Creation has always been harder than copying - retelling a joke you heard takes little talent. Printing books is easier than writing books.
Copyright is a monetary incentive for new difficult works.
If you can push a button and a new work comes out… the question of who made it is completely fucking irrelevant. Only human effort deserves this protection.
Should photography be copyrightable? If you can just push a button and a new work comes out, does that really deserve protection? I understand it can take more effort than that when you count all the prep work, but at the end of the day, you’re still just pushing a button to create the work.
That is a great oversimplification. I mean it is a fair point Photography is taking images of the natural world. In your example, there is far more texture work,modeling, etc for it. While Photography those kind of things were already done for us, we are merely picking the angle, maybe influencing the lighting, etc. This isn't to belittle Photography since they even acknowledge there is more work to it then just click button. I think we are just seeing people belittle a medium for the barest min requirements of the medium. I wouldn't call taking a selfie of yourself doing a duckface grand art to it even though its photography but I feel people are placing "AI art" in that place where the worst of the worst is stated to be the whole medium, when merely "AI art" is just another tool in the arsenal of real artists.
In every single art discipline there are ways of creating with very little effort. You can point an iPhone at your nephew and create a photo, but you can also spend weeks stalking an animal for the perfect photo, or a natural phenomenon that rarely occurs. You can arrange the composition of a portrait, spending hours getting the lighting right. That’s ignoring the post-processing that can consume a crazy amount of time.
People think that because the technical side of photography is more accessible than in the past, there’s very little to the art.
But consider a random stranger’s phone. What are the odds that there’s a single photo on there that you would enjoy looking at, let alone having a print on your wall? Probably very low.
But then compare that to a professional’s portfolio. There’s going to be a huge difference, because a professional has the eye for a good photo. And people will happily dismiss their work because it only took 1/64th of a second to capture, and they’ll ignore the insane amounts of work that went into honing their ability.
As I said, every single discipline has low-effort works. The very idea that photography is by it’s nature so low-effort that it’s not worth copyrighting is incredibly short sighted.
As I said, every single discipline has low-effort works. The very idea that photography is by it’s nature so low-effort that it’s not worth copyrighting is incredibly short sighted.
I think their point was this case seems to be biased against new technology. We don't put into question that photography is copyrightable since its been an established art form. Even someone who just takes random pictures on their phones are able to copyright their work because even at the end of the day photography is a bygone technology and many of the rights they had for them were developed decades if not a century after the advent of the technology. Many of the copyright protections that photography has these days date back to 1988's Berne Convention, obviously there were earlier laws on the subject but they did vary quite a bit.
The very idea that AI Art is by it’s nature so low-effort that it’s not worth copyrighting is incredibly short sighted.
The precedence in it ACTUALLY involves photography, where a monkey took a picture after someone had left a camera by a group of monkeys. A picture taken by a human would be copyrightable, the picture taken by the monkey, not so.
Consider it this way. IF you are putting the same amount of effort you would put in that you would put in to commission a human artist to make work for you, then it's not yours.
If you are putting in as much effort as you would make to fully collaborate with another human, then it's yours.
What this basically does is say that corporations and people can't use AI to commission art or work-for-hire and have it copyrighted. It explicitly says that if a human uses AI as a tool they can still copyright.
It explicitly says that if a human uses AI as a tool they can still copyright.
The mere fact a human made a "prompt" in theory should be a good enough category for it be copyrightable but apparently not. As I said, having someone make a duckface selfie is automatically a copyrightable work, which requires so little effort or human element to it that it is insulting. Again I am fine with this result if the parameters of "Humans using AI as a tool" is drawn well enough in the future, right now that line is very ill defined. The problem is people are scared of this technology and there are reason to be if its implemented poorly it can hurt a great many people but we are clearly seeing people draw very hard lines that are unrealistic and these companies will do everything they can to save money. So these kind of ruling mean very little in the grand scheme since no shit Disney or whatever company probably was never going to just sell a raw collection of renders as a product besides the most budget of budget studios.
I think you're not giving people who know how to angle a selfie credit, but that's a tangent.
The law needs to start somewhere, and "you can't use AI for work-for-hire and have the copyright" is actually a pretty good place. Because Thaler wasn't claiming the copyright for himself, he was claiming the AI as the creator and himself as the owner for "Work-for-hire", kind of like how Siegal and Shuster created Superman but DC got all the money and the ownership for it.
That is precisely what the corporations trying to screw over the WGA wanted to do, have scripts from AI and themselves as owners for "work-for-hire."
Now that particular use case is struck out, and there's still room for people who use AI as tools to claim copyright personally. I think the line may have to do with how detailed the prompt is. Like, I can say "Draw a man punching another man", or I can describe in detail the man, the posing, the other man, their facial expressions, the angle...etc... "Draw a man punching another man" is way lower effort, I think, than even taking a picture of myself, because I'm not even choosing an angle. But if there's a detailed scene set, then I think I would have enough to argue with the copyright office. I'd save my prompts if I were going to test this.
Just like the work is in crafting the right prompt, finding the right models, finding the right custom training data, and then putting it all together.
That's a WHOLE other can of worms. The guy who made the AI is not necessarily the guy who uses it, and the way it's been made may have been using the efforts of other people without compensation.
Hard to say that AI using others’ work and a photo of others’ works is different. It would make take taking pictures of anything remotely urban illegal.
No, the person who made the AI is analogous to the person who manufacturers the camera. The person getting the AI to make some product is the same as the photographer.
Level of control. Everything in photography is a deliberate choice. Subject, framing, angle. Even a selfie is trying to get just the right angle. You see it with your own eyes, and select the moment you want to capture.
Sure, a straight-on photo of the Mona Lisa is not gonna be copyrightable, it's like a Xerox of the painting. But take this image of the Scranton City Hall for example.
The photographer had to choose the time of day, the exact right spot to stand, the angle to hold the camera, and the overall tone of the picture. It is distinctive from other pictures of Scranton City Hall taken at other times of the day, or from other vantage points.
It is a distinct, deliberate image meant to convey a certain image.
With AI, you enter a prompt and the computer does the framing, angling, pacing, focus...etc.. You don't have any input on the actual process if you are just entering a prompt. Now, you do if you are creating digital art using AI as a tool in your process to do smoothing and such (which is considered human authorship by the copyright office), but for things like ChatGPT and Midjourney where you just enter a prompt? It's not your arrangement unless you choose from a selection of AI outputs and put them together as a series or collage (also considered human authorship).
Scranton City Hall itself is a work designed by Edwin L Walter and Frederick Lord Brown.
If you go in person and take a picture of Scranton City Hall, the photo is your work of art. It is your copyright.
You can create an image of the Scranton City Hall using AI to help with the details, making the choice whether to keep or roll back the AI changes as you work towards the final product, and it will be your art. it would be copyrighted to you.
But if you type "an image of Scranton City Hall at night" into an AI prompt, you are getting a work where the program has determined what the angle, mood, tone, and vantage point is. That's not your art. It is the AI's an AI, like the monkey who took the photograph, is not protected by copyright law and therefore the image is not copyrightable.
What I'm saying is a teen girl angling her wrist to find the exact right angle where a blemish on her forehead and a little extra fat on her cheek is invisible is making more deliberate choices about the final image than a guy who puts "image of a teenaged girl making a duckface" into an AI prompt, and she deserves to have her image copyrighted.
Your comparing simplistic use of AI to professional photograhy. Thats not a compeling argument.
Level of control is fairly vauge point. If you use auto focus do you no longer get to copyright a work? Do you need to name your goals of the photo ahead of time so we know you didn’t capture something by accident ? What about the fact that the camera holds all the parts together for you, shouldnt you need to personally align the lesne and film as well as move the shutter. Oh what if the shutter speed is faster than whats humanly possible?
How do we test that a tool has enough input complexity to make its output human generated enough?
The ruling is ABOUT the simplistic use of AI. Right down at the bottom it says that a human using AI tools is still a human author. Thaler tried to copyright the AI as the author, and himself as owning it due to work-for-hire. The Judge said no. Because if you just put a prompt in and get art out, you are not a creator.
Your examples are all of a human using automated tools to make art when the ruling specifically states that a human using automated tools is an author. The work is only non-copyrightable when AI is the author.
The precedent is of a freaking monkey taking a picture, for asimov's sake. Honestly, photographers do not deserve the shit they're getting piled on them in this thread.
@hglman Also, I'm hurt. I gave you a distinct example of the use of AI as a tool to assist an artist in that comment so that I could COVER the use of AI as a tool rather than having an AI as the author and you say my argument only covers "simplistic use of AI."
I really don’t understand why it feels like so many people are desperately ready to let AI tools annihilate the arts, and defend it so viciously.
Sure it’s fun now, but in reality all it’s going to do is completely enshitify graphic design, photography, music production, marketing and commissioned arts as career options. All of these systems are so valuable because the largest corps in the world are drooling at the idea of cutting all the human cost of any creative fields they engage with.
Why are people who aren’t in those positions of power so excited for AI to completely devalue the arts? It’s the most human thing we have and people are so ready to just piss it away to computers.
Remember when Terragen got really good, and nobody painted landscapes anymore? No? Well there you go.
This is going to go terribly for media giants, because if they don’t need people to make stuff, neither do you. You, right now, can push a button and get a deluge of whatever images you can describe. They’re not great. But the technology has existed for something like eight months, and any shortcoming people can spot is feedback that makes it better.
And stop trying to ruin the term “enshittification” when this has nothing to do with monopsony.
In any case:
Demand 30-year copyright, no exceptions. We need to restore the public domain.
Mandatory licensing is unavoidably necessary with streaming’s petit monopolies. All media platforms should serve all media.
Any humans left in the loop who aren’t getting a cut of their runaway successes have been robbed, and the people responsible belong in jail.
The answer I see the most when I ask how AI has changed the world has been "Art is now available to the masses and not just a small group" meaning it's people who think that making is something only select, talented people can do and not something that anyone can do. I suspect a certain amount of jealousy, and that they don't understand that accomplished artists have spent years honing their skills, so they cheer AI as making them able to produce artwork when really it's just another form of asking someone else to do art for you.
I can empathize with the feeling of thinking “gosh I could never do that, your work is amazing”, and I think especially now with social media, people only see the final product, skipping the countless hours of work and years of dedication. Kinda like the old “man your camera takes amazing pictures” thing.
As a person that is on that journey with multiple artistic disciplines, some of my lowest days have been when I have struggled to improve my skills. Its depressing and it hurts, but with those downs comes the peaks of making genuine improvement and progress. I can ride that feeling of a single success for months. Its dramatic, but I worry for people younger than me being completely disconnected from the arts and the personal journey that is so important.
Getting an AI to make good art takes a lot of human effort, at least with the current generation of AI art generators. But fortunately that appears to be accounted for:
AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances.
I imagine it's no different from creating a piece of art by starting with a copy of something conventional in the public domain, such as the Mona Lisa. If you apply enough of your own work to it it becomes yours.
Yeah, it's like... Well, if you put a prompt in Midjourney and it generates a picture, that's commissioning art from an AI. If you are using digital drawing tools and use some AI for finishing touches, that's making art.
Or if you commission works from midjourney, then arrange them into a cohesive whole like a collage, then the collage is art by you but the individual pieces are art from AI. If the studio puts a prompt into an LLM and gets a script, it's not copyrightable. If they pay a writer who uses an AI to correct the grammar on a script or search for errors, that's copyrightable.
It's an easy distinction until you get into AI-generated performances of people's likeness. That'll be... interesting.
There's a lot of middle ground between this two extremes, though. Suppose you iterate on your prompt again and again and again to exact the image you had intended. Does the end result constitute art? Would it ever? What about the prompts? There was difficult effort, but no "digital brush" on a "digital canvas" (so to speak).
But with things like Stable Diffusion you have tools that are like inpainting and outpainting where you can brush out/in details you want changed. I think this is a far more interesting question since in your own its just a raw output from AI just with a revamped prompt which the court stated can't be copyrighted. Unless what you meant was you first run a Txt2img pass then you use img2img with some minor changes like drawing something or drawing things out or changing colors, would that then quantify as a "copyrightable work" since then you do have a more human element to direction.
In-painting really makes it difficult. What's the difference between in-painting an image (that is to say, AI generated texture) vs photoshops Clone Stamp?
Twitter replaced the logo after Musk requested for people to post logo submissions and that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.” Musk then pinned a tweet featuring a video created by a Twitter user named Sawyer Merritt and changed his own profile photo to the new X logo. Musk did note that the new X logo is an “interim” one, so it could be replaced at a later stage.
Not really; the XOrg logo is clearly designed in two parts, with a break between the two sections. It's absolutely reminiscent of it, though, just different enough that you can't really call it a copy.
US copyright law doesn't allow for protection of something like that. A dingbat, yes, but if it's very plainly recognizable as an X then the exact shape and output of that typeface isn't protectable. You can even print out a font, scan it, and create a new copycat font from it. The only thing you can't do is reproduce the actual typeface file itself, which is fundamentally a single copyrighted piece of software. Some other countries allow more protection on the shapes of individual letters, but I don't think you'd ever win a case anywhere on such a simple geometric shape as this X.
What's even funnier is that anyone pretending to be the creator of the logo is a liar. (It is a scammer's website, after all.)
It's a symbol that's part of the "mathematical alphanumerical symbols" subset of Unicode since ~2001: 𝕏, also known as Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X (U+1D54F).
Interested to see how this plays out! Their argument that the only way a LLM could summarize their book is by ingesting the full copyrighted work seems a bit suspect, as it could’ve ingested plenty of reviews and summaries written by humans and combined that information.
I’m not confident that they’ll be able to prove OpenAI or Meta infringed copyright, just as i’m not confident they’ll be able to prove that they didn’t violate copyright. I don’t know if anyone really knows what these things are trained on.
We got to where we are now with fair use in search and online commentary because of a ton of lawsuits setting precedent, not surprising we’ll have to do the same with machine learning.
ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”
I think this is where the crux of the case lies since the article mentions these are only available illegally through torrents.
This is starting to touch on the root of why they keep calling this "AI", "training", etc. They aren't doing this for strictly marketing, they are attempting to skew public opinion. These companies know intimately how to do that.
They're going to argue that if torrents are legal for educational purposes (ie the loophole that all trackers use), and they're just "training" an "AI" then they're just engaging in education. And an ignorant public might buy it.
These kinds of cases will be viewed as landmark cases in the future and honestly I don't have huge hopes. The history of these companies is engineer first, excuse the lack of ethics later. Or the philosophy of "it's easier to apologize than ask".
It's the defacto term for how we fit a statistical model to data, unrelated to any copyright concepts. I'm pretty sure we called it "training" back in 1997 when I was doing neural networks at uni, and it's probably been used well before then too.
Neural nets are based on the concept of Hebbian learning (from the 1930s), because they are trying to mimic how a biological neural network learns.
This concept of training/learning has persisted because it's a good analogy of what we are trying to do with these statistical models, even if they aren't strictly neural networks.
TBH I'm not really familiar with how the AI has developed over the years. Wikipedia says that ChatGPT is proprietary, which leads me to believe it's hasn't been developed with research grants or government involvement. Is this the case? Can a company legally develop an AI by obtaining its learning material through illegal means? Which it sounds as if Open AI and Meta did through the use of Bibliotik.
I can't see how this doesn't have some legal ramification, but IANAL.
OpenAI is called that for a reason. They absolutely were a non-profit research org initially, so would have been eligible for research grants, etc. They would probably have gotten a pass on using the torrents too, for the same reason.
They went to a private for-profit model later after they built their AI's and wanted to start selling them as a service. How the hell all of that plays out as the company they are now is anyone's guess.
This concept of training/learning has persisted because it's a good analogy of what we are trying to do with these statistical models, even if they aren't strictly neural networks.
It may be that no one currently knows exactly what these things are trained on, but it could be determined. If you know the methodology you can figure out what data is being used. The companies involved are going to resist letting anyone find out, but I’m hoping a court case will break that black box open.
One of the many problems with this form of AI is the degree to which we don’t know where it’s getting its information from. Without that, there is no way to determine the reliability of the results. They can sound perfectly reasonable and be entirely untrue.
Even if they did train the model on the entire text of the book, that's still not necessarily copyright violation. I would think not, since the resulting model doesn't actually have a copy of the book embedded within it.
AFAIK it takes these large bodies of text and rather than digesting them and keeping it in some sort of database, rather it holistically (and i'm generalising here), see how often certain words are strung together and taking note of that. Let's call them weights.
Then users can prompt something and the 'magic' here is that it is able to pick out words of different weights based on the prompt. Be it, are you writing an angry email to your boss, a code in python, or structure for a book.
But it is unable to recreate the book from a prompt.
People who know the topic more intimately please correct me if I am wrong .
How do we "know" anything where the answers are just being made up as part of humanity's collective cultural game of Calvinball?
Courts in various jurisdictions will make various rulings. Judges will interpret them in various ways. Legislators will chime in with new legislation and new treaties. Internet arguments will churn away with a whole range of assumptions about what is true or false that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
I present my opinion here. I feel it is well informed and I can back it up in various ways when challenged. But nobody "knows" anything because these aren't laws of physics or math that we're talking about here.
Or did you mean whether we know if a copy of the book is embedded in the model? That can be more objectively tested, at least.
But the server used to calculate the model would have a copy of it. If training an AI model is not fair use then the mere act of loading a book you don't have a license for into the server would be copyright infringement. Like text book. It's a unauthorized digital copy. It's all very untested legal grounds and seems like lots of people want to be the first to test it. Not everyone has a great case but if the courts interpret things a certain way there's gonna be lots of payouts so maybe best to get in line early?
Perhaps, but that's a separate legal issue from the model itself. You might have committed a breach of copyright in the process of gathering the material that the AI was trained on but the model itself is not a copy of that material and so is not itself illegal to train or use. And perhaps not even that, since downloading a pirated book is not the illegal part (uploading it is).
As you say, there's some untested legal waters here. But it seems likely to me that the best that Silverman will accomplish is some nibbling and quibbling around the edges.
Right but you can sue for what happened on the training server. I'm guessing the training server still exists. I doubt they wiped it completely before the next round of training. If the training server infringes copyright then you still lose the suit. Maybe. Remember that copyright law is not written with the internet in mind. If you have a "copy" and it's not authorized that might just be enough for a backwards court to find infringement.
I think of it in extremes. Imagine you had a video producing model of the future. Could you then load up every MLB game recorded and train the model to make novel baseball games based on that or would the MLB be pissed you had a server full of every MLB game ever recorded?
If you can give some vague prompts to the model to obtain something that is close enough to a significant chunk of the work that, had it been written by a human, was susceptible of being considered plagiarism... then I'd say the same laws protecting from plagiarism should operate there.
It doesn't matter whether it's really stored there in some form or not (in fact, it's probably ok for to store copyrighted material in a private server as long as it's lawfully obtained), but whether the output that is being distributed to third parties is violating the license of the work or not.
If you can give some vague prompts to the model to obtain something that is close enough to a significant chunk of the work that, had it been written by a human, was susceptible of being considered plagiarism... then I'd say the same laws protecting from plagiarism should operate there.
Perhaps, but that's not even remotely what's being accused in this case. They're asking ChatGPT for a summary of the book and it's generating a summary a couple of pages long. Nothing is even close to verbatim, and I don't know enough about any of the books to know if those summaries are even accurate. In my experience ChatGPT often ends up hallucinating a lot of details when asked stuff like this.
It’s difficult to tell to what extent books are encoded into the model. The data might be there in some abstract form or another.
During training it is kind of instructed to plagiarize the text it’s given. The instruction is basically “guess the next word of this unfinished excerpt”. It probably won’t memorize all input it’s given, but there’s a nonzero chance it manages to memorize some significant excerpts.
It’s difficult to tell to what extent books are encoded into the model. The data might be there in some abstract form or another.
This is a court case so the accusers are going to have to prove it.
The evidence provided is that ChatGPT can produce two-page summaries of the books. The summaries are of unknown accuracy, I haven't read the books myself so I have no idea how much of those summaries are hallucinations. This is very weak.
They have to prove it but if they case gets far enough they will have the right to ask for discovery and they can see for themselves what was included. Thats why it might just settle quietly to avoid discovery.
The important question is not what was in the training data. The important question is what is in the model. The training data is not magically compressed into the model like some kind of physics-defying ultra-Zip, the model does not contain a copy of the training data.
There are open-source language models out there, you can experiment with training them. Unless you massively over-fit it on a specific source document (an error that real AI training procedures do everything they can to avoid) you won't be able to extract the source documents from the resulting model.
I have just read elsewhere that they're using the same account as Instagram uses. So if you have an Instagram account, and have done nothing with Threads at all, they're likely still counting you as a Threads user.
yeah my insta was not set up for threads when i opened the app. i had to purposefully consent to linking the two accounts. Seems to me like its 10 mil actual users.
In the US alone, Instagram has over 150 million users. Even if the only country accessing it was the US, the number should be much higher than 10 mill, were they automatically adding the users.
They're not counting all Instagram users. However, if you have an Instagram account, all you have to do is download the Threads app, and it'll log in with the same saved credentials. The barrier to entry is extremely low, so a lot of people have at least tried it.
Lemmy and kbin, find a community and stick with it or join a bunch. If you really don’t want to use discord for a hangout then there’s revolt and guilded for voip clients. You can also try mastodon and matrix, or really a combo of things.
I'm on discord but not for the sociability so much. However, there are some hyper specific subjects that get served up there. Personally, I find it very chaotic.
The one thing Discord has over IRC is logging. If someone could develop an IRCv# with constant channel logging and a history like Discord, I would be there immediately.
Back in the day my mirc client logged as long as I was online. Had logs for certain channels that went back 7 years at one point, but sadly lost those logs in a HDD meltdown.
I had 28.8 dialup when people in my neighborhood had DSL, because my folks were cheap and old-fashioned. They were still accustomed to 1200/2400 baud, why should we waste the money on 56K? We finally upgraded when I got a Hayes 56.6K from Dennis Hayes at a show, and I insisted on installing the thing myself. So I wasn't able to stay online and keep logs.
Discord seems to be sort of adapting to that? In the /r/iosbeta discord, they have topics that sort of act like reddit posts. But yeah, so far, I'm just all over the place. A couple of lemmy instances, Kbin primarily, and a lot of mastodon, with discord filling in when I'm bored. Although discord is very bad as a replacement for reddit/twitter, the nostalgia and it feeling very IRC is kinda nice.
There's a learning curve with using federated platforms wether it's Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon. Things will definitely improve as these platforms get more fleshed out but as is, it'll probably come off confusing to a casual user.
To give Reddit and Twitter credit, they made it convenient to join communities as you just need a single account to interact with hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of people. It's convenient as a user that you only need one account as opposed to 30.
If anything, we might end up reverting back to using smaller forums until the fediverse has time to catch up. I think it's unsustainable as a business model and we're seeing this with the self-destruction of both Reddit and Twitter where they're leaning too far to try and make a profit where it's affecting user choice and experience. Most people that ran web forums back in the day didn't do it for the money but instead they wanted to foster a community. Yes going back to that might cause the internet to get a bit more fragmented, but I think it'll work out for the best as both forums and the fediverse puts users first.
The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping...again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc.... Essentially they've all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the "new wave" of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.
Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it's not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.
I think another major factor is that this is really the first time since 2008 that companies have had to deal with interest rates on their loans.
For 15 years, corporate money was functionally free from the government banks. It allowed a lot of things to happen that could not have otherwise happened.
Now that its not free anymore, the bar of profitability is suddenly a lot higher than it was last fall.
This is really the biggest part. There isn't room for the future right now, gains need to be realized to pay other investments and if not portfolios leaned out.
Everyday Twitter erodes its worth for short-term wealth.
This is, and will always be, the main push of capitalism. This isn't some cute new term like "enshittification" or something, this is just good ol fashion rent seeking and it's capitalism working as intended.
In hindsight, it seems absurd that we collectively trust a for-profit company to disseminate official information. Governments should probably take this opportunity to spin up their own Mastodon instances and migrate away from Twitter.
Yeah, I'm with you 100%. The same thing could be said about reputable news organizations. And really, there's no better "verification" than people and agencies having their accounts on servers tied to domains that they own.
We don’t like, that they have a monopoly on these platforms, we don’t like the idea of influencers, we don’t like cult of personality, we don’t like to loose control over our data, we don’t like English speakers as a whole, we don’t like US politics, we don’t like radical politics (even though I am a radical right, I hate everyone else who is radical right and more so the left. Actually I hate every political position), we also hate to loose our productivity for screentime and the list could go on.
We Germans are control freaks. We have always been. In the past we tried to enforce it with weapons. Now we are desperately trying to enforce our values with generosity. Running around the world and throwing money around.
We are longing for absolute control, centralised in Germany and not in some foreign third world country without healthcare (USA).
When we think back on how the Google Street View coverage looks in the EU when the majority of Germans objected to getting their houses filmed, there just might be a certain attitude against big tech companies.
I don't mind having to watch an ad every now and then, a couple of years ago the ads were still acceptable, watch 30s, one ad, the video starts and enjoy. Now it is two or three ads and the start, which can be longer than the video itself, and you can have ads in the middle of the video. It just becomes very annoying, very quickly. Hence, I started blocking these ads more and more.
Yeah that's the thing. I'm happy to watch reasonable ads but the concept of reasonable seems to continuously shift. I was happy with a single 15s ad occasionally but it's:
2x 10s ads
1x 15s ad and 1x 10s ad (with a skip at 5s in)
1x 15s as (with maybe a skip at 5s)
Like the pattern and the frequency are all over the place and it feels like I'm constantly watching ads.
I get that need to pay for traffic / usage, but I'm watching 720p / 1080p at compressed quality. How much do they truly need
And don't forget that even after that you still have to watch baked-in "This video is sponsored by <insert shady company here>" adds since the actual revenue that gets passed to creators from youtube is so low that to keep the ship afloat they have to look for additional revenue streams.
There is "anti adblock" blockers, mine work on even the most aggressively advertising sites and i don't think the adblock developers will stand still either.
uBlock Origin on Firefox is best, enable all the filter lists (except the regional language ones). Not to be confused with uBlock, they are not the same.
You mean.... that you can predict one's income by where they fall on the "Roach Motel Apartment" to "3x McMansions and 2x condos in NYC" spectrum?
Cuz I find it surprising. Most of the millionaires/billionaires club don't actually post a real income. They have investments, and take loans against those investments. (or the growth in value there of.)
It's been my experience that F-150 owners are arrogant, southern-fried buttholes, but anyone who owns a Cybertruck is probably worse, just by merit of being associated with Elon Musk.
I don't think anyone driving a Tesla owes anyone an excuse. I've been driving one for a few years and one of the first things I did after purchasing one was block Elon on Twitter.
You don't have to respect a business or the people that run it to buy and enjoy what they're selling.
I owe one to myself every time this asshole posts some far right bullshit on Twitter. Really makes just want to torch the car, sometimes. Won't do that cause it's a fine car and utterly innocent, of course.
It is a reality that Teslas were the best affordable EV you could get for a long time.
Now that the IONIQ is below it in price, maybe we can be a bit judgier for new vehicle purchases.... but even still, that is remarkably few affordable EVs available to the typical consumer and there still are some reasonable reasons to pick a Tesla. Unfortunately, that is mostly their charger network, which is the lightning cable of chargers trying to pretend that a totally superior ISO charger isn't better for consumers in every way.
I am going to judge a lot of them for driving like assholes. There's a reason people call them Tasshole.
At least where I live Tesla is a good option for overpaid office guys, the guys that used to drive a BMW or Audi. Lots of Tesla drivers that are impatient, aggressive and just annoying on the road.
There are a lot of bad drivers out there. We all see them every day and it doesn't matter what make or model vehicle they're driving.
I can also say that your interpretation of who is driving these vehicles is a wild generalization. Claiming that Teslas are being driven by 'overpaid office guys' is a stretch, and I don't think you understand how much a Tesla costs relative to any other vehicle of the same year out there.
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