General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on It ain't much, but it's a livin' 1 day ago:
So they just… f*ck off and die.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 3 comments
- Comment on Half as Hot 3 weeks ago:
Obviously we’d all die but I wonder how exactly. This would make a good question for Randall Munroe.
- Comment on Grindr be like 3 weeks ago:
What are you doing, step stool?
- Comment on [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse 1 month ago:
The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.
- Comment on [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse 1 month ago:
Maybe you could call it recoupment but it doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s not quite the same thing, either.
You could also talk about coercive monopolies but that doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.
- Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules 1 month ago:
If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash.
Yes, if. I don’t know if you can guarantee that. It’s all fun and games as long as you’re doing English. In other languages, you get characters that can be encoded in more than 1 way. User at home has a localized keyboard with a dedicated key for such a character. User travels across the border and has a different language keyboard and uses a different way to create the character. Euro problems.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.
- John F. Kennedy
- Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules 1 month ago:
You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.
- Comment on Preference 1 month ago:
Americans may be seeing serious savings in that picture.
I am seeing serious evolutionary pressure on liver genetics.
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
can exercising one’s agency over their body really be considered “rent-seeking”?
First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people’s bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.
Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people’s bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.
Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for “justice”, like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can’t expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn’t want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.
Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.
to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.
We’re probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. en.wikipedia.org/…/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
Obviously that’s not what you mean. I guess I’m just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.
SAG-AFTRA
…is fundamentally a conservative organization. It’s no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That’s what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?
No. I am talking about rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.
Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that.
How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?
Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don’t see why you would use such clauses as an argument.
That’s a poor and fallacious argument there.
It’s not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.
You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the “union” doesn’t care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?
Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and at the top… Well, you know. It’s not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.
- Comment on Google Cache Is Now Fully Dead. 1 month ago:
Shocked? You’d think all the people outraged at having their websites scraped would be delighted. That’s probably the real reason for this.
- Comment on Throw back time 1 month ago:
Meh. As a german, it just doesn’t make me tingle quite like sending tanks to the east.
- Comment on DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow 1 month ago:
I wonder how many of them would actually stand in solidarity with, say, warehouse workers.
- Comment on The Extreme Cost of Training AI Models. 1 month ago:
That probably indicates a problem with the estimates.
- Comment on The Extreme Cost of Training AI Models. 1 month ago:
Yes. Also, Europeans work fewer hours per year. There are big differences between EU countries, though. en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_average_a…
- Comment on The Extreme Cost of Training AI Models. 1 month ago:
From the source:
Our primary approach calculates training costs based on hardware depreciation and energy consumption over the duration of model training. Hardware costs include AI accelerator chips (GPUs or TPUs), servers, and interconnection hardware. We use either disclosures from the developer or credible third-party reporting to identify or estimate the hardware type and quantity and training run duration for a given model. We also estimate the energy consumption of the hardware during the final training run of each model.
As an alternative approach, we also calculate the cost to train these models in the cloud using rented hardware. This method is very simple to calculate because cloud providers charge a flat rate per chip-hour, and energy and interconnection costs are factored into the prices. However, it overestimates the cost of many frontier models, which are often trained on hardware owned by the developer rather than on rented cloud hardware.
- Comment on DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow 1 month ago:
It’s like with people who are stuck in traffic. They are frustrated and so they wish for for change. The wish for more roads (and bigger cars, faster cars, more cars). The natural human reaction when something doesn’t work is: Try the same thing harder! It’s not to try something else.
I think we have all been in situations where we failed to push a door open, and so we angrily pushed again harder before easily pulling the door open.
I see lots of people agreeing that there is a problem, as evidenced by the popularity of the term “enshittification”. But the reaction is to double down on the policies that got us here.
You can see that in AI threads here. People call for more intellectual property, more silo-ing of data. Of course, that won’t work and Doctorow has explained that on several occasions. pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullie… …medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-13-spoo…
Other institutions that are apparently considered trustworthy also “side with AI companies”, in that they understand that fair use is in the interest of society. For example, libraries including the Internet Archive. librarycopyrightalliance.org/…/AI-principles.pdf blog.archive.org/…/internet-archive-submits-comme…
- Comment on DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow 1 month ago:
“framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used” <> “governing tech democratically”
That’s a bit of a contradiction, no?
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.
Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.
OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
one of the few influential unions in the US
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
- Comment on DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow 1 month ago:
Doctorow also published a transcript of his speech: …medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-08-17-hack…
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.
It’s ok if you watch out for numero uno. I’m not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn’t affect you. You can’t opt out of society. You won’t be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against “pirates”. And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.
- Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling 1 month ago:
Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?
That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.
- Comment on Why are people seemingly against AI chatbots aiding in writing code? 1 month ago:
I got a lot of listening lined up but I’ll add it to the list. I hope they offer some statistics. Flying has become a lot safer over the years. I’d be surprised if automation works against the trend rather than for it.
Thanks for the answer.
- Comment on Why are people seemingly against AI chatbots aiding in writing code? 1 month ago:
I know about this crash and don’t see the connection. What’s the argument?
- Comment on Lionsgate’s New Deal Is a Test of Hollywood’s Relationship With AI 1 month ago:
This isn’t sci-fi AI. It’s not going to use itself. It’s a new tool for digital artists, including VFX artists. I expect it will benefit them by making them more useful.
- Comment on ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy 1 month ago:
That’s what’s so depressing about lemmy. People convince me that there is some genuine issue that should be addressed. The mob grabs torches and pitchforks and goes to demand that… Money be given to rich people instead of changing anything. It certainly makes you understand why the world is as it is and that it will only become more so.
- Comment on ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy 1 month ago:
I see how I misunderstood.
This conception of individual rights seems rather ad hoc. I don’t think I could have guessed that that’s what you meant, rather than copyrights.
I don’t see the connection to copyright, in any case. How does fair use interfere with anyone’s right to earn a living? And if it does, why support the Internet Archive?
- Comment on ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy 1 month ago:
As far as I can tell, this community hates open models just as much as any others. Some seem to hate them even more. That’s the point about this “nightshade” tool.
