Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”
They already monetized their fucking users, they’ve had users straight handing them money for fucking years now (sometimes for basically nothing in return!), but that’s never enough for these god damned vampires.
But back then Reddit still believed in opening up their platform, and their relation with their users was not adversarial. Their source code was even available on GitHub with an open source license! It didn’t feel much different to us sending monthly donations to instance admins and Lemmy devs now on Lemmy. People genuinely didn’t want Reddit to shut down back then.
Oh, I totally agree about the time period, but it also shows why this is such a big slap in the face to the userbase from Huffman. It literally ignores that time period and acts like this is the first time they’ve tried to wring money out of their userbase.
I keep saying that commercial, money making clients should donate 10% of their profit (or living money) to the server their user chooses. This is how FOSS services will survive.
How are they NOT?! Paying Reddit money to have someone go EDIT THANKS 4 DA AWARD KIND STRANGER is stupid, and it caused every thread to be clogged with asinine comments like “I WISH I CUD GIV U A WARD!”
I don’t know if you were there before gold existed, but it was a lot more like… Lemmy. None of that twaddle.
You know how spez was bitching about how reddit never made a profit? Yeah, now we know why. You know what his compensation was last year? $193,000,000. Fuck that arrogant prick.
Not to take Reddit’s / spez side, but to clarify, that’s not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.
Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.
I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that. I get he is after a life changing amount of money no doubt, but 600k is a comfortable living by any metric.
Thank goodness for this decentralized stuff now. Communities are important, especially for the marginalized in society. There is a potential good in social technology without jerks with ad budgets and AI delusions of grandeur
I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that.
He was a Founder who left and came back. In all fairness, he was never attracted to it so much as he was instrumental in creating it.
The type of person he is is the type of person who created the platform to begin with…
Another example might be Jack Dorsey, who claimed that Elon Musk could be the only one to save Twitter.
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
These asshats are all alike. To get to the point where you can afford fleets of servers to create a service like this to begin with, you already were exploiting people and greasing palms. Other than Aaron Swartz, you should be pretty fucking skeptical of anyone who has been involved with Y Combinator.
I can’t understand how investors would fall for this. For the sake of humanity and my own mental health I hope they don’t. But I have a suspicion they will, and it goes to shows how fucked up the world is.
It's why they released news of the actual IPO on the same day they released the news of Google buying our data: they want to tie reddit and Google together in the public's mine, make reddit seem better than it is.
Around the time they re-corporatized into Alphabet. Probably a little while before that, so at least a solid decade since that’s been completely out the window.
Also, it only ever referred to putting ads before search results… which is how it is now. They clearly dropped any principles they had a long time ago. It’s honestly a little shocking more isn’t written about how Google was one of the earliest to begin its enshittification process, probably with the death of Google Reader, which was the death knell for RSS feeds and the Old Internet.
They restructured as Alphabet in 2015, and Reader was shut down in 2013. Google was founded in 1998. So that means it took about 15 years all told for Google to completely shed any ethics or morals they had about being a better company. That’s how quickly selling out your principles happens now.
What I still can’t figure out (in my very shallow dive into the repo) is if it’s a meta search engine like Searx-ng or if it does its own crawling and builds its own search index.
I run Searx-ng and love it, but I’d be interested in a true self-hosted search (though I’d need to devote a lot of resources to build and run such an index).
Anyone know?
Update: Looks like it crawls and maintains its own index. From the credits/thanks at the bottom of the readme (emphases mine):
The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development.
#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.
When we’re at the point where “criminals” are the ones acting ethically to undo the damage caused by those in power, I have to wonder how long until society collapses and is forced into another major restructure.
The word hacker doesn’t mean criminal. Hacking is not a crime unless you do something illegal with the skillset you have. They are just coders and reverse engineers. A hack usually means a quick fix.
Never claimed otherwise. Unauthorized access of a corporate system, especially a control system for public transit, probably qualifies as illegal even if the intention was good.
Unauthorized access of a corporate system, especially a control system for public transit, probably qualifies as illegal even if the intention was good.
It’s okay. Reading comprehension is a hard skill to master.
I have no doubt that those in charge now will sink their claws in so that they still come out ahead in whatever system comes next. When you abolish the monarchy, the rich become politicians.
They almost certainly had, as it was downloaded from the net. Some stuff gets published accidentally or illegally, but that’s hardly something they can be expected to detect or police.
that’s hardly something they can be expected to detect or police.
Why not?
I couldn’t, but I also do not have an “awesomely powerful AI on the verge of destroying humanity”. Seems it would be simple for them. I mean, if I had such a thing, I would be expected to use it to solve such simple problems.
Unless you’re arguing that any use of data from the Internet counts as “fair use” and therefore is excepted under copyright law, what you’re saying makes no sense.
There may be an argument that some of the ways ChatGPT uses data could count as fair use. OTOH, when it’s spitting out its training material 1:1, that makes it pretty clear it’s copyright infringement.
Making something available on the internet means giving permission to download it. Exceptions may be if it happens accidentally or if the uploader does not have the necessary permissions. If users had to make sure that everything was correct, they’d basically have to get a written permission via the post before visiting any page.
Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement under US law. Using the web is rarely fair use because there is no copyright infringement. When training data is regurgitated, that is mostly fair use. If the data is public domain/out of copyright, then it is not.
Making something available on the internet means giving permission to download it. Exceptions may be if it happens accidentally or if the uploader does not have the necessary permissions.
In reality the exceptions are way more widespread than you believe.
It’s a hugely grey area but as far as the courts are concerned if it’s on the internet and it’s not behind a paywall or password then it’s publicly available information.
I could write a script to just visit loads of web pages and scrape the text contents of those pages and drop them into a big huge text file essentially that’s exactly what they did.
If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can’t see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information in which case you explicitly don’t need to ask the permission.
Google provides sample text for every site that comes up in the results, and they put ads on the page too. If it’s publicly available we are well past at least a portion being fair use.
That was the whole reason that Reddit debacle whole happened they wanted to stop the scraping of content so that they could sell it. Before that they were just taking it for free and there was no problem
You can go to your closest library and do the exact same thing: copy all books by hand, or whatever. Of you then use that information to make a product you sell, then you’re in trouble, as the books are still protected by copyright, even when they’re publicly available.
If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can’t see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information
I don’t think that’s the case. A photographer can post pictures on their website for free, but that doesn’t make it legal for anyone else to slap the pictures on t-shirts and sell them.
Which is the crux of this issue: using the data for training was probably legal use under copyright, but if the AI begins to share training data that is distribution, and that is definitely illegal.
First of all no: Training a model and selling the model is demonstrably equivalent to re-distributing the raw data.
Secondly: What about all the copyleft work in there? That work is specifically licensed such that nobody can use the work to create a non-free derivative, which is exactly what openAI has done.
If I scrape a bunch of data, put it in a database, and then make that database queryable only using obscure, arcane prompts: Is that a derivative work permitted under fair use?
Because if you can get chatgpt to spit out raw training data with the right prompt, it can essentially be used as a database of copyrighted stuff that is very difficult to query.
Exactly! Then you agree that because chatgpt can be coerced into spitting out raw, unmodified data, distributing it is a violation of copyright. Glad we’re on the same page.
You should look up the term “rhetorical question” by the way.
It wasn’t. It is commercial use to train and sell a programm with it and that is regulated differently than private use. The data is still 1 to 1 part of the product. In fact this instance of chatGPT being able to output training data means the data is still there unchanged.
If training AI with text is made legally independent of the license of said text then by the same logic programming code and text can no longer be protected by it at all.
Well firstly the article is paywalled but secondly the example that they gave in this short bit you can read looks like contact information that you put at the end of an email.
You don’t want to let people manipulate your tools outside your expectations. It could be abused to produce content that is damaging to your brand, and in the case of GPT, damaging in general. I imagine OpenAI really doesn’t want people figuring out how to weaponize the model for propaganda and/or deceit, or worse (I dunno, bomb instructions?)
This is why some of us have been ringing the alarm on these companies stealing data from users without consent. They know the data is valuable yet refuse to pay for the rights to use said data.
That’s easy to say, but when every company doing this is also lobbying congress to basically allow them to build a monopoly and eliminate all alternatives, the choice is use our service or nothing. Which basically applies to the entire internet.
According to most sites TOS, when we write our posts we give them basically full access to do whatever they like including make derivative works. Here is the reddit one (not sure how Lemmy handles this):
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
According to most sites TOS, when we write our posts we give them basically full access to do whatever they like including make derivative works.
2 points:
1 - I'm generally talking about companies extracting data from other websites, such as OpenAI scraping posts from reddit or other such postings. Companies that use their own collection of data are a very different thing.
2 - Terms of Service and Intellectual Property are not the same thing and a ToS is not guaranteed to be a fully legally binding document (the last part is the important part.) This is why services that have dealt with user created data that are used to licensing issues (think deviant art or other art hosting services) usually require the user to specify the license that they wish to distribute their content under (cc0, for example, would be fully permissible in this context.) This also means that most fan art is fair game as licensing that content is dubious at best, but raises the question around whether said content can be used to train an AI (again, intellectual property is generally different from a ToS).
It's no different from how Github's Copilot has to respect the license of your code regardless of whether you've agreed to the terms of service or not. Granted, this is legally disputable and I'm sure this will come up at some point with how these AI companies operate -- This is a brave new world. Having said that, services like Twitter might want to give second thought of claiming ownership over every post on their site as it essentially means they are liable for the content that they host. This is something they've wanted to avoid in the past because it gives them good coverage for user submitted content that they think is harmful.
If I was a company, I wouldn't want to be hinging my entire business on my terms of service being a legally binding document -- they generally aren't and can frequently be found to be unbinding. And, again, this is different from OpenAI as much of their data is based on data they've scraped from websites which they haven't agreed to take data from (finders-keepers is generally not how ownership works and is more akin to piracy. I wouldn't want to base a multinational business off of piracy.)
Remember when Twitter gave a copy of its entire archive to the Library of Congress, so that researchers and historians would always have this unique document of what people were talking about online in the early 2000s?
So what they’re saying here is that it’s cheaper for them to drag rtr laws to court everywhere for years than it is for them to make devices repairable. Or, in other terms, planned obsolescence makes them so much money that they can spend billions in lawyer fees and still make a profit.
Yup, or the Apple play which is just walk right around these regulations with some additional tricky bullshit while outwardly 'supporting' RtR. If I was a lawmaker I would be so fucking livid about this circumvention I would come back even harder but I guess I don't know a lot about that process.
Yeah at least make the corruption worth it but it's hard to up the price when the guy next to you would take a trip to Delaware to vote the way they want
It's worth noting this happened 6 years ago and both of the cops were fired.
Listening to the audio and reading transcripts is hilarious. These guys sound like a couple teenagers driving around discussing Pokemon, accidentally going the wrong way down a one-way street; the part where they ignore their superiors trying to contact them asking why they aren't responding is the best part.
The question is, what has happened in the LAPD from this exact event occurring again? This amount of negligence and selfishness is absolutely still happening.
Hell, the fact that it took SIX YEARS to get this footage is damming all by itself. I want to be amused by the childish nature of this all, but goddamnit does the whole situation make me angry.
“We’re making propaganda for fun. Join us, it’s comfy,” the 4chan thread instructs. “MAKE, EDIT, SHARE.”
It's just some random fun, guys; it's not at all a coordinated campaign by white supremacist fascists to inundate people with racist and fascist propaganda.
We’re making propaganda... Join us... the 4chan thread instructs
So the campaign is coordinated
4chan
The visual guide instructs potential posters to create images that are “Funny, provocative. Redpilling message (Jews involved in 9/11). Easy to Understand.” Under an image that shows a crying Pepe the frog with a needle next to its arm and a gun pointed to his head, the guide says “vaccines enforced by violence.” Under an AI-generated image of two Black men with gold chains chasing a white woman, the guide said “redpilling message (migrant crime in scandinavia).”
So they're white supremacist fascists
MAKE, EDIT, SHARE
So they are inundating people with it
whether you think it's random fun or not is subjective, but the way they've described it is accurate.
The specific incident in question was a grand larceny case where two men tried (and failed) to steal a robot owned and operated by Serve Robotics, which ultimately wants to deploy “up to 2,000 robots” to deliver food for UberEats in Los Angeles. The suspects were arrested and convicted.
So it wasn't like some incidental crime that happened to be filmed by the robot, they were literally trying to steal the robot. I mean... of course the victims provided the police with the evidence they had to help catch and convict the people who tried to rob them? This is like a hit-and-run victim giving the police their dash cam footage.
The videos of people breaking them, riding them, humping them, stealing food out of them, is so fucking on point about how some of our behavior. Why would any company trust that these things would not get fucked with?
With emergent tech you ALWAYS have to look at who’s interested.
I don’t have facts, but I’d like to think it’s more the low and middle class who use services like Doordash and UberEats.
I can imagine them soon introducing a way to “verify” the correct customer by doing a facial scan.
Suddenly cops are allowed to use the scanning and live feeds from these robots on the streets to keep an eye on persons of interest, and suddenly there are patrolling robots on the streets, that can grass people up without them even realising.
You absolutely won’t see the upper class communities with these patrolling robots around (saying it’s too oppressive!), so it becomes a tool to spy on lower socio-economic communities. And of course, any attempt to damage them is met with a fine, or arrest.
Amazon’s Ring cameras have already been used to provide recordings to cops. Those were private devices so the cops can’t just tap into them whenever they want. But a Doordash robot is fully exempt of that limitation.
I appreciate that many older games are still available on Steam either "maintained" as in the article or "remastered". Someday soon I will buy Total Annihilation...again...on Steam this time.
But I do not understand why games are seen as disposable, temporary media. Sure the latest titles are flashy but there are plenty of fucking awesome older games that are still fun to play. And as physical media disappears it becomes much more important for the gaming industry to stop pulling the ladder up behind themselves. History matters. Old <> bad.
There should be an equivalent to the classic rock stations for video games. I greatly appreciate the efforts of the MAME, archive.org and Mr. Lee to keep the classics alive.
What you say reminds me of this GDC talk. There’s a great analogy comparing the experience of buying a movie from 1989 vs a game from the same year. Why don’t companies just embrace emulation and treat it like we do video codecs?
Seems like the game companies sort of allow the emulation...unofficially. It should be part of their actual business and profits and emulation looks like a great path to that.
If the next iPhone has an unlockable bootloader, a USBC port, and a removable battery then I may just buy my very first iPhone (to run Linux on of course). With the work Asahi is doing for Mac hardware, an unlocked Apple Silicon iPhone could be an amazing Linux phone.
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