canoebuilder

Link?

Also to your photos, if you post them, and care to share.

Twitter even provides mute, block, and whatnot functionality to prevent specified things from even showing up in your line of sight to begin with. And if the app is really bothering you, you can always set it down and go outside, take a walk, meet somebody new, do something that will put a smile on your face on your deathbed.

Lumping in mean comments online, with actual abuse is approaching risible. Words have meanings, we shouldn’t dilute or distort them.

By Twitter “not taking action,” sounds like your friend is upset that he or she can no longer co-opt the proprietors of the site into enacting punitive measures on people who draw his or her ire.

Maybe some mean things were said or whatever, but at the end of the day it’s just text on a screen isn’t it? And there’s a lot more to life than text on a screen, isn’t there?

It’s also weird how you mention the technical functioning of the site, then bring up the “Trust & Safety Org” when the legacy of “Trust & Safety” is a small cabal with extremist views arbitrarily deciding what information to censor and suppress based on their own viewpoints, whims, and influence from government agencies.

That has nothing to do with the technical functioning of the site which is a matter of reproducible, specifiable, determinate functions implemented in computer code to produce a useful product. The kind of thing that really turns the mind of an autist on.

P.S. Not to be too blasé about your friend, mean words can be an issue, especially an ongoing pattern, but anonymous strangers online seems like less of an issue than irl, and was this really an issue where block or mute wasn’t sufficient? How so?

vs

Why didn’t you do this thing 2 weeks ago that you were under no legal obligation to do?

Seems like a significant and valid distinction even if what they communicate to the intended audience is largely the same.

“Largely the same” because in the second case it would be possible that forgetting, or some other obstacle to resigning occurred.

Following your line of reasoning if it is perfectly legal to walk into a coffee shop and sit down and listen to what the people next to me are talking about, commit it to memory, even make notes about it, does it then follow that it should be perfectly legal, reasonable, and acceptable for a govt agency or some other organization to put microphones everywhere to record what everyone is talking about, then feed all this data into various databases and modeling systems?

Reciting something in a park is different than selling a copyrighted print of something in a park when you don’t hold the copyright. Which is much closer to what the NYT is accusing OpenAI of.

The training data not “existing” in the model is interesting, but at some point, a distinction without a difference.

If I hire an autistic savant to go to a library and read all the books, then I set up a book selling service where whenever people want to buy a book I have my savant employee type out the book for them, is it then going to pass muster in a copyright case if I tell the judge “It’s okay actually, because the books don’t actually exist in my employee’s brain, merely neuronal encodings of them.” ?

If I have a copyrighted image on which I don’t hold the copyright. But I want to start selling it to people, is it cool if I just run it through a lossless compression algorithm, thereby generating a new encoding of the information and then sell this new encoding along with the software and command to reverse the compression?

Regarding the open source stuff, there I think you might find more favor to your arguments.

But the stuff we are seeing within commercial enterprises like OpenAI and Midjourney is clearly copyright infringement.

And I don’t see copyright law being insane in these cases.

If Google, YouTube, Dropbox didn’t exist you could still share files with your friends.

Sharing a file with a friend and him benefiting in some way from that is a different thing entirely than massive centralizing corporations flouting copyright rules to benefit commercially and increase their power.

More of the former, less of the latter.

It would actually be more in line with the “Internet idea” of a decentralized network, not a massive hub and spoke arrangement.

Saying, “Hey, we already have some big corporations where copyright infringement plays some role in their business model, why not add a few more in the form of “Open”AI, and whoever else.” Is not a good argument.

The centralized server farms and behemoth corporations are in many ways representative of what the commercial internet has become, but are not a fulfillment of the original “internet idea.”

What’s your sense about SETI or the Fermi paradox, if a signal becomes so vastly diluted just within our solar system?

I’m sure the SETI people have thought about this and made various calculations, but with the inverse square law and the vastness of space, maybe “needle in a haystack” is optimistic.

Is it the wrong model to think that anything but maybe a galaxy scale civilization is just going to have it’s signals more or less totally dissolved into seemingly random cosmic fluctuations, relative to our sensors/receivers at least?