mountainb

A license is a contract or contract term waiving certain rights to sue. That’s what a copyright license is. And yes, you cannot issue a valid license if you don’t have the right to do that.

What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s. Under the DMCA and other sources of law this is plausible.

The East India Company was itself a highly effective quasi-governmental institution with a powerful military, a special relationship to a great power, and many other relationships to various kings and nobles who ran the local governments. It's not the best example for this type of phenomenon for this reason.

I think it's also the case that hard money is a different kind of phenomenon from paper money reflecting an entirely different philosophy concerning property and what it is. It reflects a natural law perspective in its most earthy and primitive form, which is that gold and silver are money because ancestors from time immemorial saw it as such due to certain intrinsic characteristics. Governments certainly regulated mints, but also marketplaces could and did regulate coinage on their own which is possible because of its physical nature. If a coin is clipped or made into a false alloy, that can be detected and corrected without state institutions.

Paper money by contrast tends to reflect more modern positivist theories of property in which property rights are deemed to exist because the state speaks those rights into existence. In the middle ages and even before, states as we know them now did not exist and could not exist, so positivism would have been absurd on its face, and its most direct application in the form of artificial currency could not be made.

Not true in the US. It is true that most plaintiffs prioritize commercial copies, but you can obtain statutory damages even if there are no actual damages from the copying.

Many companies and artists simply allow technically infringing fan art etc. to exist without enforcement.

A template document and some software already does it without an LLM. Advising the clients on what it means and what they have to do is unfortunately something AI assistants are bad at. But this use case is not an expensive use case for family lawyers; court systems already try to make this type of settlement accessible to pro se people.

Sort of like how the medieval world relied on a small class of aristocratic landowners who loved riding fast horses and killing each other, the postmodern world relies on a small class of people from all walks of life who will work much harder than usual to make more money than they need, operating large enterprises to solve various material problems of other people that they don't really need to be solving, paying tax on those enterprises that they could otherwise avoid if the were not working so much.

Using this tool seems to generate superior cringe posts to the actual cringe posts. I made one about what my female toddler’s violence taught me about B2B SaaS sales and the story it created, while implausible, was genuinely charming.

LLMs have created more billable hours for me as an attorney because the LLMs convince the client that they need to know more about irrelevant issues, how specific statutes may apply, and other such things. They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail. It reliably bloats things that would be a .1 into .5 or more.

Taxes in the US go to a cluster of major items. Medicare, other medical, Social Security, interest, VA benefits and veteran's medical care, federal spending on the indigent or disabled, and Defense. Those together are 94% of annual federal spending.

None of that spending is subject to that much debate; all the remaining "debate" is over the remaining 6%.

I don't think defense is really as discretionary as it seems. A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners to keep trading with the US on favorable terms through cash transfers, provision of military equipment, training, and mutual defense pacts among other diplomatic agreements.

Japan didn't just decide on its own free will to become a pacifist country dedicated to exporting cheap, high-quality manufactured goods to the United States. General MacArthur did that.

This is why, here at GloboCorp, we kill an Excel monkey at the office right after the daily standup. The open office plan makes it so that the whole team hears the screams (and some lucky team members catch a little splatter). Death creates some unexpected synergies. At GloboCorp, our employees learn that death is inexorable. Does one fear the rising of the sun? No. One simply accepts that the sun will rise. So too do our valued team members at GloboCorp simply accept that they will be checking functions until they are reduced during a daily teambuilding exercise.

No one at GloboCorp asks themselves if they will live the rest of their lives as Excel monkeys, because we answer that question for them every day. The answer is Yes, you will fill out the little cells, and then we will kill you. We provide effective solutions to the problem of being. We transform existential dread into acceptance and peace and high performance.

It's a digital picture book for "adults" that operates on the same principles as picture books for children.

It’s a guy asking to make an end-run around the constitution and the APA regulatory framework based on a flimsy sci fi premise. Naturally it provokes a negative reaction.

This reads like an AI with an overflowing context window wrote it; or in the alternative it’s a list of statutes written by an arrogant and delusional king. It is this type of arrogance that will lead to an unfavorable reaction by Congress.

You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.

Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.

We fought what, two wars for this vassal? Deleting an account is a pretty minor favor compared to that.