FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 8 days ago

I wish more people realized science fiction authors aren't even trying to make good predictions about the future, even if that's something they were good at. They're trying to make stories that people will enjoy reading and therefore that will sell well. Stories where nothing goes particularly wrong tend not to have a compelling plot, so they write about technology going awry so that there'll be something to write about. They insert scary stuff because people find reading about scary stuff to be fun.

There might actually be nothing bad about the Torment Nexus, and the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" was nonsense. We shouldn't be making policy decisions based off of that.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

Except it's not a threat to the future of all libraries, it's a threat to the future of "libraries" that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks. Basically turning themselves into book-focused piracy sites.

I'm incredibly frustrated with Internet Archive for bringing this on themselves. It is not their mandate to fight copyright, that's something better left in the hands of activist organizations like the EFF. The Internet Archive's mandate is to archive the Internet, to store and preserve knowledge. Distributing it is secondary to that goal. And picking unnecessary fights with big publishing houses like this is directly contrary to that goal, since now the Internet Archive is in danger.

It's like they're carrying around a precious baby and they decided it was a good idea to start whacking a bear with a stick. Now the bear is eating their leg and they're screaming "oh my god help me, the bear is threatening this baby!" Well yeah, but you shouldn't have brought a baby with you when you went on a bear-whacking expedition. You should have known exactly what that bear was going to do.

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

If you want to get away from the Lemmy codebase entirely I can vouch that mBin works quite nicely. I've been on fedia.io for months now and only once or twice hit some kind of technical problem, which was resolved quickly.

FaceDeer, 18 days ago

Who else is better equipped?

The EFF, for example. Fighting lawsuits for the sake of internet freedom is their reason for being. Sci-hub, for ebooks more specifically. Or Library Genesis. Those are organizations specifically devoted to fighting against excessive copyright restrictions on books.

Just because you perceive them as unworthy to bear the challenge

You're not understanding what I'm saying here. I don't think Internet Archive is unworthy to bear the challenge. I think they're not well suited to it, and when they inevitably lose the lawsuits they've jumped head-first into they're risking damage to other causes that are very important and unrelated to this particular fight.

FaceDeer, 20 days ago

Important to note that the initial form of this treatment is to trigger the growth of teeth that failed to grow in the first place, at least last I read about it. An important first step, but for now it may be dependent on there being an existing "tooth bud" down in the jaw to get going.

I suspect that in the long run we'll need to figure out how to implant a new tooth bud, probably made using the patient's stem cells, to grow replacements for teeth that have been lost later in life.

FaceDeer, 21 days ago

Only those who don't care about privacy and use Windows.

So most people, then.

FaceDeer, 21 days ago

All industrial users pay lower, because they're able to apply economies of scale and locate themselves in places with lower power costs. Some of them are big enough that the utilities will build power lines and plants specifically to make electricity cheaper. It's not just a matter of "oh, they're rich, so we'll charge them less."

FaceDeer, 25 days ago

If AI has the means to generate inappropriate material, then that means the developers have allowed it to train from inappropriate material.

That's not how generative AI works. It's capable of creating images that include novel elements that weren't in the training set.

Go ahead and ask one to generate a bonkers image description that doesn't exist in its training data and there's a good chance it'll be able to make one for you. The classic example is an "avocado chair", which an early image generator was able to produce many plausible images of despite only having been trained on images of avocados and chairs. It understood the two general concepts and was able to figure out how to meld them into a common depiction.

FaceDeer, 25 days ago

Better a dozen innocent men go to prison than one guilty man go free?

FaceDeer, 28 days ago

But then you get that awkward situation where you go on vacation, open your luggage to get a fresh pair of socks or whatever, and find that you brought nothing but guns and ammo along with you on your trip.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

"Model collapse" can be easily avoided by keeping old human data with new synthetic data in the training set. The old archives of Reddit content from before there was AI are still around.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

You answered your question in the sentence right after your question. The landlord owns the property and so he can do what he wants with it. He's letting you live there but has decided he wants something in exchange for letting you live there. If currency didn't exist he'd want something else in exchange.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

This sort of thing is so self-sabotaging. The website already has your comment, and a license to use it. By deleting your stuff from the web you only ensure that the AI is definitely going to be the better resource to go to for answers.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, so I don't see anything wrong here. The character's using a more generic term when talking to a layperson.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

In Weinstein's case the prosecution brought in testimony from women who weren't part of the charges that were actually being tried, though, which is a pretty big difference from what happened here. Clifford is kind of central to this case.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

A nice feature to note is that Ukraine is charging people for this sort of corruption.

Instead of, you know, letting them run for president again.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

I've been saying this for years, this was an incredibly boneheaded move by the Internet Archive and they just keep on doubling down on it. They shouldn't have done it in the first place. When they got sued, they should have immediately admitted they screwed up and settled - the publishers would probably have been fine with a token punishment and a promise to shut down their ebook library, it's not like IA cost them anything significant. But they just keep on fighting, and it's only making things worse.

This isn't even IA's purpose in the first place! They archive the Internet. They're like a guy who's caring for a precious baby who decides he should go poke a bear with a stick, and when the bear didn't respond at first he whacked it over the nose with the stick instead. Now the bear's got his leg and he's screaming "oh no, protect my baby!" And it's entirely his fault the baby's in danger.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Except that's probably not what they're for, I saw a video recently (I think it was this one) that went into detail about the reasons why it doesn't make much sense for these to be a knitting tool.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

It's tongue in cheek, but I rather like this one.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Oh, for crying out loud, Internet Archive. This is not the fight you should be fighting.

The Internet Archive is the steward of an incredibly valuable repository of archived information. Much of what it's got squirrelled away is likely unique, irreplaceable historical records of things that have otherwise been lost. And they're risking all of that in this quixotic battle to share books that are widely available anyway and not at all at risk.

"Lending" out those books in the way that they did was blatant copyright violation spitting directly into the eye of publishers known to be litigious and vindictive. All to fight for a point that's not part of their mandate, archiving the Internet. They're going to lose and it's going to hurt them badly.

Each copy can only be loaned to one person at a time, to mimic the lending attributes of physical books.

Internet Archive believes that its approach falls under fair use but publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House disagree. They filed a lawsuit in 2020 equating IA’s controlled digital lending operation to copyright infringement.

That is not what the lawsuit was about, Internet Archive. If you're going to fight this fight then be honest about what exactly you're fighting for. The lawsuit in 2020 was not about one-person-at-a-time lending, it was about your "COVID Emergency Library" where you removed all restrictions and let people download books freely.

I strongly believe that copyright has gone berserk of the decades and grown like an uncontrolled weed, harming the intellectual commons for the sake of megacorporations' profits. I'm a subscriber on this piracy community, after all. I believe in the position that Internet Archive is fighting for here, despite all the downvotes I'm surely about to be hammered with. But they shouldn't be the ones fighting it. Let someone else take this one on. Sci-Hub or Library Genesis, maybe.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Hm. I wonder what the lack of any sort of punctuation at all says about you.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

The patents on sildenafil expired in 2020.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It does, but a thick layer of matter is actually a pretty good radiation shield. Material is rated based on its "halving distance" - how many centimeters of stuff it takes for the radiation passing through it to be reduced by half. It never quite blocks all of it, but if you keep piling on additional halvings you can get the radiation levels down as small as you want.

This article has a table of values for how well various types of material blocks gamma rays, for example. Sand has a halving distance of 2.9 inches, and solid stone is 2.2 inches, so a couple of feet thickness will provide thousand-fold reduction in radiation.

Other kinds of radiation penetrate heavy elements better, but those kinds of radiation actually get blocked by light elements instead, such as the hydrogen in water. Mars has a relative abundance of water so you can incorporate that into your shielding too.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I can't recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I've wanted, and executable code is just too risky.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It's not just you that they're worried could get stabbed, it could be anyone.

I took some psych courses in University and one of my profs was full of anecdotes about patients he'd cared for, there were people who were perfectly nice and calm and then in a split second something would go unpredictably wrong and they'd be savagely attacking whoever they could get their hands on.

And then a moment later they'd be beside themselves with dismay over having "lost it", apologizing sincerely and profusely. He said it was really hard keeping on your toes in there. He permanently lost his hearing in one ear when one of his patients slapped him out of the blue one time, to both of their surprise. If anything remotely like a weapon was easily accessible it could go very badly.

I'm sorry your experience was unpleasant, and of course I can't remotely speak to it myself - it was your experience, not mine. But it could be that the stuff that was done was for everyone's protection.