badgermurphy

Its really, really big and populous, and also ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse. I think those combined factors lead to California passing more volume and variety of laws than any of the other American states. Many of the laws they pass are regulation on business and consumer protection in excess of those provided by the federal government, but the socially progressive side of politics has its villains, too. Their villainy comes in the form of forced trading of freedom for security--outlawing activities that are dangerous to you, or banning objects and knowledge that have the potential to harm you or others even if they have other practical uses. Its the main reason why it is risky to fight for the victory of one's own political "team" without further consideration. It is easy for people interested in the public good to be overzealous in enforcement of public safety. It's hard to get broad agreement on where to draw that line. For example, I tend to lean in the "natural law" direction, where I think you should be allowed to have and do almost anything you want, so long as it doesn't materially harm anyone else, even indirectly. Most other people, even on the left, find that relatively extreme and believe in more personal regulation in the name of increased public safety. For example, most Democrats support moderate to strict restrictions on personal firearm, chemical, and encryption ownership, rather than banning the illegal uses of those things themselves. It is more dangerous for people to be able to be able to get dangerous stuff, so it makes sense people would have a lot of differing opinions on where to settle between "Mad Max" and "Minority Report".

I do think that some projects will fare better than others, particularly ones like you mentioned, where the team is robust and capable of handling the filtering of increased submissions from these new sources. I believe we are going to end up having to see some new mechanism for project submissions to deal with the growing imbalance between submission volume and work hours available for review, as became necessary when viruses, malware, and spam first came into being. It has quickly become incredibly easy for anyone to make a PR, but not at all easier to review them, so something is going to have to give in the FOSS world.

It is their problem until the second they submit it, then it is the project's problem. You can lay the blame for the bad actions wherever you want, but the reality is that the work of verifying the legality and validity of these submissions if being abdicated, crippling projects under increased workloads going through ever more submissions that amount to junk. What is the solution for that? The fact that is the fault of the lazy submitter doesn't clean up the mess they left.

Sure, but if they can be demonstrated to _ever_ plagiarize without attribution, and the default user behavior is to pencil-whip the output, which it is, then it becomes statistically certain that users are unwittingly plagiarizing other works. Its like using a tool that usually bakes cookies, but every once in a great while, it knocks over the building its in. It almost never does that, though.

There's the rub. When establishing laws and guidelines, every term must be explicitly defined. Lack of specificity in these definitions is where bad-faith actors hide their misdeeds by technically obeying the letter of the law due to its vagueness, while flagrantly violating its spirit. Its why today, in the USA, corporations are legally people when its convenient, and not when its not, and the expenditure of money is governments protected "free speech".

But now, even the person submitting the license-breaching content may be unaware that they are doing that, so the problem is surely worse now that contributors can easily unwittingly be on the wrong side of the law.

Its Nintendo. They were already suing them before they even knew about the ad. Most lawyers are familiar with the old "cease and desist" letter method, but Nintendo's even got "don't even start" warnings from their legal department.

I think you might be surprised. Generative AI has limited utility and costs a lot to operate; so much, in fact that t does not appear there are enough natural resources on the planet we’re on to ramp it up to the scale that is intended. Soon, the hype-based funding will dry up, and the free and subsidized generative AI tokens will all disappear. Only then will we see the true cost of using it and if users will bear that cost. If it costs a lot of money to ask it to do things, people will go back to doing a lot of those things themselves.

Agreed. They run on dump drucks of burning VC capital. I don’t see how LLMs stick around in any meaningful way when the dump trucks stop pulling up.

That's entirely the fault of the TV cartel. If they could get their collective act together, these TV add-on modules would have gotten off the ground. You could have a TV monitor with a couple of empty sockets on it to put a streaming module or NTSC antenna card or DirecTV card or whatever. Consider that things are the way they are because the involved companies are short-sighted, collusive, and uncooperative on standards, and the fact you need cable spaghetti and half a dozen remotes is due to a lack of consumer protections, not a lack of bells and whistles in your TV.

I don't really agree that is conceptually okay. TVs and computers have drastically different life cycles. That TV will still be kicking probably a decade after the internal Smart TV computer is uselessly underpowered. This same problem is arguably even worse with cars.

Couldn't happen to a nicer pack of jackals.

Are you reading the hate on Windows? Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar international mega-corp, and their software is meant for enterprise use as a tool to get a job done–a means to an end. All of its other uses are distantly secondary to that. In that context, the tool becoming progressively less reliable, fast, and predictable makes it ever less fit for purpose. Sure, you used that time for something else productive, but when you need your computer for something important right now, it failing to work because its maker broke it when you weren’t looking is a lot to take. Dollars and jobs can be lost because of Microsoft’s cavalier attitude toward quality. Contrast that with Linux, a free program made by volunteers in their spare time. Its own updates can cause problems like Windows, but they are ever less common, which is the opposite is true for Windows. Furthermore, if I have important upcoming use for my PC, I can delay or ignore updates as long as I want, even forever. The owner gets to control the computer’s use, because they’re the owner, a fact Microsoft does not respect at all, and seems to be taking measures to change. People do not like to be told what to do, nor when or how to do it. People that know how computers work and use them heavily understand how to maintain their computer, and those people are heavily represented here. They are getting their skilled PC management replaced by forced, shoddy, automation of that task and it causes them unnecessary problems, often at inopportune times. That’s why Windows gets hate here–Microsoft keeps kicking them in the balls and they hate that.

If they get Windows 95, they can also play Hearts to their Solitaire's content.

Trident was such a cooler name than WebKit, too. A rare instance of Microsoft giving something a name that was neither confusing nor lame. I mean, those ActiveX controls were a little… well… Trident was a cool name!

There is never anything fundamentally bad about more choices, but that doesn’t mean that some of the choices are not fundamentally bad.

I believe that there isn’t because, at least as I understand it, it costs considerably more money than it makes to operate it. It gets less bad at scale like Google has achieved, but they still lose money on it, so it seems doubtful that anyone else could break in and beat them at that game. They continue to operate it because they get a variety of other things from it that don’t directly make the YouTube division money, but feed into their other divisions where they collectively generate considerably more money than YouTube loses from it, in the form of user personal preference and demographic data collection, network affect driving users to their other services, and direct tie in to their juggernaut ad network. Its not too much different than “loss leader” products at the store, which you may have heard of. The idea is that you take some product that almost everyone frequently buys, like milk or eggs, and you put one of the lower priced ones on extreme sale, often even at a loss, essentially all the time to drive traffic to your store. You put those products way in the back, and customers will often buy a bunch of other stuff on their way to and from getting it. The profits from the other products well exceed the loss on the “loss leader” one, even when some customers only by the loss leader, so the store considers it a winning strategy.

Its not, though. The chain of events is well documented, with much of the original correspondence still there to read and evaluate for yourself. Its arguably not a conspiracy, either, since it was perpetrated by a single entity. Their motivations for doing it are the subject of a lot of speculation, some of it pretty wild, but the facts that they did do it and how it was done are public record.

It totally could and probably would. I am a phone OS tinkerer myself, but the above poster is right that it is a lot of hobbyist type tinkering and you can brick your device and fuck it up so you can't communicate with your friends and family. I agree with the main sentiment that these alternative OSs for phones and computers are a lot better in a lot of ways, but we are unwise to act like getting your computer or phone that way is that easy. Trying to get an alternative OS working well on a device can _very_ easily consume an entire waking day or more, and bricking is not impossible, especially with phones.

I’m sure that’s true, but it is also noteworthy that any and every consideration that goes into the initial citation of the date before it is fed into the model introduces intended and unintended consequences on on the training. Furthermore, the proliferation of the LLMs themselves is putting negative pressure on survival of the places where all the good data is sourced from in the first place. When traffic to a place lime stackoverflow is way down because everyone’s reading LLM answers (that the LLM training dataset got from stack overflow), there are less good conversations on stackoverflow to read. Some of these sources of training data may even be caused to cease to exist entirely.

Unfortunately, it was just that: good luck. All appliances from Samsung and LG are notorious in the market space for premature failure. If we had a functioning consumer protection agency, they wouldn’t be able even sell something of such poor reliability.

Hard disagree. Please, everyone, research impartial product reviews before you buy any appliance. Your appliance lifespans should be measurable in decades.

The problem that is created by a person's private data being collected against a person against their will is primarily a philosophical one similar to the "principle of least privilege", which you may be familiar with. The idea is that those collecting the data have no reasonable need for access to it in order to provide the services they're providing, so their collection of that information can only be for something other than the user's benefit, but the user gets nothing in exchange for it. The user is paying for the product/service they get, so the personal data is just a bonus freebie that the vendor is making off with. If the personal data is worthless, then there is no need to collect it, and if it does have worth, they are taking something of value without paying for it, which one might call stealing, or at least piracy. To many, this is already enough to cry foul, but we haven't even gotten into the content and use of the collected data yet. There is a vibrant marketplace among those in the advertising business for this personal data. There are brokers and aggregators of this data with the goal of correlating every data point they have gotten from every device and app they can find with a specific person. Even if no one individual detail or set of details presents a risk or identifies who the specific person is, they use computer algorithms to analyze all the data, narrowing it down to exactly one individual, similar to the way the game "20 questions" works to guess what object the player is thinking of--they can pick literally any object or concept in the whole world, and in 20 questions or less, the other player can often guess it. If you imagine the advertisers doing this, imagine how successful they would be at guessing who a person is if they can ask unlimited questions forever until there can be no doubt; that is exactly what the algorithm reading the collected data can do. There was an infamous example of Target (the retailer) determining a young girl was pregnant before she told anyone or even knew herself, and created a disastrous home situation for her by sending her targeted maternity marketing materials to her house, which was seen by her abusive family. These companies build what many find to be disturbingly invasive dossiers on individuals, including their private health information, intimacy preferences, and private personal habits, among other things. The EFF did a write-up many years ago with creepy examples of basic metadata collection that I found helpful to my understanding of the problem here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters?rss=1 Companies have little to no obligation to treat you fairly or even do business with, allowing them to potentially create a downright exile situation for you if they have decided you belong on some "naughty list" because of an indicator given to them by an algorithm that analyzed your info. They can also take advantage of widely known weaknesses in human psychology to influence you in ways that you don't even realize, but are undeniably unethical and coercive. Also, it creates loopholes for bad actors in government to exploit. For example, in my country (USA), the police are forbidden from investigating me if I am not suspected of a crime, but they can pay a data broker $30 for a breakdown of everything I like, everything I do, and everywhere I've been. If it was sound government policy to allow arbitrary investigation of anyone regardless of suspicion, then ask yourself why every non-authoritarian government forbids it. I know that's a lot; it is a complicated topic that is hard to understand the implications of. Unfortunately, everyone that could most effectively work to educate everyone on those risks is instead exploiting their ignorance for a wide variety of purposes. Some of those purposes are innocuous, but others are ethically dubious, and many more are just objectively nefarious. To be clear, the reason for the laws against blanket investigations was to prevent the dubious and nefarious uses, because once that data is collected, it isn't feasible to ensure it will stay in the right hands. The determination was that potential net good of this kind of data collection is far outweighed by the potential net negatives. I hope that helps!