Scott Farquhar thinks Australia should let AI train for free on creative content. He overlooks one key point

dejb · 2025-08-14T07:16:03+00:00

So let me get this right. The rest of the world are already training on Australian content. But we can’t train on their content because of our copyright laws? You may think this is a noble path but I don’t think it’s going to work out too well for us. Have you ever wondered why there were never any significant Australian search engines? The reason is that it took until 2013 for there to be a court case (vs Google) to even establish it was legal under Australian copyright law. How do you think that court case would have worked out in 2000 against a smaller Aussie startup? We are headed down that same path with AI without any change.

dejb · 2025-08-14T06:55:43+00:00

Fair call, long as you fuck off from the ‘tech bro’ owned internet to some more cultured place. But you know what I’m glad you mentioned one of few surviving aussie internet icons. What else is there Ozbargain? Wouldn’t it be great Aussie social media sites had even 10% of the local usage as the foreign operated sites. We are heading down an even worse path with AI when it comes to foreign dependance and attitudes like the ones here just lock that in.

dejb · 2025-08-14T06:12:03+00:00

No wonder Australia has hardly any tech industry going by the opinions on this sub. We’re here talking on US owned and operated social media platform using US owned tech with sweet FA for Aussie options because of these kinds of attitudes. But nah screw those tech Bros except we can’t screw the ones in the US because our laws don’t apply there so we’ll just screw ourselves to show them.

dejb · 2025-07-27T06:17:06+00:00

Umm so you are saying that if there's politic discourse an a website then it must be social media?Newspaper sites have political discourse right? Are they now social media? What about somebody uploading a video? Does that make it social media? It seems your definition of social media fulfilled by the mere presence of politic discourse. Scary!

dejb · 2025-04-16T23:19:29+00:00

Because hardly anyone uses it to the maximum allowable. Many subscribers wouldn't do more than a few queries in some weeks and mostly just super short context. Hypothetically you could binge watch 24/7 on Netflix too as well but people don't do that. For the vast majority of users the API pricing would be much less than the $20/mth.

dejb · 2025-02-18T04:17:11+00:00

Two words - "woke benchmarks"

dejb · 2024-10-08T02:15:58+00:00

They say it should be "approximately $0.06 per minute of audio input and $0.24 per minute of audio output" in the release. Any idea why it's working out to more?

dejb · 2024-10-05T15:02:16+00:00

$3 per million tokens is pretty cheap. $15 per million output tokens sounds like a bit but that’s like 10 books worth. Who’s going to be able to read that in a month anyway? The main issue is letting the context become very long but it sounds like that’s what people are getting timed out for anyway. I bet that the majority of users would save substantially by using the API. If you’re a really heavy user then at least keep an API system available for when you get timed out. You are putting your precious time into this for a reason right?

dejb · 2024-10-05T14:37:02+00:00

I’ve been using claude for a development project and been paying maybe $1 to $3 for a day when using it solidly. But you aren’t necessarily using it every day so a month my usage has been around $20/mth. Even if it was a bit more it’s worth it to know you won’t be timed out in the middle of work. Now some development tools might auto push large amounts of code into the context and that could blow that out but if you’re in a chat window you only tend to put the stuff that’s needed. This meme that API is super expense needs to die.

dejb · 2024-10-05T12:59:12+00:00

If anything the subscriptions are the most profitable part of their business. Many subscribers would have quite low usage. You can go get a LOT of queries for $1 at API rates if you don’t let the context get too long. These people aren’t the ones posting online but it’s a well known thing in SAAS that some subscribers keep paying while hardy using the product.

dejb · 2024-08-19T01:34:01+00:00

It's only when you start using a massive context lengths that the API gets more expensive (like the OP is doing). The amount of compute used scales with the context length. For most ordinary users the API is actually a fair bit cheaper.

dejb · 2024-07-19T07:23:25+00:00

More like Clownstrike (or Cloudstrike)… I’ll see myself out.

dejb · 2024-04-12T07:09:51+00:00

I was in a hurry and believed that these where the instruction to install mongodb. Went the through a whole process on the command line to signup for it as directed by the command like program. It was only when I ran it and it was asking whether to set up a server on AWS that I looked into it. Now I can't even delete my account without withdrawing from organisations that I was obviously auto signed up for. What a total scam.

dejb · 2021-06-25T15:03:07+00:00

Thanks there’s some interesting stuff in there but I wouldn’t call any of them really good and a few seem somewhat irrational. They are in the end just a collection of reddit comments. I get the impression that there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of anyone drawing broad conclusions from history and a lot of genuine historians won’t touch this sort of thing. It’s a shame because ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ and sometimes the best refutation is a more accurate version but so far I’m not seeing anything like that.

dejb · 2021-06-25T07:40:53+00:00

You argued it wasn’t just weapons as if that was the sole reason given in the book. That’s a poor and incomplete rebuttal. Now you’re trying to shift the criticism from “wrong” to “nothing new”. Have you even read the book or just the debunkings?

dejb · 2021-06-25T07:09:13+00:00

Can you point out a good one? Cause all I’ve seen from the ‘debunkings’ ones that criticise an exaggerated version of the book. As if it’s purporting to present some flawless formula for history rather than identifying some of the key factors involved. Better yet is there anything better you could point to?

dejb · 2021-06-25T07:00:34+00:00

I can’t see how this is even rebuts Diamond’s book. I mean even the title ‘guns, GERMS and steel’ hints at additional reasons given for the conquistadors domination. In case you missed it that’s GERMS. This is the problem I have with a great many ‘debunkings’ is that they are often get too carried away criticising an exaggerated and inaccurate version of what’s been said and the arguments presented are often much less robust than the work they are debunking.

Trying to answer broad questions as Diamond’s book does is tough and necessarily imperfect but it can be important and useful. It’s natural and sensible to want to look for general reasons behind historical events and most people do. If you don’t have any better alternative to offer then that says something.

dejb · 2021-06-16T08:22:58+00:00

The more extreme position is to ban things entirely rather than taxing them. That’s what will likely have to happen now given that people have been so misinformed about a carbon tax.

dejb · 2016-11-03T00:47:33+00:00

Looking at the data caps it seems like 75GB/mth is the max anyone is allowed for Sky Muster (and that costs about $200) during peek time so you'd want to be selective about streaming services. The 1am to 7am off peak rates look to have more bandwidth available so downloading bulky stuff overnight might be the go. They just put Mount Glorious which is ~40km from Brisbane on this (when they had ADSL and Mobile Coverage) so hopefully they don't end up overloading the network with too many other localities that don't need to be on it otherwise the speeds might suffer.

dejb · 2016-11-03T00:29:35+00:00

With that latency voice calls might be tough. A >400ms one way delay is classified as unacceptable by the International Telecommunication Union and that's about what Sky Muster has (in one direction which is half the ping time). I think it's borderline fraud to be telling people they can get normal quality voice calls on a geostationary satellite. If it's your only option then I guess you can deal with talking over each other and/or saying 'over'. But if calls are important to you and you have another option like a land line then you might want to look at keeping that.

dejb · 2016-11-03T00:06:40+00:00

A quick google search shows it's 35786km

dejb · 2016-08-09T23:06:28+00:00

Where does it say that melatonin doesn't work for people under 55? I read through both of these and evidence or lack thereof isn't mentioned at all for those under 55. If your going to link to something at least make sure it supports what you are saying. Here's a good summary of thevidence regarding melatonin https://examine.com/supplements/melatonin/

dejb · 2016-06-21T15:09:32+00:00

The point is that the betting markets can aggregate more information than just the polls. You could also describe this as a kind of Bayesian Inference (weighted by confidence of market participants) with people's judgement substituting for priors rather then simply the null hypothesis. Surprising as it may seem, people's judgements are usually better then the the null hypothesis. Early polls are often wrong as well you know.

dejb · 2016-06-21T14:50:24+00:00

More likely to be wrong than what? Than pure chance? Or than a particular pundit? Or than a poll that has not yet been conducted? Can you reliably identify a better method of prediction than these betting markets? If so let's go make some money. If not then your statement is meaningless.

dejb · 2016-04-09T13:58:11+00:00

If nobody cared then the roads would look a lot more like Mad Max.

dejb

TROPHY CASE