FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 9 days 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, 10 days ago

A lack of understanding about how copyright and licensing works.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

His whole purpose is to assassinate the leaders of his opponents.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

Also, they're commonly found stored with people's valuables - coin stashes, jewelry, etc. They were clearly valuable. Many of them don't appear to have any wear on them either, so if they had a utilitarian use it likely didn't involve lashing stuff together.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

There are larger girths to be found in the animal kingdom. Those Romans could get wild.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

The hole isn't used in the process of knitting with these things, just the knobs on the corners.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

They weren't cave men, they had plenty of metal stuff.

These dodecahedra are vastly over-complicated for "utilitarian" uses. As Boinkage says, if you need something for fastening some ropes together just to lash stuff, why use an intricate forging like this? All those knobs, the complex hollow shape, the variously-sized holes, those are features that took a lot of work to add. If it's a utilitarian piece then those features need to be for something. Otherwise we'd be finding examples of simpler versions that lacked those features.

The "they could be for knitting glove fingers" idea, for example, could be just as easily done using a hunk of wood with five nails driven into it.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

So the aid bill passed. Guess that means we're in WW3 now, then?

Or maybe that was just yet more empty rhetoric?

FaceDeer, 10 days 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, 10 days ago

I think he's just snowballed in popularity over the years because he's good at reading these scripts in a way that sounds both smart and fun. The different channels focus on different styles and subject areas, letting you pick and choose what kind of thing you're interested in.

I rather like his "Decoding the Unknown" channel, where he gets scripts debunking various paranormal or otherwise mysterious events and he reads them for the first time as it's being recorded, taking lots of opportunities to interject his own theories and speculation and just generally rag on the concept of the paranormal as he goes.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

There isn't necessarily direct causality here, their views are dropping through the floor regardless.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

You realize that if cases like this are won then only the "giant fucking corporations" are going to be able to afford the datasets to train AI with?

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

I don't think you're familiar with the sort of resources necessary to train a useful LLM up from scratch. Individuals won't have access to that for personal use.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

They're the ones training "base" models. There are a lot of smaller base models floating around these days with open weights that individuals can fine-tune, but they can't start from scratch.

What legislation like this would do is essentially let the biggest players pull the ladders up behind them - they've got their big models trained already, but nobody else will be able to afford to follow in their footsteps. The big established players will be locked in at the top by legal fiat.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You'd be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that's publicly available to anyone with eyes. There's no basic difference between training an LLM off of a website and indexing it for a search engine, for example. Both of them look at public data and build up a model based on an analysis of it. Neither makes a copy of the data itself, so existing copyright laws don't prohibit it. People arguing for outlawing LLM training are arguing to dramatically expand the concept of copyright in a dangerous new direction it's never covered before.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

But you're claiming that there's already no ladder. Your previous paragraph was about how nobody but the big players can actually start from scratch.

Adding cost only makes the threshold higher. The opposite of the way things should be going.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You'd be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that's publicly available

How? This is a copyright suit.

Yes, and I'm saying that it shouldn't be. Analyzing data isn't covered by copyright, only copying data is covered by copyright. Training an AI on data isn't copying it. Copyright should have no hold here.

Like I said in my last comment, the gathering of the data isn't in contention. That's still perfectly legal and anyone can do it. The suit is about the use of that data in a paid product.

That's the opposite of what copyright is for, though. Copyright is all about who can copy the data. One could try to sue some of these training operations for having made unauthorized copies of stuff, such as the situation with BookCorpus (a collection of ebooks that many LLMs have trained on that is basically pirated). But even in that case the thing that is a copyright violation is not the training of the LLM itself, it's the distribution of BookCorpus. And one detail of piracy that the big copyright holders don't like to talk about is that generally speaking downloading pirated material isn't the illegal part, it's uploading it, so even there an LLM trainer might be able to use BookCorpus. It's whoever it is that gave them the copy of BookCorpus that's in trouble.

Once you have a copy of some data, even if it's copyrighted, there's no further restriction on what you can do with that data in the privacy of your own home. You can read it. You can mulch it up and make paper mache sculptures out of it. You can search-and-replace the main character's name with your own, and insert paragraphs with creepy stuff. Copyright is only concerned with you distributing copies of it. LLM training is not doing that.

If you want to expand copyright in such a way that rights-holders can tell you what analysis you can and cannot subject their works to, that's a completely new thing and it's going down a really weird and dark path for IP.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

Yes. Why does something need to be done about it? If you want to outlaw something it behooves the people arguing for it to explain why it's necessary to outlaw it, and why it's worth the tradeoffs that come with outlawing it. Things aren't prohibited by default.

In this case it seems to me that adding some kind of "right to analyze" that copyright owners could control would have a lot of utterly terrible implications and few if any positive ones.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

You added an /s, but do you think other countries wouldn't take advantage of the US outlawing or heavily restricting a technology like this?

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

I know this is a popular thing to be angry about, but this time there was an actual fine. The consequences are being ratcheted up. The judge is just taking as much care as possible to make sure that all the "t"s are crossed and "i"s dotted along the way, otherwise he risks the whole trial being thrown out in the end. Look at some of the other high-profile "this rich guy's guilty as sin but got off anyway" cases, they often boil down to some screw-up that doesn't disprove the overall case but still invalidates the trial. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby pop to mind.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

And even though it seems like a tiny slap on Trump's tiny wrist, it's still an escalation. So next time Trump flagrantly violates gag orders the judge can escalate more. If there's an appeal it'll be important to be able to show the judge didn't jump straight to the harshest penalties.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

Yes, but as I explained, the judge is proceeding by steps up the ladder of consequences. The next time Trump violates a gag order he can now say "I have demonstrated that fines are insufficient, and so I'm moving on to jail time."

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

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

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

It's harder than on Reddit, though, because the population as a whole is so much smaller. There aren't alternative communities for most topics- there aren't communities at all for most topics- and you keep seeing the same small group of prolific posters so the views aren't as diverse. If you happen to align with that group's views, great, but I find it a lot easier to end up as the lone unpopular view than on Reddit.

I'm hoping this will continue to improve over time as the Fediverse grows and diversifies more.

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

I haven't been paying close attention but it seems to be doing well. I originally joined the Fediverse on kbin.social because I liked the idea of supporting an alternative to a Lemmy monoculture, especially given what I'd seen of Lemmy's devs' views, but over time it became apparent that the lone developer of kbin wasn't intending to take advantage of outside assistance and that it wasn't going to work out as a single-person project in the long run. So I'm glad mBin forked, it seems to have picked up the necessary momentum. The mBin instance I'm on has had the occasional downtime or bug but nowhere near the kind of trouble kBin routinely had.

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

There's already Conservapedia.

FaceDeer, 11 days ago

Very much so. Last I heard the userbase was composed of roughly half truly sincere ultra-conservative nut and half parody accounts attempting to portray ultra-conservative views too extreme and nutty for the sincere ultra-conservatives, and nobody could tell who was what.