Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Spreaders have driven me to obsession. I’ve never felt driven to commit to a species eradication policy until now.

Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don’t think Paramount Studios would buy anyone’s defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.

However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.

No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.

That’s part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in boosting their own profit gains.

Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art but from IP property of their own kin.

Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from the work of human creatives. But those artists mostly signed away their rights long ago to their publishing house masters. Since the ownership class controlled the presses, those contracts were far from fair.

Artists, today, routinely see their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and it’s embittering and soul-crushing. We’ve seen Hollywood accounting come into play throughout the last century. Famous actors are notoriously cheated out of residuals. (With the rise of the internet, and prior to that a few smart agents, we’ve seen a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)

The artists were screwed long before AI ever came around.

Instead this fight is about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin. But we’re already in squalor, anyway.

Can’t say you’re wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn’t yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren’t perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.

Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I’d be interesting if little dogs – the robots – are used for couriers.) So it’s not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

This is like bullet deflectors to keep your gun from shooting holes in the propellor.

Yes, early WWI planes had them.

Yes, but that model is late in the gravity game. We were toying with the two bodies experiment before heliocentrism, let alone higher-dimension curvature of space.

Eventually some pissed off engineer who knows a thing or two about color will create a conversion utility to allow GIMP to seamlessly work with CMYK.

That angry engineer might be you if you have friends who fill in the gaps within your own knowledge base.

It won’t affect much except bleeding edge theoretical physics. Much the way we don’t need relativity to make airplanes fly (but round-earth gravity models help for long distance flights).

Physical laws are mathematical models that reflect natural forces and predict outcomes (accurately that we can fling cans of passengers across the world safely). It wouldn’t be the first time we discovered that some previously constant forces are actually variable (much the way the force of gravity is affected by distance, noticeable only when you lob something high enough.) We shrug and change the variables, and some physicists near retirement may balk and say it’s ridiculous, as Einstein did regarding Heisenberg’s probability-based quantum mechanics.

The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.

Much the way musicians were on the front line when recording was becoming a thing and movies were turning into talkies. But that’s the most visible pushout. We’re also seeing clerical work getting automated, and once autonomous vehicles become mastered, freight and courier work (driving freight is like a third of the US workforce).

This is much the same way that GMO technology is fine (and will be necessary) but the way Monsanto has been using it as DRM for seeds is unethical.

I think attacking the technology itself doesn’t serve to address the unethical part, and kicks the can down the line to where the fight is going to be more intense. But yes, we haven’t found our Mahsa Amini moment to justify nationwide general strikes.

As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it’s vexed me that we can’t organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it’s not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we’re going gentle into multiple good nights.

I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn’t the problem, it’s companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.

(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That’s a thing we won’t tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That’s what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)

In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we’d have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.

All we’d have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.

The proletariat is still sore about the ones in 2008. They revealed plain the stratified economic system.

More specifically, Chinese state interests influencing Americans. US elected officials are AOK with US, plutocrat and commercial interests influencing Americans.

It’s not about protecting the public, it’s about who gets to engage in malicious action against the public.

Unhiding extensions is one of the first things I do when setting up windows, but it will still hide the .lnk extension on shortcuts, so it’s still a vector for phishing attacks (specifically, tricking the user to do something that runs malicious code).

Experienced pirates will get into the habit of taking precautions against malware attacks and will distrust downloads until they are sufficiently vetted,

It’s kinda like AAA game companies waiting for a couple of weeks after a title’s release (and all the reviews are done) before rolling out the micro-transaction market (and the corresponding game-balance adjustments).

Funny how when Windows XP had dial-in activation we warned that this would drift over to games if we tolerated it, and then it did.

Funny. Not long after all the spyware was inserted into Win 10, they imported it into Win 7, and we got a general notice to not install those updates (or uninstall them).

Yeah, Microsoft was always a shit.

Sounds like French law enforcement wants a police state that supercedes the civil rights of the public.

You know, the French public have a reputation for getting ugly when the state gets uppity.

That sword over Damocles is swaying in the breeze.

So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.