• 41 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There is a legal, regulated, mostly safe method to buy cigarettes. It is inaccessible if you are under a certain age, but only the seller/provider is punished for violating regulations. It’s okay to have restrictions on what children can consume.

    While current laws on illegal drugs do not work, arguing against any regulation whatsoever is similarly silly, the laws obviously work. Smoking rates have dramatically declined since those laws and public education campaigns began.






























  • Well, why would they ditch for piracy? Netflix was smart about the whole thing: adding an authorized household (not user, entire household) is cheaper than creating a new subscription. The people subscribing to Netflix aren’t fundamentally opposed to paying for streaming, they were opposed to an unfair change in the business model. Netflix countered with a seemingly fair change in the business model that now eliminates the hassles that come with password sharing and could make the marginal increase in cost per household fairly small. It was overall a pretty smart business decision.

    There are many many problems with Netflix, including their growth-based business model, the lack of insight into their finances, and the way they’re slowly enshittifying the film industry. They’re a major reason for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. However, this change wasn’t stupid and people weren’t stupid for going along with it. I don’t see how it would lead to an overall increase in piracy, that’s being driven by the many new streaming services forcing costs on consumers. But consumers won’t blame Netflix for that because, frankly, that’s not Netflix’s fault.



  • I’m halfway through the second book. There is a lot that’s very culturally specific and while Ken Liu provides notes for a lot of it, there’s some stuff that he doesn’t really explain, which may be part of it. Some of it is just the way things are written or described, it’s a different style.



  • You’re making a hasty generalization here

    I’m really not, though I’ll readily admit I’m simplifying things. An LLM can only create something it’s been given. I guess it can generate a string of characters and assign a definition to it, but it’s not really intentional creation. There are many similarities between how a human generates something and how an LLM does, but to argue they’re the same radically oversimplifies how humans work. While we can program an LLM, we literally do not have the capability to replicate a human brain.

    For example, can you tell me what emotions the LLM had when it produced the output it did? Did its physical condition have any effect? What about its past, not just what it has learned but how it was treated? What is its motivation? A human response to anything involving creativity factors in many things that we aren’t even consciously aware of, and these are things an LLM doesn’t have.

    The study you’re citing is from Google, there’s likely some bias and selective reporting. That said, we were talking about creativity, not regurgitating facts or analyzing data. I think it’s universally accepted that as the tech gets better, it’s preferable to have a computer make the first attempt at a diagnosis, especially for a scan or large data analysis, then have a human confirm.

    For the remix example, don’t forget that samples get attribution. Artists credit what they sampled and get called out when they don’t. I’m actually unclear as to whether an LLM actually can cite to how it derived its output just because the coders haven’t revealed if there’s some sort of derivation log.


  • The problem is essentially how do you define ownership? Is there a right to not make something the copyright holder owns publicly available?

    I think in the cases of abandonware or more recently the moves by media companies to delist certain media for tax benefits, there’s a good argument to be made over forfeiting the copyright, so it’s now public domain and fair game. But I also think for something like the Star Wars Holiday Special, where the creator/copyright holder (not sure about that status post-Disney acquisition) genuinely hates it and does not want it available to the public, the owner should be allowed to restrict access to it.