ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 4 days ago:
Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.
The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.
Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.
To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 4 days ago:
It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.
The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 5 days ago:
The thing is a robots.txt file doesn’t work as licensing. There’s no legal requirement to fetch the file, and no mechanism to consent or track consent.
This is putting up a sign that says everyone must pay, and then giving it to anyone who asks for free.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.
If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word “inch”.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.
We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.
They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 5 days ago:
Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 1 week ago:
It’s from a time when you bought undried and planned wood rather than dried and planned like we typically do now.
It’s less a quirk of the imperial system and more a quirk of the lumber retail system, which is older than the metric system.
The biggest difference is that in places that use dimensional lumber and the metric system the pattern is to sell by actual dimension, rather than nominal. So a wall stud might be 45mmX145mm, or 63mmX75mm for a rafter, depending on your country.Most north American hardware stores also sell by finished sizes now.
- Comment on Trump says he plans unconstitutional executive order to mandate ID for voters 2 weeks ago:
To be clear: the president dictating it via executive order is unconstitutional, not the practice of voter id itself.
The constitution pretty explicitly makes elections a state issue with some congressional action on top of them. The president doesn’t factor into it - Comment on nooo my genderinos 3 weeks ago:
“applies” isn’t the word I would use. It’s not like nature has a line that once you pass some threshold of mass, acceleration or distance it needs to flip the relativity switch.
Probably say “becomes noticable”.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 3 weeks ago:
I’d actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we’re attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it’s objectively measurable but it’s still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete. - Comment on nooo my genderinos 3 weeks ago:
First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach “borrowing”. 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can’t take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.Definitely more clear, right?
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 3 weeks ago:
I believe that’s what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn’t focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that’s like… Elementary school. - Comment on 95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds 3 weeks ago:
It’s frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though “artificial intelligence” means “super human reasoning”, “very smart”, or “capable of thought” when it’s really a combination of “reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion” and “can appear intelligent”.
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 3 weeks ago:
Because disabling JS is unheard of in the open source world, right?
They implemented a feature that breaks the website for people who otherwise have no issues while providing no functional value to the site “rather than spending time building their actual product that people want to use.”
It’s one thing to expect them to do special work to support an uncommon configuration, and it’s another to feel frustrated that they did extra work to break a less common but still unremarkable configuration.
I entirely support people not wanting bots to scrape their shit, but there’s a handful of websites I use that use this specific blocking software and it frequently gets angry and blocks me if I’m on my phone for no good reason. It’s annoying, and getting angry at the user for being upset that your website is broken is about the only thing more unreasonable than demanding that an open source developer do work for you for free.
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 3 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t call that “seething”, the project is targeting an English speaking audience (English is the source, other languages are translation targets), effectively no one is a native speaker of Esperanto, and it’s usage is small enough that someone could quite possibly never encounter the language.
Bad project names are common enough in programming and open source, and complained about, that I wouldn’t jump right to xenophobia as the reason someone might complain that a project picked a name knowing it would be difficult to pronounce.They can name it whatever they want, but getting that angry that someone didn’t recognize a word in an anglisiced spelling of a word from a niche language is uncalled for.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
I think the difference might be that you’re thinking of standards that say “if you do A and B and C then you’re a good ___”. Happens with prescriptive education standards that are tied tightly with budget.
I’m thinking of standards like “failure to A or B or C, or doing X or Y or Z makes you an unacceptable ___”. It’s what you see in restaurants and hospital hygiene standards. Any restaurant “cleaning to the test” and only going down the food safety list and correcting any issue is both the type that would just be filthy without those standards, and also would end up serving safe food. Same for doctors and hand washing. We would rather all doctors be deeply committed to hygiene, but we have real world data that mandating hygiene minimums and doing things to enforce them has measurable increases in patient well-being. Same for building safety standards and such.people just go through the motions devoid of thinking and intent :) Now they also can go: I followed the flowchart what more do you want
In a system with the standard, those people are providing better care than they would be without them.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, standards for care isn’t “teaching for the test”. You don’t overfocus on “don’t change diapers in the food prep area” or “tell the parents if you use the first aid kit” and somehow end up neglecting care.
I take my kids to a legal daycare. That means I know people who work there and are nearby have been certified in pediatric CPR and first aid within the past year. That they do fire drills. That they have a policy for when sick kids need to go home and when they can come back.It’s not about a law forcing people to care, it’s about establishing a baseline. If a caregiver I haven’t met swaps in for one I know I don’t have to learn their standards on the spot.
It’s odd to be opposed to standards.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
Well that seems quite odd. Most developed countries have standards for childcare settings, including defining minimums for activity and incident logging.
Finding regulations was difficult, but it seems that Belgium just has lower quality childcare than even the US, according to the UN. unicef.org/…/where-do-rich-countries-stand-childc…Color me surprised. I kind of assumed if we had standards that anyone else would have similar or better standards.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
And over how many children? So 30 kids 5 seconds each
You literally said 30 kids.
childcare.gov/…/supervision-ratios-and-group-size…
Staff:Child Ratio Group Size Infants: Younger than 12 months old 1 adult should care for no more than 3 infants No more than 6 infants in a group or class Toddlers: 13–35 months old 1 adult should care for no more than 4 toddlers No more than 8 toddlers in a group or class
For kids wearing diapers 8:1 is really pushing it and probably illegal anywhere in the US.
You talk about being required to log stuff when it’s just something you keep track of when watching kids that age. They have routines, and they can’t tell you their needs. You keep track of that stuff because you know their routine and it tells you where they are in it. 1:1 you can just remember. The second you add another adult you need to share data.
Many jurisdictions require logging (page 16) because it’s best practice.
Using a computer just makes it easier and makes it so the checkout conversation can be entirely the qualitative report and conversation you seem to want it to be.You’re seemingly just declaring something to be an onerous burden and pointless when it’s simply not.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
Going based on my kids daycare, it’s really not a problem. You’re talking 30:1 kids to caregivers, and 8:1 is over the legal limit.
Like, I’ve hung out in the daycare. I’ve talked to the caregivers. It’s not nearly the way you seem to think. They like it because it’s easier than the documentation they would be keeping for their own purposes.
I’m typing this having just gotten back from dropping the kids off with them and hanging out chatting for a bit.If the kid fell and bumped his head, I’m sure they are spending about five minutes logging and tending to them. Probably 20 seconds typing after 3 or 4 minutes putting an ice pack on it, giving them a hug and letting them sit on their lap.
- Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
Are you this unaware of how people actually function?
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it braindead, because that just needlessly antagonistic, but we have a lot of evidence that people forget truly important things all the time, particularly in a setting where a group of people are working together to care for others.
Nurses and doctors will forget they administered medication and give double doses. People will forget that they needed to toss the spinach from the line because it’s coming up to its safe lifetime and get people sick.
It’s why we have checklists and logs where we write stuff down.
If my local coffeeshop has a checklist and log where they document cleaning the bathroom and doing a deep clean on the espresso maker, why on earth would it be unreasonable for the significantly more important job of “caring for babies” to also do so? - Comment on Incident 4 weeks ago:
Oh, I assumed you thought people were spending a lot of time entering timestamps. Do you think this is a particularly onerous process for them, or that the parents need to like, acknowledge each log? They just push a button to select the kid and tap another to select the event. Maybe type a description if it’s an incident report. It’s significantly easier for them than logging it any other way, and it ensures parents get the information on food, diapers and whatnot.
I am confused how you see this as care by flowchart. Daycare staff aren’t medical professionals. They aren’t qualified to make objective decisions about what’s an “important” event to notify parents of in a consistent manner. What country are you in where the parental notification laws are “I dunno, if you feel like it I guess”?
