• 0 Posts
  • 113 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 26th, 2024

help-circle
  • The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer

    I wouldn’t agree. Sure, Taylor Swift would own her likeness. But so would her doppleganger.

    This could be done on a nonsensical basis such as first-dibs or whose ever is the most well-known, but the only logical option is that both are protected.

    So if our Taylor doppleganger goes around just looking and existing with an appearance closely matching Taylor’s, she’s protected under her own likeness.

    If she goes on to claim of being Taylor Swift and swindles people, that’s a seperate issue dealt with impersonation statutes.

    Even cosplaying as they did with Dolly Parton would be protected under free speech/expression.

    Since these protections already exist, a right to likeness only really stops the deepfakes, which is exactly the point.


  • It also used to be that if one part of such a contract was found to be illegal, the entire thing would be thrown out, not any more.

    Not necessarily.

    A contract is supposed to be a mutually-beneficial arrangement. I sell you a car for its market value. I work for you for a market price on my time for the position and my expertise.

    If there’s a small mistake both sides are willing to amend - there probably won’t even be a suit.

    Even if there is a suit, most places’ laws prefer nudging toe contract to the side “less off” in such cases.

    Only when there are unreasonable demands by one side, or the contract is so one-sided it can’t be amended is when it gets thrown out completely.

    Which is supposed to be almost never.

    Therefore, I don’t think the rules themselves changed as much as the goalposts and the reasonableness window have. Quality of life and purchase power is decreasing steadily basically since Reagan.

    Contemporary EULAs are taken as acceptable and a fact of life when even 10 years ago T&Cs were laughed at which were much less unreasonable in comparison.

    Other types of contracts follow the same general direction, with employment ones being among the absolute worst.


  • If you just give binary blobs and no sources

    The main point is that you give the source to the blobs, so it’s not a black box anymore - new maintainers knowing what the blob does (and how) saves a HUGE amount of time prodding the black box (blob) to infer its behaviour.

    And it doesn’t pose a security risk - if anything, more eyes on the code is better. Security through obscurity has been proven a myth since open code has more eyes on it. Security researches have smarter things to do than prod some binary blob when there’s so much code that’s either open source in the first place or at least only they got access to closed code.

    What obscurity does is limit the eyes on the code, but the share of bad actors hoping to strike gold to researches looking at it outdoes any benefit.

    Will your technically-challenged great-Aunt switch to post-support build when her phone hits EoL

    She won’t. But you as her niece/nephew might. And the local repair tech might when she comes to ask. Abd she’s not an idiot, just the technology isn’t mature enough in the societal sense: people don’t think of bringing their phone to a repair shop like they do their cars, which is a fixable issue - even without much advocacy groups time will fix this issue.

    hackers [will] be able to remote control her banking app and take away your inheritance before the community can even patch it

    You might be mixing apples and orabnes here: why and how is the community expected to “fix” a banking app?

    A banking app is a closed blob just like phobes nowadays. It’s a parasitic relationship: blobbed phones are used to justify blobbed apps and vice versa. It’s like saying “well, the foubdation of the building is bad, but to fix it we’d need to also deal with the crumbling walls” - so instead of fixing, it often is better to do a fresh start. But you’re suggesting we should continue making buildings with bad walls and foubdations because we have the wall materials lying around, so why not use them?

    Then there could also be licensed code

    This is a recipe for disaster. I hope you’re trolling.

    The Internet wouldn’t work if DNS were centralized, and the only thing DNS is used for is translating key pairs (basically). Now a single point of failure would have to do code vetting?

    It’s the totalitarian dream! Oh, and absolutely out of touch with reality.



  • Whoever has a brain, a gun and less than $1 million in the bank. Hell, even some uber-rich folks might join the cause.

    And besides, if anyone has a gun problem, it’s America. Might as well make that bug into a feature. Y’know, wrong clock right twice or whatever.

    If the rulers end up getting shot and school shootings give way to senate, town hall and courtroom shootings, maybe a positive change would come. If nothing else, guns would get controlled which would mean less school shootings judging by the Brian Thompson case.

    And just to say - I’m not preaching political violence. What I am saying is that a bunch of dead adults is teeny tiny bit less terrible than a bunch of dead kids.










  • Why lax the timelines? Companies have an army of employees. They can deal with the consequences, unlike individuals.

    Someone comes home dead from work. Someone’s close family passed away. Someone went to vacation and didn’t get the (snail) mail in time.

    A lot of things make the 10-ish day window of “raise issue now” impossible to honour.

    However, not for companies.

    If people are overworked - hire more.

    If someone’s family member died - there’s everyone else in the section to take care of stuff until they return.

    If the only person responsible for dealing with this stuff is out on vacation, it’s a managerial issue. One that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

    While the reasons companies raise sound PR-friendly, they’re really not justifications - only mere excuses.

    A company is a system, and if it fails a 10-day deadline of dealing with their financial obligations (after months of failing to provide a core customer service on top), it’s a failing system. The only one whose fault it is is the company itself and its (clearly sub-par) management.

    Individuals can have the excuse of “life happened”. Companies cannot, as they’re not living beings. Especially since sooner or later, everyone is replaceable in their eyes, and because most can always hire more people without a single meaningful change in any KPI.

    About the deadlines: yes, they should be extended. Claimants usually don’t care much abd start the process after months of backlogged claims anyway. Even for a single claimee it’s beneficial - a slower buth more robust system has higher odds of honouring a request.

    However, companies have absolutely no ground to request an extension because they’re big. If anything, it should be shortened.






  • Yeah, Lemmy is a bit over-the-top anti-AI, but most of it is based in reality.

    There are a bunch of problems with AI. And they outbnumer any good ones by a mile.

    The main cause of that fact is the entire AI bubble.

    AI wastes a fuckton of energy. Of course, this energy isn’t free: communities pay. Electricity demand goes up, and so does price. Then, most electricity isn’t green. And on top of that, the rise in demand causes more electricity peaks, which almost exclusively get “fixed” through fossil fuel-based methods.

    From another angle, AI disrupts markets. And not in a good way. Companies dump millions into AI while neglecting their employees (who get laid off because AI “can replace” them), and their customers as well (since instead of doing useful stuff for consumers they pump out AI-branded bullshit no one wants or needs).

    Then, big AI companies spit in the face of copyright and have the audacity to turn around and claim copyright on their models’ outputs. If inputs are free game, so are the outputs. Copyright is a very vague, misunderstood and misused term, and no argument I’ve heard claiming feeding stuff into AI is fair use was grounded in reality.

    That all veing said, AI is here to stay. I’ve been thinking long and hard about similar fundamental changes to how human society functions, and I think i found one. Photography.

    Way back when, you had to do things painstakibgly by hand. Drawing, copying books by hand, etc.

    Then the printing press came. Revolutionary? Sure. But not as revolutionary as photography. Instead of writing by hand, you had to typeset by hand before printing. This made the process scalable, but it was still painstaking work.

    But photography is a different matter. You just have to make (or buy) a camera and other required supplies (film, developing media, etc), and then you merely have to set up the camera, take the photo, develop the film, and make the photo.

    Even in the early days of photography, while these processes took some time, it wasn’t painstaking. To take a photo, you set up the camera, and wait. To develop film, you dunk the film into a chemical bath, and wait. To transfer the image onto paper - a similar ordeal. Set, forget.

    Photography fundamentally changed how the entirety of society works. Painters complained and lost jobs and livelihoods - like the “jobs stolen” by AI. Instead of drawing stuff, which required a lot of skill, taking a photo is much simpler (abd faster).

    Yesterday, instead of having to paint stuff, you’d take a photo. Today, instead of taking a photo, you ask AI.

    On the copyright front, the paralels are obvious: Taking a photo of a book is fair use. But photocopying a book isn’t. The problem with AI is that it does some transformations to the original, so it’s obfuscated inside the model. But the obfuscation can be undone, as AI often happily spits out certain inputs verbatim when asked. Take a photo of a page - okay. Photocopy the entire book? Not okay.

    The situation is the same when we look at artwork instead of books. Taking a photo of an artwork in a museum is okay. Scanning an artwork (duplicating it verbatim) - isn’t. Same for movies. A frame is probably gonna be okay. The entire movie - won’t.

    Going by the closest analogue, there is absolutely no justification to indiscriminately feed everything and anything into AI, for indiscriminately photocopying and vervatim copying the same material is clearly protected.