Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.

But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.

Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.

Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).

Some economist please corrcxt me if I’m wrong, but: Trickle down may not work. However, trickle up should.

If you do say, UBI, people will spend the stuff. And the money will go to the big players. They’ll buy their food at Walmart. Or meds at Target Pharmacy. Or get a loan at JP Morgan.

Unlike, say Walmart, who won’t buy their huge private jet collection from the swathes of less-than-well-off people across all of America.

So even if UBI made people lazy, even if it made people less productive, the money will still disproportionately end up in the hands of the rich.

I know I write essays which is a weak point of mine. One I should address, but I see the gist of my message didn’t get to you.

For one I use (and like) Inkscape and have strong negative feelings towards Adobe (and run Linux). Just like most of the folks here. That, however, should be pretty clear-cut from my original message.

They have a point.

I’m kind of the other way around:

I’m used to Inkscape since forever. I’m no graphics design expert, but do know my way around Inkscape for simple SVG editing, mostly stuff shamelessly taken off Wikimedia.

Way back in college, I enrolled in an elective “graphic design” course. Of course, being a course, they used Illustrator.

That thing works nothing like Inkscape. It was a long time ago, but I remember being baffled by it, to the point of being unable of doing basic stuff.

To be fair, I had no need for learning Illustrator and no wish to do it either, so I quit the course while I still could and exchanged it. I just felt like i’d be losing my nerves on switching, when I had better stuff to do than becoming dependant on Adobe and losing my minf in the process.

Both programs may indeed sport menus in the same spots, but the menus aren’t the same. They may look like the same thing, but they’re really not.

It’s kind of like a bus and a train. Illustrator (the bus) sports all the nice stuff (i assume) from other Adobe stuff. Just like a bus uses the same road like cars do, with the same signalization.

Inkscape is more like the train. It does things differently from say Krita or Gimp, but it also does other stuff than either Krita or Gimp. Which (dare I say) makes it more effective at what it’s meant to do.

Because historically (and for the most part today as well), it costs money.

Sure, today stuff like ChatGPT and the somewhat older Google Translate exists, but that doesn’t solve the cost issue. (And I’m skirting on the huge elephant in the room called quality for a bit of brevity).

There’s a huge chance someone paid a good chunk of money for all the books you find dirt-cheap at a flea market, check out at a library or happen to find in your own house.

Printing physical books is expensive. Publishers also want a margin, and a lot of authors want royalties.

In the end even if the publisher and author are both good souls demanding nothing, someone needs to foot the cost of printing. But before that, you’d need to go through non-trivial talks with most authors’ publishers and/or authors themselves.

Then you need to arange for translation, typesetting and printing if you’re not doing it yourself. That takes both time and money.

And if you were to do all that yourself, it’d be a huge time investment, with a potential lawsuit if you don’t do those damn talks. So most just don’t bother.

Businesses are incredibly inefficient, even though some are “successful” and have a lot of cash to burn. They need to pay workers, bills, buy and fix equipment, and of course, a cut needs to go to the top people. Usually the “golden” 80-20 rule applies to almost everything: 20% of books make 80% of money, 20% of employees make 80% of money, and a different 20% of people do 80% of the work, etc. And of course, in this world, it’s all about the money.

A translation is usually initiated by a publisher that has a manager who wants to get his section’s metrics up to go cry to his own manager about how good he is to get a raise or not get fired. This is a daily grind. Sometimes (but quite rarely), that leads the manager to the decision of publishing a new book. Usually such actions are guided by things like bestseller lists, reviews and personal biases of the manager and the company as a whole. Sometimes the publisher hires an agency to try to approximate the demand for such a book (even more money spent). Then they do the talks. This also costs money, and the result is also a cost of money (the royalties to be paid). Then comes translation, then printing, then distribution to bookstores, and finally advertising.

These are just the steps that come to mind. All cost money, and all the books you see for sale in a bookstore went through all of these steps. For a library, not as much (but still the vast majority) did.

Sure, not every situation is the same, so there are companies that specialize in providing translations of well-known works or companies whose manager at one point said they need to publish 25 translations yearly (instead of one individual one), so they kind of “flood” the market.

But sometimes it’s just the whim of a newspaper whose management thought printing classic works of shorter length and bundling them with their newspaper would drive up newspaper sales.

It’s incredible how each document (edition of a book or otherwise) has multiple stories (of the author, publisher, translator, seller, advertiser, buyer, worker in logistics/delivery driver,…) that shaped the life of it. Some lasted a few hours, and some took hundereds of man-hours. All of this somehow translates to money.

That’s the long answer.

The short one is: 80% the economy and 20% human laziness.

Nor does it “read” its input. It doesn’t even process it.

It’s built/tuned using it. Or as AI techros would say, trained.

some sort of tracking of him was done that the feds don’t want people to know about

That “tracking” is all the work they did to find a suitable fake perp. If they had any real evidence and Luigi did do it, it would’ve been admitted almost immediately. They have very little to lose.

it was something that may be ruled unconstitutional and risk the case against him

And besides, if that were true and Luigi truly did it, don’t you think the current SCOTUS would use this great stroke of luck as a way of undoing some “dangerous” precedent?

Well…

CK did want guns readily accessible. CK did say gun violence deaths were a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Given the fact that Luigi might be pinned for the crime, it’s equaly likely that CK truly has had a larger share of responsibility in the health mogul’s demise.

Soon you cannot believe anything you read online.

That’s a bit too blanket of a statement.

There are, always were, and always will be reputable sources. Online or in print. Writteb or not.

What AI will do is increase the amount of slop disproportionately. What it won’t do is suddenly make the real, actual, reputable sources magically disappear. Finding may become harder, but people will find a way - as they always do. New search engines, curated indexes of sites. Maybe even something wholly novel.

.gov domains will be as reputable as the administration makes them - with or without AI.

Wikipedia, so widely hated in academia, is proven to be at least as factual as Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be harder for it to deal with spam than it was before, but it mostly won’t be phased.

Your local TV station will spout the same disinformation (or not) - with or without AI.

Using AI (or not) is a management-level decision. What use of AI is or isn’t allowed is as well.

AI, while undenkably a gamechanger, isn’t as big a gamechanger as it’s often sold as, and the parallels between the AI and the dot-com bubble are staggering, so bear with me for a bit:

Was dot-com (the advent of the corporate worldwide Internet) a gamechanger? Yes.

Did it hurt the publishing industry? Yes.

But is the publishing industry dead? No.

Swap “AI” for dot-com and “credible content” for the publishing industry and you have your boring, but realistic answer.

Books still exist. They may not be as popular, but they’re still a thing. CDs and vinyl as well. Not ubiquitous, but definitely chugging along just fine. Why should “credible content” die, when the disruption AI causes to the intellectual supply chain is so much smaller than suddenly needing a single computer and an Internet line instead of an entire large-scale printing setup?

I know a few artists and get their complaints against AI, but I feel they’ve been way too overblown.

I look at AI as what it is - a new technology. Everthing was one at some point.

For example - cameras. Do you think artists who learned painting were happy when cameras started displacing them?

Of course there was outrage. It’s natural to protect your interests. However, technology has to be allowed to progress and people’s rights have to be respected. Developments in technology such as photography or AI are a disruption of the existing legal framework, and the two sides’ rights (those of the users and if those displaced) must be balanced.

However, unlike photography, there’s a clear legal basis and precedent analogous to AI art - in most places recieving copyrighted material without permission isn’t punishable while distributing it to others is.

An AI model is in essence a retrieval system in the sense of the US DMCA. Most other places have substantially similar laws in spirit, and most places draw the distinction between distribution and “fair” uses of infinging material. A good rule of thumb is that selling access is a big no-no, distributing is a big risk, and merely using a much smaller one. All technically illegal (as are memes).

To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)

But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?

As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.

Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.

And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.

If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.

“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.

However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.

Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).

It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.

This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.

Fucking duh.

You got me there. For that’s how words work.

The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there.

May I ask where this incredible society is? Sounds like a dream. Here in E*rope they milk every second of your shift. Bonuses barely exist in my experience, usually being vehicles for keeping people on minimum wage and telling them to “work hard”. Usually they’re rigged so even if you do bite, only the company profits.

The EU got Apple to open up sideloading. Why would they not stop Google from suddenly doing the same?

If you replace yours after every use, then go for it!

If you keep a more traditional schedule of toothbrush replacement, I’d strongly suggest one brush per person per month. You might get away with one brush per 2 people per month, or one brush per person per up to 3 months, but not both.

It is a bit confusing.

Minecraft is a digital simulation of a physical (albeit blocky) world.

If we treat minecraft as a physical world (one simulated, but that’s beside the point), we can claim that it’s a (simulated) physical simulation.

He may very well be the personality to cause the Epstein files be released.

Calories are interchangeable like this percisely because a calorie is a unit of energy.

This “energy” we speak of is in stored as chemical potential energy of molecules.

When the human body digests foods, it breaks down molecules to build new ones through chemical reactions. Some such reactions release energy, while others require outside energy to happen. Some molecules are, likewise good stores of energy for the body because they take part in reactions that release energy.

But, at the end of the day, energy is energy. Another type of chemical reactions that release energy is burning. It just so hapoens to be much faster and easier to create and control than the work an ingestive tract does.

The only difference is that burning converts things into a slightly different set of molecules than digestion would (with burning releasing all energy and digestion leavinf some untapped), so energy released by burning isn’t 100% on par to the energy extractable to a human digesting it.

That being said, the difference between the “theoretical” energy (burning) and usable energy (ingestion) isn’t too important. You may put in the 1500 calories on the label, but you won’t utilize all of them. However, taking into account the fact that whenever energy is measured, it’s measured by burning we stay consistent. We may not be 100% percise, but we’re at least consistently wrong. And the amount of unavailiable energy is incredibly small - humans are actually more efficient than machines from an “energy efficiency” standpoint. Given the fact that each person has a different metabolism (and metabolism changes regularily throughout the day, year and with age), neither does trying to be 100% percise make sense, since your values for today will be different from your values for tomorrow.

About losing weight: Weight is lost when energy is taken in, and gained when it used.

Since a human uses about 2000 calories a day, 1500 was discovered as the best middle ground between starving and not gaining weight altogether.

It really doesn’t matter where the calories come from because the only important thing for tracking weight is net energy, gained or lost. 100 calories “trapped” in sugar is the same as 100 calories “trapped in fat”. With the human body being as efficient at sucking out energy out of stuff, the only real difference is in how long the process takes - energy in sugars is practically instantly availiable, while energy in protein takes some time to be extracted.

A net gain or loss of 200 calories is the same, wether it’s through sugars or proteins. But, for the body, it’s all the same. If it has a sufficit of energy it’ll store it (and you’ll have a net weight gain). If it has a deficit, it’ll seem you’ve lost weight, as that energy went into something other than your body’s reserves.

I don’t think individuals should have to pay - even with their private data

Agree.

[…] and that means companies shouldn’t either.

Disagree.

Whn a person pirates, they usually do it for a) themselves, b) their family or c) a close friend. Some might share on a larger basis.

And other than that, they also usually use it for a) educational or b) entertainment purposes.

For companies, it’s alsmost always d) On a larger basis and c) commercially.

As most licences and contracts differentiate the two uses, so should the law.

The fact that I can download a book online and read it (sneakily, and technically illegally) doesn’t mean that if I became an AI LLC I could download it, along with thousands of others, to then sell as my AI’s “knowledge”.

Making that an AI’s knowledge is “storing in a retrieval system” and commercial use isn’t a free use criterion.

The true problem with (common law) copyright is the fact that it can be bought and sold. Or rather, the author doesn’t own it - the publisher does. Which goes against the initial idea of the author getting dividends from their works.