General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on EU’s Top Court Just Made It Literally Impossible To Run A User-Generated Content Platform Legally 1 week ago:
Very unlikely, in the eyes of the US court system. They have no EU physical presence, and aren’t advertising targeting EU people.
That’s exactly the thing. US courts don’t care about foreign laws in the first place. They don’t care about a EU presence at all.
Nevertheless, the EU demands that any websites, internet services, … that are offered to EU users follow EU laws like GDPR. If it’s in a language not spoken in the EU, then it’s probably fine. If lemmy.today declared that it was specifically for Oregonians, that would likely be fine, too. But anything in English that is offered globally, is a potential target.
That should not be taken lightly. If the 4chan people travelled to UK, they would probably be arrested. They will have to watch out when they travel abroad if the country might assist the UK and arrest and arrest them. If they ever acquire property abroad, that might be seized.
Fedi-servers in the EU certainly have to follow these regulations.
- Comment on EU’s Top Court Just Made It Literally Impossible To Run A User-Generated Content Platform Legally 1 week ago:
You know how 4chan is doing business in the UK? In the same way, lemmy.today is doing business in the EU.
This ruling is not likely to have immediate consequences for the fediverse, since the GDPR is not enforced much.
I don’t think it is actually impossible, as the headline claims. Platforms that have already been on the receiving of enforcement are probably fine, eg Facebook.
- EU’s Top Court Just Made It Literally Impossible To Run A User-Generated Content Platform Legallywww.techdirt.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 5 comments
- Comment on Apertus: Switzerland government release a fully open, transparent, multilingual language LLM 2 weeks ago:
Maybe I’m talking more about enforcement than actual law,
Probably. Different countries in Europe have very different traditions there. I think the former socialist countries are still more relaxed. But the EU-line is rather dominated by countries like Germany.
Come to think of it. Switzerland officially takes a very lenient approach. It’s legal to download media files for personal use. But as you can see here, that leaves research and business hanging.
- Comment on Apertus: Switzerland government release a fully open, transparent, multilingual language LLM 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know any European country that has anything like the copyright clause in the US Constitution, or anything close to Fair Use. I don’t see the argument.
There’s a good chance that European AI companies like Mistral are breaking the law. We will have to see how it eventually goes in court. Recently, there was a decision in a Munich court against OpenAI. By that standard, even Apertus might be in trouble. But I doubt that decision will stand.
- Comment on Americium: How a small element could power the next century of space exploration 2 weeks ago:
Plutonium-238’s half-life is 87.7 years, Americium-241 is 432.6 years. Which… is almost 5 times longer, so… not sure why that’s cringe?
What’s cringe is the word “staggering”. Natural radioactive isotopes have half-lives on the order of billions of years. All elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae. Billions of years have passed since the novae that created that heavy elements now on earth. Anything with shorter half-lives is no longer around. (More correctly, one should talk decay chains.)
What’s staggering is that these isotopes are available at all. They are artificially created in nuclear reactors. Mass production of Pl-238 began only during WW2 for bombs. That’s almost a half-life ago. The shorter half-life makes the availability of Pl-238 much more impressive.
I believe they’re referring to the fact that it’s not an element of major topic. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.
There are over 100 named elements. I don’t think I could name half of them. Americium is relatively prominent because of it’s use in smoke detectors. And while I’m at it: Americium is the element. Americium-241 is a specific isotope; a specific variant, chemically identical to other variants but with slightly different physical properties.
There are a number of isotopes suitable for RTGs. It’s a matter of trade-offs. There’s half-life, which is basically how fast the properties of the material change. There’s also energy density and how bad the radiation is for the device. And always, there’s cost. Fun fact, in Chernobyl they did try robots, but the electronics could not withstand the radiation. People don’t withstand it either, but there’s a lot of them.
- Comment on Apertus: Switzerland government release a fully open, transparent, multilingual language LLM 2 weeks ago:
Badly. This was released almost 2 months ago and completely failed to make a splash, just like the other European models you have never heard of.
There’s a lot of denial about this, but you just can’t make such models competitive in Europe. The copyright industry is too strong. This combines with a general culture of data ownership and control. Case in point, the copyright industry is especially strong in Denmark, and they are also champions of chat control.
- Comment on Americium: How a small element could power the next century of space exploration 3 weeks ago:
Yes.
Shout-out for The Radioactive Boy Scout. (RIP)
- Comment on Americium: How a small element could power the next century of space exploration 3 weeks ago:
Yes. And also:
Its half-life is a staggering 432 years, five times longer than plutonium-238.
Cringe…
AI slop?
- Comment on German court: ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics 4 weeks ago:
GEMA’s social media game is certainly top. Nice to see the money being put to good use.
If all seats are filled,
Sure. Everyone’s Taylor Swift. Let’s just assume that.
The actual truth is that if you do not play GEMA music, you have to provide evidence of that to GEMA. Young musicians who foolishly reason that they don’t have anything to do with GEMA will be dragged through court.
- Comment on Reddit mod jailed for sharing movie sex scenes in rare “moral rights” verdict 4 weeks ago:
Fair Use exists only in the US. I believe it is part of the reason why the US became so culturally dominant. It certainly is why the internet is US dominated. European copyright laws are stifling.
- Comment on German court: ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics 4 weeks ago:
GEMA was created by the Nazis to take over pop culture. There’s a certain logic there.
Of course, under the Nazis you could be sent to camp if you belonged to the wrong subculture. So there is a difference. The rebels of the time listened to jazz, to swing. “Negro music” was the social media of that age, corrupting the youth.
- Comment on Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom 4 weeks ago:
It wouldn’t be so easy. Such restrictions would have to be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.
- Comment on Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom 4 weeks ago:
Yes. I think the last time I heard of Montana was in The Hunt for Red October.
- Comment on Montana Becomes First State to Enshrine ‘Right to Compute’ Into Law - Montana Newsroom 4 weeks ago:
I wonder if this would make it illegal to cut off someone’s internet if they are accused of piracy. Probably that sort of thing still goes.
It might provide a protection against anti-circumvention laws and such; laws that make it criminal to mess with hardware DRM on your devices.
- Comment on Surprise EU rollback of 'GDPR' digital-rights rules prompts alarm 4 weeks ago:
Copyright is the bigger problem. The lack of a sensible Fair Use equivalent makes a lot of “tech” impossible. GDPR is a problem, too, but for AI it is the smaller problem. The media sees itself as benefitting from the broken copyright laws, while GDPR cuts into their profits. So that’s why the public discussion is completely skewed.
It’s a given that the EU’s reliance on foreign IT companies will increase. Europe is deeply committed to this copyright ideology, that demands limiting and controlling the sharing of information. It’s not just a legal but a cultural commitment, as can be seen in these discussions on Lemmy. Look for reforms to the Data Act. That’s the latest expansion of this anti-enlightenment nonsense and it really has the potential to turbocharge the damage to the existing industry.
- Comment on Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court to Hold Internet Providers Accountable for Copyright Theft 5 weeks ago:
Nice try. But this is explicitly the “Authors’ Guild” and others.
- Comment on Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court to Hold Internet Providers Accountable for Copyright Theft 5 weeks ago:
Interesting to see the reactions here; how they differ from other lawsuits that pit “authors” and “artists” against tech companies.
- Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court to Hold Internet Providers Accountable for Copyright Theftauthorsguild.org ↗Submitted 5 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 45 comments
- Comment on The Authoritarian Stack 5 weeks ago:
We have our own local home grown cliques that capture gov contracts.
Yes. If you scroll to the bottom, you find that the project is led by Prof. Francesca Bria.
Looking her up on Wikipedia, one has 2 thoughts: 1) She has a lot of hustle. 2) Why haven’t I heard about any of that?
This is just the Monorail Man doing the song. Except with disturbingly fascist overtones.
- Comment on Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI 5 weeks ago:
I was just a little surprised to see the familiar name but I don’t quite remember why. Maybe because of the downvotes.
- Comment on Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI 5 weeks ago:
Oh. By Bruce Schneier.
- Comment on Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost - Ars Technica 5 weeks ago:
Yes, the archiving and republishing would be illegal in most countries, but not in the US. Fair Use
They didn’t face trouble over archiving the net, but over digitally lending e-books and audio.
- Comment on a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service 1 month ago:
Maybe it’s time to have a little think about that word, “influencer”, and how that is a job with which people make money.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 1 month ago:
It’s also funny how Lemmy is buying up this narrative.
The entire US economy is currently being propped up by growth in the AI/tech sector.
What’s happening is that Dementia Don is curb-stomping the US economy. AI investments, mainly in data centers, are the only thing that still seems promising. When you are on a trek and someone leads you through Death Valley, while pouring out all the water, you shouldn’t blame the last horse that still keeps going.
Putting the blame in the right place would certainly help, with a view toward the mid-terms.
Financially: Diversify. Make sure that you are not completely dependent on what happens in the US. But mind that Europe comes with its own imponderable risks (ie Putin). Same with China. Maybe some old leader dies and the new crew runs everything into the ground; they go to war with Taiwan, that sort of thing.
- Comment on Automattic CEO calls Tumblr his 'biggest failure' so far 1 month ago:
“so far”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Outage is ending.
Oct 20 2:27 AM PDT We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Could be that your region relies on different servers, could be that only the sign-in is down.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 1 month ago:
I don’t see what makes you so certain. The EU unambiguously wants computing devices to be more locked down. It wants responsible developers to be tracked.
If your argument holds, then that only means that there is a loophole allowing devs to distribute apps anonymously. That’s where the car analogy fails. There are exceptions for small enterprises and “open source stewards”. These exist so that small players and start-ups won’t be overwhelmed by bureaucracy. They are not supposed to protect dev privacy or user freedom.
I can only repeat that I find your argument valid. I just don’t believe it would stand up in court. If Google was pushing back on this, I would still back them up on such arguments. But they understandably don’t.
Unless there is a major change in attitudes in Europe, we are going to see much more mandated control and surveillance, anyway.