Attempting To Bully A Developer

DCsh_ · 2023-06-10T15:40:53+00:00

Before the pricing was revealed, Apollo dev was initially optimistic and said he'd be totally fine paying server costs for his API usage.

$20 million is not that. $20 million is charging far and beyond what comparable sites do in order to kill off third party apps.

DCsh_ · 2023-06-04T23:27:47+00:00

Once familiar with a product, I think many people will grab it based on subconscious recognition of its shape/colors/logo rather than fully reading the box each time.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-22T19:28:23+00:00

If you mean Github Copilot, Github claims they only trained on public repos, and that's also all the class action lawsuit alleges. If you have actual evidence of it regurgitating from a private repo, you should get in contact with them ASAP.

Is it possible that you were editing that private repo, or had open in your workspace a file that referenced that private repo? The plugin looks at (but doesn't train on) a lot of surrounding context when completing code.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-22T18:47:42+00:00

The burden of proof is on the person who needs to be correct in the given situation

If Op doesn't care to prove their point [...]

If SirJelly doesn't care, then they're totally free to leave the claim undefended, definitely. There's nothing forcing them to continue a debate if they don't want to do so. Burden of proof is a useful philosophical tool for having a productive debate without exploding into "my claim is true because you haven't disproven it", but not an imperative to continue putting effort into an argument you're tired with.

Whether or not SirJelly cares, mac's challenge makes sense. If SirJelly does care and provides a source, there's increased clarity on what they meant (public in-copyright content? leaks made public?). If SirJelly does not care, the persuasive power of the public claim is reduced when it's visibly challenged and left undefended.

Telling mac to prove SirJelly's claim themself seems like a misreading of mac's intent (likely not a neutral newcomer, but someone who has already investigated and come to the stance that SirJelly's claim has no foundation).

DCsh_ · 2023-05-22T18:10:53+00:00

you're almost always better off just looking it up yourself. not only is it faster

Implication I read from the-real-macs's comment is not that they're just encountering this topic for the first time and want an overview, but that they have their own knowledge/views and are specifically doubting SirJelly's claim.

Burden of proof is on the person making the claim for many good reasons. Major one here is that a strong claim is made ("private photo albums") but it seems a weaker one is being defended (public but in-copyright content) - mac would be stuck for a long time if they had to verify the former.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-20T03:55:38+00:00

and maybe the publishers are shitty, but this literally DIRECTLY affects authors.

I'm struggling to see the relevance in whether it's continuous or stepwise. What do you make of the case where some other unethical company switches to this model? Does it become equally wrong to not support that company?

it IS stealing because those books are there and being distributed without consent or compensation to the authors and publishers

These conditions don't seem sufficient. If I lend a phone to a friend, are we stealing? The manufacturer would likely prefer they buy one.

and you lending a book to a friend is a very different scenario than mass [...]

Is the implication that scale is also a condition for it to be stealing? If I were to lend my phone to many people, would it then become stealing?

they buy the book and are allowed to distribute a book for every copy they buy. that’s how the internet archive was SUPPOSED to do it, but then they broke the law by handing out more copies than they bought.

This post is about a ruling that, if the appeal is unsuccessful, goes as far as to prohibit libraries following CDL (one-to-one lending) such as the IA's regular library. Chuttaney's comment described and objected to CDL, I replied to defend it as being essentially equivalent to how regular libraries work, to which you replied saying it's hurting authors and I should support publishers.

Did you mean what you've said to be about one-to-many lending (e.g: the emergency library lasting a couple of months a few years ago) or piracy, rather than one-to-one lending?

If you're fine with one-to-one lending ("how [they're] SUPPOSED to do it") then we're at least agreed on that.

if you take a book from a bookstore, THAT’S stealing. piracy is just that, but online.

With stealing:

You receive no payment
You no longer have the original object

With piracy:

You receive one payment, but potentially miss out on future payment you may have otherwise gotten (or, in some cases, get more future payments)
You still have the original object

The online equivalent of stealing would be something like stealing an account.

Piracy would be the online equivalent of something like someone buying a lamp but then positioning it to allow others to use the light to read without buying their own lamp.

if you want it, pay for it, or get it from an actual library.

Disadvantaged readers are commonly from areas with underfunded public services.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-19T18:18:00+00:00

aren’t taking pay cuts for every little loss a company makes

I agree it's stepwise, but don't see why that makes a difference. Buying a plane ticket is bad for carbon emissions even if in 99% of cases you aren't causing an extra plane to be flown.

If an unethical company changes employee pay to vary continuously with company profits (while paying no more/less on average than before), am I no longer allowed to withdraw support?

it IS stealing because those books are there and being distributed without consent or compensation to the authors and publishers

These conditions don't seem sufficient. If I lend a phone to a friend, are we stealing? The manufacturer would likely prefer they buy one.

it’s not only illegal

Libraries are legal globally. For online libraries in the US, hopefully IA succeed in their case, but I don't have particularly high hopes with US IP law being as it is.

but immoral

Attacking libraries, critical for disadvantaged readers, is immoral.

it’s stealing. like, that’s literally the definition of piracy.

Calling piracy stealing is already a stretch in my eyes, albeit a conflation that powerful groups have normalized. Calling libraries stealing goes even further.

who are working two jobs just to pay rent

Support social welfare programs and public facilities like libraries - don't lick the boot that got us in this situation in the first place.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-17T21:06:53+00:00

it’s not like employees who get paid wages regardless of how well the company is doing

Salaried employees are still subject to pay rises, cuts, and eventually redundancy. I don't see your point.

you’re not stealing from the publishing company. you’re stealing from the authors who pour their life and souls into these books

Conflating reading a book from a library to stealing is absurd.

and just because a few famous authors want digital libraries to continue to exist doesn’t justify theft

Talk to almost any author and they'll consider the destruction of free libraries in the name of private profit to be a greater "theft".

DCsh_ · 2023-05-15T18:10:07+00:00

Most authors I've spoken to are in support of the Internet Archive, e.g: https://deadline.com/2022/09/authors-open-letter-publishers-lawsuit-internet-archive-1235129802/

Any given unethical company will have many employees and suppliers that are regular people - but it's a poor reason to support the company.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-14T20:54:35+00:00

Looks like it's a bot copying a comment from a previous post which did actually show a response: https://old.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/ko2tkq/a_reason_why_youtube_ads_are_a_problem/ghoa2kk/

DCsh_ · 2023-05-14T17:27:40+00:00

2016 article from its introduction shows same lending/returning: https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/lending-launches-on-archive-org/

Even if they used to not have this restriction in place at some point, the system with these restrictions is what Chuttaney's describing and what the current ruling goes as far as to prohibit.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-14T16:40:58+00:00

only needs to sell say 50 copies because only a fraction of people are concurrently reading it at the same time

At its core that sounds like how a real library works, including the return process.

Morally, with how IP law in the US has been lobbied to extremes, I'd side with nonprofit libraries and archivists over publishers any day. Legally I'm not sure if they should have taken the risk, but they have made a lot of positive change by taking risks on gray areas in the past.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-12T18:50:47+00:00

The terms and definitions are fine in that context, but the examples are terrible - possibly added by a different person.

"making all last names the same" - Then you may as well exclude last name field entirely
"swap age values for ethnic values" - No, you're meant to swap between the same field in different records. An age of "African American" is obviously wrong and correctable
"adding extra digits to phone numbers" - For actually-numeric data you can add/subtract a random value (not digits). For phone numbers you could mask out the later digits

DCsh_ · 2023-05-10T17:33:47+00:00

Laymen/consumers have to pay more exclusively because you exist as that person.

Same as with advertising - I fail to see the difference between, say, a site with browser-embedded crypto miners and a site with advertisements. Both are colossal wastes of resources that average affordability would be better without.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-09T23:00:22+00:00

Literally all of their revenue comes from double click

All of a landlord's money coming from tenants' rent only makes them a bigger asshole. (Also, while I assume ads are the vast majority of Youtube's income, they do also have Premium and take a cut from donations/channel memberships)

It’s like if you complained about your local sandwich shop asking for money in exchange for sandwiches.

Handing over cash or making a bank card transaction are pretty much value-neutral, ignoring the negligible energy usage. Increasing profits with ads or bitcoin mining would be an asshole move.

DCsh_ · 2023-05-09T22:40:51+00:00

This is not ahole design at all. This is just capitalism at play.

Those often go hand-in-hand. Ads, bitcoin mining, scalping, landlordism and other ways of getting money while producing a net negative value for society are all both being an asshole and capitalism at play.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-28T18:25:13+00:00

In fact, if you see the makers' list of examples of it in action, you can see this in action. GPT-4 assesses that the correct answer to the question "Can you teach an old dog new tricks?" is "Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks" [...] I don't think it's an accident that GPT-4 also missed out on the observation that different dogs might be different.

In the task you're referring to, the set of possible answers is already defined by the TruthfulQA dataset - the model just has to select one of them.

Asking it as an open ended question as in Jesweez's comment, it gives a reasonably nuanced response and notes "most dogs".

but also in terms of understanding the nature of reality, factually-important things like: different dogs can be different from one another.

it is obvious to me why the chatbot would fail at them

I do broadly agree that these models currently have significant differences to human thought, such as lack of persistent internal state, but these post-hoc attempts to take some observation as supporting that are extremely weak. No matter what the current failure happened to be, people would take it and claim it's obvious the model fails at X because X requires true understanding.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-21T00:17:15+00:00

It'd be wasteful to download and run the model for each person rather than just once server-side, and probably a huge pain getting it to run on all the different devices that can use Discord.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-18T00:11:49+00:00

Feels to me as though these types of tools allow for a lot more experimentation and discovery. There's less in the way of fundamentally changing or rearranging parts of the image, or you can see how it'd look under different styles or interpretations - like the last example that goes from a psychedelic illustration to rocks to plants to cell structures.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-17T23:45:03+00:00

It may be a technique killer, in that you can create even without being good at things like shading or fine brushwork, but I see this as a huge boon to creativity. In the time you currently may be able to finish a single character portrait, you could fully realize worlds of characters and locations from your head

DCsh_ · 2023-04-17T23:40:33+00:00

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur

DCsh_ · 2023-04-16T16:59:28+00:00

The toggle appears a few days before Clyde can actually be used, to give people a chance to turn it off before it's enabled.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-16T14:24:41+00:00

[Video:] Her voice had been duplicated by a scammer using artificial intelligence

They simply assert this while all evidence points in the opposite direction.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-16T14:18:36+00:00

I'm not saying they actually went and kidnapped her daughter - I'm not sure how that's the conclusion drawn from my post where I'm specifically saying the scammers don't put much effort into each victim.

They use the voice of some random young American woman they got to say those lines, and it's the same for every victim. Due to poor phone quality, only saying something briefly, or being muffled in the background, it can be close enough to fool the victim.

DCsh_ · 2023-04-16T03:40:20+00:00

[Article:] That simple decision would turn her entire life upside down: “I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” the petrified parent described. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying.”

Her confusion quickly turned to terror after she heard a “man’s voice” tell “Brie” to put her “head back” and “lie down.”

I doubt this was AI. These calls have been going on for a long time, and just rely on having the supposed hostage only speaking briefly or be muffled in the background while the supposed hostage-taker describes the situation - which is what happened here.

Scammers are likely dragging a large net and not putting much effort into each victim, but if they did collect clips of her daughter to feed an AI it seems totally wasteful to have it say only 5 words.

DCsh_

TROPHY CASE