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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • If you’re not deliberately min-maxing the CAP Theorem or doing EDA, there’s no reason to use microservices and every reason not to.

    It is not just an implementation detail or a matter of preference. There are fundamental UX implications.

    That can be a net positive for users (and developers). But if you’re doing it “just cuz”, you’re gonna have a bad time.




  • Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.

    I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.

    It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”










  • I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)

    But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.

    Take archive.org for example:

    It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

    I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.

    But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

    Edit: And to be clear, when I say it’s fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don’t mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.


  • I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

    AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

    I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

    Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

    They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

    Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

    Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.



  • I don’t think blahaj would object to the basic message.

    There are the occasional man-hating users, sure. But for the most part, the instance seems to accept the idea that men suffer under patriarchy as well.

    Now, when you bring it up in response to women, enbies, etc. suffering under patriarchy… that’s not so great.

    So I guess it depends on what community it would be posted to, and how it would be posted.

    Given how OP seems to be spamming this in multiple unrelated communities… I can’t imagine they would post it to blahaj tactfully. So… maybe you’re right, lol.


  • All of security is about trade-offs. “What does it protect me from, and what do I give up to gain that protection?”

    If you need to remember a lot of passwords, then having some kind of system makes sense.

    But most people don’t need to remember a lot of passwords. Most people can reasonably offload that job to a password manager.

    So without knowing anything more, I’d guess it’s not good security for them.