers are different, and we can show precisely what contribution the copyrighted work makes to the response to any prompt, just by running the AI twice.

Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw do all that, but they’re not bitmap editors.

It’s literally not possible to be exposed to the history of art and not have everything you output be derivative in some manner.

I respectfully disagree. You may learn methods from prior art, but there are plenty of ways to insure that content is generated only from new information. If you mean to argue that a rendering of landscape that a human is actually looking at is meaningfully derivative of someone else’s art, then I think you need to make a more compelling argument than “it just is”.

There is literally not one single piece of art that is not derived from prior art in the past thousand years.

This is false. Somebody who looks at a landscape, for example, and renders that scene in visual media is not deriving anything important from prior art. Taking a video of a cat is an original creation. This kind of creation happens every day.

Their output may seem similar to prior art, perhaps their methods were developed previously. But the inputs are original and clean. They’re not using some existing art as the sole inputs.

AI only uses existing art as sole inputs. This is a crucial distinction. I would have no problem at all with AI that worked exclusively from verified public domain/copyright not enforced and original inputs, although I don’t know if I’d consider the outputs themselves to be copyrightable (as that is a right attached to a human author).

Straight up copying someone else’s work directly

And that’s what the training set is. Verbatim copies, often including copyrighted works.

That’s ultimately the question that we’re faced with. If there is no useful output without the copyrighted inputs, how can the output be non-infringing? Copyright defines transformative work as the product of human creativity, so we have to make some decisions about AI.

This issue is easily resolved. Create the AI that produces useful output without using copyrighted works, and we don’t have a problem.

If you take the copyrighted work out of the input training set, and the algorithm can no longer produce the output, then I’m confident saying that the output was derived from the inputs.

a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work

What was fed into the algorithm? A human decided which major copyrighted elements of previously created original work would seed the algorithm. That’s how we know it’s derivative.

If I take somebody’s copyrighted artwork, and apply Photoshop filters that change the color of every single pixel, have I made an expressive creation that does not include copyrightable elements of a previously created original work? The courts have said “no”, and I think the burden is on AI proponents to show how they fed copyrighted work into an mechanical algorithm, and produced a new expressive creation free of copyrightable elements.

No, I get it. I’m not really arguing that what separates humans from machines is “libertarian free will” or some such.

But we can properly argue that LLM output is derivative because we know it’s derivative, because we designed it. As humans, we have the privilege of recognizing transformative human creativity in our laws as a separate entity from derivative algorithmic output.

And yet, we know that the work is mechanically derivative.

The bias is in the AI design and the training dataset.