People are acting like ChatGPT is storing the entire Harry Potter series in its neural net somewhere. It’s not storing or reproducing text in a 1:1 manner from the original material. Certain material, like very popular books, has likely been interpreted tens of thousands of times due to how many times it was reposted online (and therefore how many times it appeared in the training data).

Just because it can recite certain passages almost perfectly doesn’t mean it’s redistributing copyrighted books. How many quotes do you know perfectly from books you’ve read before? I would guess quite a few. LLMs are doing the same thing, but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.

Do apps really install the moment you press the button on Android? On iPhone you have to confirm through Face ID or by entering your passcode first.

(Make sure you’re doing this all behind a VPN)

I don’t personally trust the free streaming sites. I torrent the bare mp4 or mkv file because I can just play it on my own computer without worrying about malware or being tracked.

There are multiple mirrors for The Pirate Bay, just search it on your favorite search engine and they should come up. At least one of them always works. There’s also sites like 1337x, among other free trackers. (RIP RARBG, you’ll always live in our hearts)

There’s also private trackers that are a lot easier to get into than others.

No, because pretty much all of it is bad. Elaborating would be meaningless.

Print drivers in Windows have actually been in userspace for a while now. That’s why the cheap drivers that come with your $40 Inkjet from Walmart don’t cause bluescreens anymore.

It’s wild to see people in the piracy community of all places have an issue with someone benefiting from data they got online for free.

As someone who works as a software engineer for a smaller company without any of that noise, that sounds like complete hell. I have no clue how devs are getting anything useful done while having to context switch constantly during the day for asinine meetings and corporate progress tracking bullshit.

Still, most if not all of that subscription fee is just going back to Reddit in API calls. Not interested in supporting them at all, whether through a first or third party app.

Those are the best projects. There’s no bugs, all unit tests passed, no tickets to look at. Pure bliss.