Active Postbox user here. If I'm being honest, it's mainly a nice skin over Thunderbird, and inertia kept me on it all these years. With the wind down, I'll likely switch over to Thunderbird full time. I wonder how many other current users will do the same.
Thunderbird has gotten a lot of love in the past 2 years. Still have random hangs and the like meaning I'm finding myself just using my mail host's web interfaces often, and search... is what it is, but it's better!
That sounds a lot like all the homeowners in California that have sold their significantly overvalued homes for 7 figures to move to states where real estate is a fraction of the cost. Generally it’s considered to be a factor in home price inflation in those cheaper states.
While not mentioned in the article, it’s worth mentioning that this also coincided with T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint. Specifically, T-Mobile made assurances that the acquisition would lower prices. Instead, within a couple years they exercised their newfound market power to increase prices a fair amount. The merger should have never been authorized.
The end result was inevitable, if the merger was blocked Sprint would have just filed for bankruptcy and the 3 remaining carriers would split it up amongst themselves.
Sprint was effectively on life support and the last CEO’s only job was to pump up subscriber numbers as high as possible to make a deal as attractive as possible. That’s why Sprint had so many “free” deals a year before the acquisition was announced.
The US government made a massive miscalculation on Dish network, when in reality it really should have been split amongst CableCos who are now stealing customers from the big 3 because they have already done the hard part of building infrastructure, while Dish can’t even get off the ground.
I don’t understand why the government couldn’t have done a bankruptcy bailout of Sprint to maintain a vital industry/important competitor in the market. Essentially follow the same playbook as GM and have the government temporarily buy Sprint, rehabilitate it, and sell it back to public investors.
What the government did with Sprint was akin to allowing GM to be purchased by Ford. Whether or not that happens in bankruptcy court is almost irrelevant: a huge business in an oligopoly merging into another is generally bad news and the government should be on top of it.
(Let me also be clear to people who hated the automotive bailouts: they were easily the best possible outcome and hindsight shows they were great policy. The alternative was essentially the collapse of the American automotive industry, allowing the US to follow the fate of the British industry, and on top of that government made a profit on its investment of taxpayer dollars to carry it out)
Sprint was a technological wrong turn. They invested in the next generation platform on multiple occasions. Billions $ into WiMAX left them with a nonpractical and expensive footprint and no mid term speed benefits to really show. Then, after wanting to keep original CDMA infrastructure, they went LTE/GSM anyway. This period meant multiple modems and lower battery life. It was over with no great options.
I think in this regard the government could have basically reallocated spectrum to be roughly equal among the big four and financially it would be a bankruptcy situation.
> What the government did with Sprint was akin to allowing GM to be purchased by Ford.
The government depends on three carriers (ATT, Verizon, Sprint) for its own redundant critical communications (Continuity of government, military communications, etc).
The entire deal was structured in a way where where the wireless subscribers were shed onto T-Mobile and the important guts of Sprint were sold to Cogent for $0, who didn't have the capability or desire to take on the consumer facing business.
Perhaps tax dollars should not be used to engineer economic outcomes.
If you get too big to fail, why avoid failure? It’s about incentives.
How useful or efficient or competitive do you think taxpayer-funded Sprint would be today? What makes you think they would suddenly start being good with an influx of tax money when they weren’t good before free money injections?
> they were easily the best possible outcome and hindsight shows they were great policy
No, just because those are around does not mean there wasn’t a better alternative in bankruptcy. Bankruptcy does not mean the individual company stops making cars, let alone the entire industry collapsing. That’s pure FUD to justify the govt preventing a moribund industry from being purged of legacy companies coasting on their brand.
I think my comparison to the British auto industry is apt. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean the brand goes away but it can mean the domestic industry evaporates into nothing.
You look at companies like Lotus, MG, Land Rover, Jaguar, and even Volvo and you look at a future where their intellectual property assets essentially only exist to help geopolitical rivals. GM and Ford being sold to the Chinese would have been devastating to US industry.
There is no Volvo EV that is built in Sweden. There is no Lotus EV built in Britain. At the end of the gasoline production line run it’s just China producing all their future electric cars when they go fully electric in 5 years.
Don’t forget that automotive parts are a huge employer beyond the auto manufacturers themselves. If Geely buys Ford they’re moving parts supply to China. It’s a whole ecosystem and it’s strategically worth protecting.
Like I said, don’t forget how the government was paid back in full with interest for the bailouts. On top of that the governor gets to keep people employed rather than sending the jobs abroad. It was a no brainer obvious good policy, supported by both parties as well.
The bad unintended consequences are gonna be much bigger this way. Think of communism, it started with good intentions but the unintended consequences of absolute power concentration (who can buy or sell what and at which prices ) caused absolute corruption and inefficiency
The point is for the government to have the ability to occasionally look the biggest wolves of Wall Street in the eye, and say to them, "haha. but no.". Exercising it doesn't require abolishing private property and taking central control of all trade.
Yes, communism is when the government participates in bankruptcy court, makes an investment, and gets paid principal and interest on their loan. That’s exactly what Karl Marx was talking about.
I think the problem is that they’re competing against much bigger players, ATT and Verizon. It’s just not possible to compete against them as a late comer. That’s why there are no new networks, just MVNOs. Starlink maybe can change that. But outside of that technological change, we’re stuck and a smaller player cannot hope to be competitive on coverage against bigger players.
Ultimately what we need is much stronger anti-trust legislation against all kinds of companies that are too big, or aren’t in functioning competitive environments.
There really needs to be more accountability for such promises made during acquisitions. Or no credence should be given to such promises.
This is not at all surprising, and we've seen this happen over and over. Two big companies merge, promise prices won't go up so the merge gets approved, then within a few years, sure enough prices go up.
> How is reducing competition good for competition?
I am not familiar with the telecom market. But blocking mergers doesn’t necessarily increase competition. (For example, breaking up Walmart would reduce competitive pressure on Amazon.)
HN has a diverse set of viewpoints. For any assertion one might make, there will be someone with the opposite viewpoint.
In addition to out-and-out opposition or agreement that sounds vaguely oppositional, a comment might call for a pedantic annotation, a tangential aside or book recommendation.
That Hitchens quote is pithy and snow-clonable but demonstrated an impoverished and static epistemology. It is circular and self-falsifying by respectively assuming the existence of “evidence” independent of the assertion’s observation bias and not obeying its own assertion.
That's to be expected. A typical conversation starts with someone taking a high-dimensional problem, projecting it to their favorite dimension, and saying "the solution is obviously on my side on the number line". Of course you'll get multiple "contrarian" replies ranging from "hey, what about my preferred dimension" to "you know the problem has more than one of them?".
What? Verizon's clear benefit died long before the acquisition, even if their market share did not. The best thing to do would be to foster competition, not actively bless its destruction.
I've wanted to love MARP for years but the documentation is so limited (and tutorials so sparse) that building a presentation with any complexity beyond the basics is almost impossible unless you have a solid understanding of CSS and YAML front matter.
It's a shame, because I think the idea of MARP is revolutionary, but in practice PowerPoint (or even free alternatives like Google Slides) is easier to use.
> a protest against the ubiquity and inhumanness of digital photography
A protest to the tune of approximately $1 per photo. I love my 35mm SLR but shooting on it is extremely cost prohibitive. Digital photography doesn’t have to be inhumane, it’s more about the user than the technology.
Its a nice exercise in photography to shoot in film. When I shoot digital I might take four shots of the same subject because why not. I take photos of every little thing potentially. I give myself a headache of 4000 photos with dozens of near identical shots to sift through in lightroom.
You’d think I’d burn hundreds on film but no. A roll might last days or weeks or even longer. Every shot is different. I spend more time framing and making sure the exposure is correct. It forces you to slow down and think. The cost becomes hardly a thing because if I start worrying about $25 a month if that on film and dev, I have bigger problems.
You answered your own question — because you'd "give [yourself] a headache of 4000 photos with dozens of near identical shots to sift through".
It isn't the dollar-cost; it is the attention-cost.
When I shoot digital I might take forty shots of the same subject because there's movement and fractional differences in subject distance will visibly miss focus, so 10 fps.
When I shoot digital I might take one shot because exposure correct for highlights can be post-processed, so frame and focus.
all your "film behavior" when using film can be done @ digital; with the addition of checking if actually you did it right (a great learning tool) + not using chemicals, which aren't eco-friendly, lets not mention if 50% of the population thought like you, nature would get _fucked_ by chemicals disposal
It's strange, my mom and all her friends took thouands of photos on film. I threw away boxes and boxes of them when I cleaned out her house when she passed.
Slides/print film and processing did not used to be cost-prohibitive. But I shot a few rolls of 35mm on my old SLR a few years ago and was stunned at the costs to just have them processed and scanned to digital files.
I used to do my own (B&W) processing as a kid and paid for it with paper route and lawn-mowing money; I don't know what that costs these days but it sure seems that film photography is no longer a reasonably cheap hobby.
The masses kept it cheap. Now these film labs have to make 2020s rent and not 1990s rent with the few people dropping stuff off each day, forcing prices to increase substantially.
Nationalized healthcare doesn’t stop at a pharmaceutical manufacturer’s borders. You think NHS or any other country with socialized medicine pays what the US does? With socialized healthcare the pharmaceutical companies pay what the nation dictates or it doesn’t do business with that nation. I highly doubt Novo Nordisk would write off the US if it went to Medicare for all.
Basically, the sitting president appoints circuit judges to a lifetime position. The judicial candidates are selected by senators from whichever state the judge is to be appointed.
Generally, a conservative president will only nominate conservative judges. The candidates will generally be even more conservative if the senators who nominated the candidates are also conservative.
Over time, court watchers can conclude how ideologically predisposed a judge is based on their opinions. Usually, judges appointed by conservative presidents tend to rule as conservatives (that is, side with Republican positions), and vice versa with judges appointed by democrats. This trend is so consistent that you can often predict the outcome of a case from the composition of judges hearing the case.
The Fifth Circuit is dominated by republican senators and has recently seen a lot of appointments filled by Donald Trump. As a result, the Fifth Circuit overwhelmingly rules more conservatively than its sister circuits.
In this case, the fifth circuit panel ruled against the EPA in favor of commercial plastic producers. This is in line with Republican goals to erode the power of administrative agencies. Nobody is surprised by this because the Fifth Circuit operates in service of the Republican Party. As we say, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
I assumed this ruling came from the fifth circuit when I read the headline, but this comment you made strikes even me as a bit too cynical of how the judiciary works:
> Nobody is surprised by this because the Fifth Circuit operates in service of the Republican Party. As we say, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
These judges are not necessarily being "fed" in the corrupt way that connotes. They are people operating in accordance with their nature, and they were selected carefully during their appointment, but they might very well be capable of judicial and political independence. Lifelong appointment and all.
The Fifth is the same that banned a useful, highly reliable drug that can be used for abortions, on the grounds that some doctors might have to deal with the consequences of something went wrong.
Nobody is even pretending that this case has any actual legal merit. Even the right wing Supreme Court is having a hard time finding a reason to uphold it.
It warms my heart to see people still taking about the X201’s faulty WiFi switch. I loved that laptop but ended up mothballing it over the switch. It remains a perfect example of how cheaping out on an extremely minor component (a plastic slide-switch) can sabotage an otherwise fantastic product.
Yes I used to run into these cards all the time in the past (maybe ancestors of the one from the article) but they were always a pain to deal with. I usually just recommended new wi-fi card if the card was showing these symptoms and i cannot recall anyone ever coming back with wi-fi complaints after that. but definitely if this trick
would have worked i would have used it.
Wi-Fi cards do wear out and needs replacement, especially old ones. There was also a widespread manufacturing issue in some Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chipsets around 2007-2012, which had to do with amplifier SAW/BAW filter(?) that lead to rapid and thorough degradation in radio performance. I think at least Qualcomm did notify rather silently on B2B news channels but it wasn't communicated to the public.
Copyright was never conceived to apply to technology like this and the onslaught of copyright suits (like the NYT one) underscore its fundamental rent-seeking nature. No doubt these latest changes to GPT-4 are in response to the suits they’re presently fighting. However these cases are ultimately resolved, the end-user will be the biggest loser.
People generate all of the data going into the system and then the middle-men (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Big Tech middle-man of the week) reap a disproportinate centralized benefit. That causes a bigger problem than the so-called rent-seeking behavior of copyright holders in this case, as this has the net effect of leveraging human creativity, etc. to devalue it and continue the erosion of the middle class.
Bad things happen when you let middlemen get the upper hand, like the American health care system, or big finance disconnected from the real economy. I'll vote against the middleman every time in favor of the original value creator, because society goes down the toliet when middlemen win.
What is the alternative though? I agree with the feelings and sentiments of the anti-ai people that want it to pay copyright, but I never hear any considerations for what comes next.
This is going to end up being the music industry all over again. It's going to be impossible for any individuals or small companies to get the rights needed, and instead were going to get massive content labels selling the rights, or only giant corporations being able to hop through all these new hoops.
We don't want a repeat of that as a society, creating yet another leeching middleman and horrible industry favoring only the incumbents.
I don’t see it ending like that. LLMs will just be taught not to emit copyrighted content verbatim. Whatever the courts end up deciding, they’ll be trained to stay just this side of legal. I’m certain it’s already being worked on.
Open models are a thing. Rather than attacking the technology (which is great) with litigation to hurt a few bad actors, we should attack the capitalist rules that enables rent seeking middle man parasites to flourish.
Yes. If you think about it, the individual is being subjected to a man in the middle attack, cleaving a creator from their creation via the use of consent agreements for providing a platform. Rent seeking.
The artist or author might end up being the loser, and the multi billion corporation harvesting their work might make an unearned profit off it.
To me personally it's crazy how many people think that we would be better off without any kind of copyright protection. Copyright solves many real world problems and protects people against having a company profit off their work... but as soon as AI is involved so many people start to advocate for throwing it away.
If companies are required to purchase licenses for everything they train on, it will guarantee that only huge corporations with deep pockets can produce powerful models. Microsoft will be slightly inconvenienced, Stability AI will be destroyed. Some artists might get a payday, but most of the money will go to companies with large copyright libraries like Getty. The general quality of all models will decrease. I don't see any other possible outcome.
Almost a year ago, I made¹ the following prediction:
It looks like to me that many companies want to use the new generative tools, and many others want it not to impact their stake in the copyright system. I’m pretty sure they will both come to a compromise which will leave most users without any benefits, either from reduced copyrights or from availability of generative tools. It’s what would make both powerful parties satisfied (if not happy), and will impact the status quo the least.
Say, for instance, that they instituted a mostly mandatory licensing scheme, so that an individual artist had no choice but to allow use of their art as input when creating generative tools. People using art in this way have to pay a rather high licensing fee, but it is not paid to the artist, but to some sort of central copyright office. Huge copyright holders can also pay an exorbitantly high fee (to the same recipient) to opt out of licensing. Win-win-win; Existing copyright holders keep their existing copyrights, only large-ish actors can create new generative tools, new political positions and institutions are created with lots of money flowing in. Of course, artists then get screwed by being co-opted by generative tools which they can never afford to create themselves, and the general public get robbed both of the opportunity of using and creating new generative tools, and of any less restrictive copyright law.
For music there are already similar mechanisms in place in many countries - in Poland it's ZAiKS, in US it's ASCAP. They collect fees from organisations playing copyrighted music publicly.
(I agree that it would be terrible if they began enforcing other copyrighted content and for training purposes, because it would lead to centralisation)
In agreement with your "slightly inconvenienced": The world's dozen or so largest publishers have market caps averaging below $10bn range each.
"Even" just OpenAI alone could pocket a few of them if they need easy sources of acquiring content.
This includes the largest educational publishers. And while these publishers do not own all their content, the reality is most authors earn so little, that a "allow AI training on my work for $x extra" would give them vast amounts of content.
As for Getty, Getty has a market cap of "only" $2bn. The big players will easily afford to build or buy libraries like that.
But of course it will be the end of decent open models.
> it will guarantee that only huge corporations with deep pockets can produce powerful models
It will also guarantee that the financial means to continue making that data, that is clearly so important, would be preserved. Someone has to pay for the crafting of the data.
For many artists this is not about "getting a payday" and is instead about "not being replaced by AI". So the outcome you describe would probably sound great to those artists.
How did dock workers feel wen containerized shipping starting gaining popularity? Should we have let them all continue putting things on ships piece b piece and stacking and unstacking each shipment by hand?
How did portrait artists feel when photography was gaining popularity? Should we have let them control the industry so that if we want to record a memory of a person we must have them stand or sit for hours while someone draws them?
Man there's always someone in these discussions who will smugly tell us that this is all inevitable and our empathy for the creatives in our economy is misplaced. To you I give a hearty fuck you.
No, I am describing what happens when technology makes the market for certain jobs and talents change. The stevedores may have had a bad time for a while but our modern society only exists because we can ship things quickly and efficiently.
I feel bad for copy editors and people who write corporate blog posts or design logos or come up with ad jingles, but their niche is gone now and they need to adapt.
I often see these processes described as passive economic mechanisms that we are subjected to and not as decisions that we all make collectively and actively accept, making excuses based on the neoliberal understanding of our time as to why those people deserve to have their jobs made redundant and their livings wrenched from them.
To me, it's a kind of cowardice that people like you shrug your shoulders at and sigh and say "that's just the way things are". You can say that's just how the markets work. I don't have to respect you for it.
I am not saying that artists are going to stop being a thing. We will keep buying books written by people and watch movies directed by people and people will still make music and what have you, but it will be different. The music industry was completely different in 1900 when there no available mass recordings, different again in the 1950s with popular radio and records, and the 2000s brought the internet and MP3s.
Things change -- people's jobs will be different. It isn't going to mean artists will stop making art or machines will make everything bland, it is just a new tool that will change industries and make things easier for people to do well and thus make more art. Some people won't be able to live well doing the same thing they do now, but what they do now wasn't what they would have been doing if they were in their grandparents time.
I'd say you are creating a bit of a straw man there. The commenter you are responding to didn't say that's just the way things are. It feels like you are making their argument for them.
They showed some examples in the past and showed that society adapted.
We could try and improve our society and systems to have a safety net, education that allows us to adapt to rapidly changing technologies, etc sure but that's a whole discussion in itself.
If you give people freedom (good thing, right?) and tools exist to perform a task in a variety of different ways (some faster/more efficient than others) people will naturally gravitate towards using the most efficient tools to gain a competitive advantage, and other people will prefer work produced with those tools because it's better/cheaper. As long as better tools exist and people are free, this is just the way things are gonna play out.
If you're angry that independent artists are being fucked over by bigcorp, AI tools aren't the battle you should pick, because it's a guaranteed loss for a lot of very logical reasons, and it's just another example of a pattern of oppression enabled by our social and political systems. Even if by magic you managed to change something there'd just be another inequality coming down the pipe shortly after.
The good artists are already using AI, just like they photobashed, traced templates and used camera obscuras to produce better art faster down through the ages. A true artist transcends medium to focus on message.
I don't think most people believe we are better off without copyright. I think people believe that copyright protects specific concrete expressions and that fair use exists to allow others to build on ideas in transformative ways. It's not clear where building a learning model from this work sits in this context, hence the court cases.
Also, it's a subtle difference, but copyright is not intended to solve the problem of companies profiting off of artist's works, it is intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It attempts to do this by giving creators limited exclusive rights.
How does locking away most of the knowledge, research and learning materials in the private vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit promote the progress of science I wonder?
Even scientists are tired of the predatory and rent seeking behaviour of the publishers they have fallen prey to and are looking for any way out.
This is not promoting progress this is the opposite of it
I think it grossly mischaracterizes what copyright protects to describe is as "most of the knowledge, research and learning materials". Still I agree, that the extensions of copyright length and the behavior/incentives of publishers works against the original intent of copyright. Having said that, publishers only have control of copyright because authors give it to them. Copyright rests with the creator — the system where people are compelled to sign this over to publishers is a different (but of course related) problem. Scientists who are tired of the predatory behavior of publishers have other choices today. It's not clear what alternative you are proposing.
> vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit
Because they made it, it wouldn't exist without them, and others value it. If this data wasn't objectively valuable, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Yes. I've been aware of the intellectual property debate at least back to the great crackdown on sampling around when Paul's Boutique was released. And following it in depth from around the time Lawrence Lessig made arguments to the Supreme Court.
A large chunk of the tech community was following that case and most on HN seemed to be highly sceptical of the current status quo.
How does it protect a small artist against a large corporation profiting off their work?
I don’t even have the means to start litigation, let alone see it through.
It only protects those who are already moneyed and/or famous enough to negatively impact a large corporation’s reputation - and even in those cases it’s mostly for the benefit of the lawyers and bureaucrats who make a living off it.
If you register your work, which requires some effort, but is not prohibitively expensive or difficult, you can sue for statutory damages, which are substantial enough (up to $150k for willful infringement) that lawyers will work on contingency. There are many individual artists how have been successful here. The law actually has some real teeth that individuals can use to protect their work.
It would be nice if there was a preventative concept, where the role of the creator being a predator, seeking and suing, would be mostly reversed, so that others would instead ask for permission, and maybe get the rights to copies through a fair exchange of money, like a license. We could call this "copy rights".
> The artist or author might end up being the loser, and the multi billion corporation harvesting their work might make an unearned profit off it.
Exactly like before AI you mean then? Except instead of OpenAI it was Disney, Universal and other large corporations on that same seat.
>to me personally it's crazy how many people think that we would be better off without any kind of copyright protection.
Why should I care that the old billionaire copyright corps are dying exactly? What would I benefit defending them for me as what they did was privatizing culture as far as I remember for their personal benefit and even had a large negative influence on tech.
The copyright system being so unequal and skewed towards multi billion companies dug its own grave by itself.
The copyright issue seems unchanged. Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law. If someone uses AI, and posts the output from it as their own work, and that work contains copyrighted material, the person who posted it is in violation of copyright. AI is just a tool they chose to use and they remain responsible for remaining in compliance with copyright law.
What we need is a reasonable way for people using AI to determine which parts of the text or images they have are subject to copyright.
> Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law
What do you mean anyone?
Is Sony liable when you play an entire movie on their TV? Is Nuance liable when you use their Dragon screen reader to cerbalize an entire NYT article? Is Google liable when you display an entire webpage in Google Chrome? How about if you switch to Dark Mode, is that a transformative use?
Why would AI be any different? It’s just a tool at the end of the day!
The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.
> these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities
Care to share an example? I didn't hear of OpenAI or anyone else arguing or trying to sue anyone for abusing the copyright. If anything, their business decisions rely on an assumption that copyright will not help them protect their work
OpenAI is the force to cut slice from the copyright pie which the big copyright hoarders have. The hoarders will not strike back to try to kill the OpenAI business. Because in any case they will not be able to kill the technology itself. So, obviously, it's better for them to have OpenAI as a partner and share some profit with them to control the AI field than to kill this one and wait for another AI menace to raise.
OpenAI is not the one who would kill a copyright. They just want their cut.
Why should 'big tech' corporations be allowed to use AI to remix/mash-up human-generated content all of a sudden when creative individuals have generally been prohibited from doing it for so long?
Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. If you want the coin then you can either trade for it or fight me, but either way only one of us can have the coin. Even a bird with a worm knows a concept of physical property.
Copyright is something that was invented relatively recently, a few hundred years ago, because of a new technology back then: the printing press. Before the printing press there was no need for copyright.
Now today we again have a new technology in neural networks, and it's entirely possible that the realities of this technology push us back in the other direction, undoing what the printing press did.
The world you describe is that which turned former communist countries in the underdeveloped entities they are today. By not respecting people’s right to own property you disincentivise them from adding value. The printing press analogy is relevant. Similar to how we made rules on how that tool can be used we now need rules in how to protect people’s creations from being taken away by force using ai. Physical property rules are not the result of “physics”. Are the result of evolving beyond the savagery of taking that which doesnt belong to you by force. If it wasnt protected by law it would be protected by the sword. I get that some people would prefer that type of living but by and large civilised humans dont.
> Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand.
So do you believe people should only be able to own real estate that they are currently physically occupying? By your reasoning, no one could ever own a piece of land larger than what they were currently standing or lying on. So no one could own land. So abolition of all property rights, essentially.
I'm hella down for this, but then we should also be able to walk into the OpenAI offices and inspect their source code, cause that shit won't fit in any one hand afaik.
This is incredibly naive misunderstanding of how property rights work: they are 100% a social and conceptual construct. IANAL, but I believe you are confusing property with possession.
But, yeah. I'm down: no one can own anything that isn't currently in their hand. Let's go liberate a lot of fake property that is "owned" in violation of the laws of physics!
and more than that: even if we would agree that works should not be protected, we're currently in a highly-asymmetrical position where big players like Microsoft can take people's hard work but give nothing back. The only way to survive under a copyright regime is viral licensing.
Sure, for reasonable copyright terms. Currently, if you create something when you’re young and live long, a 150 year long copyright term is reasonably possible. (Life + 70 years)
Much as I appreciate someone’s rights to their work, things should enter the public domain in something more like 10 to 20 years. Even then, copyright protections are too strong when in force. You published something so people would use it, your ability to limit how should be quite restricted to protecting you from folks selling it as their own. I am also in favor of forced standard licensing terms.
Like say after five years there should be a standard streaming licensing fee for films and shows such that anyone can broadcast/stream/sell copies for a flat rate.
We also have to consider the cost of enforcement. We can’t be soaking up millions and billions of taxpayer dollars to protect copyrights or field complaints that aim to protect mutated copies of said works…just like you don’t send a swat team to enforce parking tickets, we have to consider what is at loss for the New York Times or other copyright holders before clogging up the courts.
There’s a reason lawyers are so quick to file a suit and it’s because it cost nothing to sic the dogs of the American justice system on others.
Kim Dotcom’s adventure calmed things down for the last wave of digital ip theft. Once that happens with one or two ai copyright disbelievers the rest will calm down.
But is it really a problem if the AI is transmitting the information in its own words? And even if that is considered illegal, doesn’t it significantly diminish said crime?
AI doesnt transmit information in its own words. It has no “own” no “self”. It does what it was programmed to do, just like any other type of software. Turns out that some people using ai have made it ingest content without permission so they can resell it for profit. That should not be permitted. My property is not yours to take unless you agree to my terms. I did not give you permission to download my data, art, code or text, to ingest in a token database and then resell it in any shape or form derived or not. No ifs no buts. If you want it you have to pay for it or respect terms. The bulk of ai companies respect that. A handful of sociopaths dont. They are the issue.
I wouldn't call ANYONE disrespecting terms and conditions they may have agreed to a sociopath. Not everything in a contract is enforceable just because it's written there, whether or not both parties signed it. And unless it's spewing out copyrighted materials "verbatim" there is an argument to be made that the LLM learned to talk from an open source and inserted knowledge from a copyrighted one.
However this turns out for private AI, I hope at the very least it can be considered fair use. Monetized LLMs can be forced to pay up or follow terms but individuals should be able to pool together and create open source models. I'm not saying I have the exact legal arguments for why this would work but LLMs in their current forms need to exist.
I absolutely agree that LLMs should exist. Torrents still exist and have their purpose. Criminals always argued that their crime is not really a crime and found all kinds of arguments in favour of it. Similarity people developing ai that doesnt respect people’s property use all sorts of wild arguments in their favour - ai learns like a human, it benefits society, other countries will use it against us, and so on. That doesnt mean we should give into their demands to destroy society and people’s lives so they can have a competitive advantage over honest people. The fact that they want to steal, destroy entire industries they take from, and demolish norms so they can make their software appear intelligent, makes them sociopaths.
A significant portion of the training set for most image generation tools is stuff made in the last 10-20 years harvested from the internet, if not the last 5 years. We're not talking about 150 years of copyright protection here, we're talking about the time frames you suggest. Artists want to protect their own work and their livelihood, and AI is being trained on the work they're actively putting out right now. You would have to shorten copyright duration to something like 5 years to come remotely close to making modern image generation models possible without violating artist copyrights.
Text is different and much less difficult since its history as a medium is much longer - if you excluded the last 10-20 years of prose from your LLM it would probably still be very good at writing. But excluding the last 20 years of digital illustration and photography would be limiting yourself to a much lower-fidelity training set.
Your work is not free from derivation which is what GPT4 does in the overwhelming number of cases. If there are small outliers and it regurgitates something word for word, we can handle it like most other instances of copyright infringement as we do now. File a takedown notice and that particular phrase can be explicitly filtered out post output generation. Easy.
I agree about the derivation bit, but “File a takedown notice for every NYT article ever published after proving GPT can reproduce each one” is not what I would call a clean solution. That’s basically a regulatory DDOS attack.
Current copyright law is simply not equipped to handle LLMs, I think.
It’s what they do anyways. The file suit after takedown after DMCA and never ever hesitate to drag court cases out over months and years, wasting everybody’s time to make sure grandma pays up because someone in her house was using Napster.
No, no one gets to get away with breaking the law over and over and over again with a simple "whoopsies" each time they get caught. There needs to be penalties.
Yeah, except I paid for the work i derived mine from. I paid taxes to learn in school, i paid for textbooks, i paid to see a painting, i paid to watch a movie, and i paid even to learn how to speak and do math. Stop stealing, and pay what you owe. Easy.
In one fell swoop, Nate tries to redefine political alignments in order to artificially distance himself from a concept he personally dislikes (“wokeness”).
His statistical analysis is a fun way to follow political horse racing (even if his models aren’t perfect) but this post is the chef’s kiss of ham-fisted amateur political science. Appreciate the earnestness, but can’t agree with basically any of his unsourced “theory.”
sourcing isn't about the presence or not of a [3] next to your wild claims
it's about having engaged with work other people have done on the subject. Like, actually read and understood other people's ideas. You can really tell the difference between someone who just googled things to support whatever they wanted to say vs someone who is straight out the gate with "there are three prevailing schools of thought on this issue; the first, characterized by xyz, posits that abc" and so on
You think that Nate Silver used Google to find out about the American political landscape? Don't you think that the many years he spent working in a field where he learned a lot about American politics would have made him pretty well-informed on the topic?
The question is, which perspectives did he expose himself to during that time, and what did he conclude from those inquiries? Data is easy; interpretation is hard. It's not enough to say he had an accurate model, it has to be reasonable, too.
In critical theory liberalism is synonymous with colonialism, capitalism, and all the other isms that are meant to be deconstructed. The antagonism is a core component of postmodernism.
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