I’m fine with this. “We can’t succeed without breaking the law” isn’t much of an argument.

Do I think the current copyright laws around the world are fine? No, far from it.

But why do they merit an exception to the rules that will make them billions, but the rest of us can be prosecuted in severe and dramatic fashion for much less. Try letting the RIAA know you have a song you’ve downloaded on your PC that you didn’t pay for - tell them it’s for “research and training purposes”, just like AI uses stuff it didn’t pay for - and see what I mean by severe and dramatic.

It should not be one rule for the rich guys to get even richer and the rest of us can eat dirt.

Figure out how to fix the laws in a way that they’re fair for everyone, including figuring out a way to compensate the people whose IP you’ve been stealing.

Until then, deal with the same legal landscape as everyone else. Boo hoo

Just need to get AI on that.

damn

Among other issues that’s going to make it harder for them to do other stuff.

It has been a pretty short trip from “Don’t be evil” to “The cutting edge of late stage capitalism”

git branch testing.stephanie.slept.with.my.friend.brad

Then delete and start over, or don’t use data you don’t have explicit permission to use. in the first place.

It’s like a thief saying “well, I already fenced most of the stuff so it’s too hard to give any of it back. So let’s just call it quits, eh?”

Waiting for 100% oral exams to make a comeback.

The headline’s confusing. If a losing bet is backfiring, does that mean it’s now a winning bet?

I’ve been saying for about 15 years now – you’d have to be a masochist to buy HP printers. Why do people keep enabling these shits? You just encourage them to be even worse. Don’t stand for even a little of their bullshit and they will change or die. You make a noose for your own neck.

Neither, though I do watch a bit of Matt Parker on youtube, so it’s a decent guess.

“one fifth the mass” is not the same thing as “five times lighter”

Consider something that weighs half as much. It’s 50% lighter … 0.5 times lighter. Something that weighs 0.2 times as much has 20% of the weight, and is 80% lighter. If it weighed 1% as much, it would be 99% lighter (0.99 times lighter). If it was 100% lighter … it would weigh nothing. Five times lighter would be -4 times the original mass.

We already have accurate and precise ways to describe less mass (albeit leaving aside for the moment the distinction between mass and weight). It’s no harder to say “one fifth” than “five times”, but only one is correctly describing what is going on.

I expect a lot more authors will go this (crowdfunding) route; if Kelsey Dionne can get over $1.3 million for a fairly niche TTRPG product (albeit that it was a very well done example of its particular niche), publishing straight up fiction books via crowdfunding has to look pretty damn attractive.

(edit: added a missing word)

heard that one earlier today …

Because of the Norman invasion. 1066 and all that. (edit: specifically, after a time the peasants spoke English and looked after the animals, the nobility spoke french and named the food, so we got the English words for the animals and the French words for most of the farm animals were used for the food made from them)

https://xkcd.com/927/

That’s a bit like asking “twitter or reddit”; different tools, different purposes. A single person may prefer one or the other, or use both in approximately equal measure.

global warming is definitely something it makes sense to worry about and which there’s still some chance to mitigate the worst effects of.

The sun expanding - or even the much earlier effects before that happens, as the sun gets hotter - will happen on such long time scales that there simply won’t be any humans at all; most species only last about a million years or so, vastly less time than we’re talking about.

We might well make the planet nigh uninhabitable in considerably less than one-millionth of the sun-being-a-major-problem time. It’s like worrying about the bridge maybe rusting dangerously a few decades from now, while not paying attention to the truck that has just veered onto your side of the road and will surely hit you in the next few seconds. You need to take evasive maneuvers, not worry about the bridge.

basically will just die a boring death after swallowing all the planets in the solar system

Not all the planets, no. Mercury and Venus, sure. The earth’s orbit will move somewhat further out when the sun expands, and probably won’t be swallowed but it will at least be well baked.

Even a little button wear would be enough to pick between those three, so in a lot of cases you’d just need to try one of them.