An AI can easily start nuclear war, as can a human.

The only thing preventing a nuclear disaster are all the institutional measures limiting its accessiblity.

If you gave a single human (or a single AI) access to a magic no-strings-attached ‘Send a Nuke’ button, either the human/AI is the second coming of Jesus Christ, or a nuke will befall some unlucky portion of the population sooner or later. Bonus points if people can talk to the AI or if access to the button is hereditary.

license terms

In most places ownership laws make those licences unenforceable - not in the legal sense, but practically - hard to lock you out of a DVD.

Great option for those still politically opposed to pirating stuff.

Well the situation explained is a glaring oversight assuming the average Windows user’s opsec common sense, but I’m amazed Notepad isn’t auto-running every single linked file automatically during parsing

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.

Not even unjust or corrupt.

It’s for cases where judicial guidelines are too hard, requiring a conviction which doesn’t make sense.

It’s for (uncontroversial) amnesty when the law is slower than the executive and not retroactive. So stuff like non-violent drug convictions.

It’s for adding another chance at parole when the parole board’s main concern is something that shouldn’t be their focus.

Anything that requires remuxing multiple times pretty much requires lossless compression. Else it’d become like screenshots of memes because the compression adds up.

That being said, last time I was working with professional audio people, they still preferred WAW as their intermediary format.

China builds world’s first 20GW microwave

For some reason it took me at least 5 reads to notice the word weapon in the title properly.

Seeing the spinning wheel loading screen makes me cry. Not because it lasts long, but because it isn’t smooth!

Innovation is good. That being said, slapping “AI”, “Smart” or more pixels is the opposite of innovation. Innovation is something new, out of the box. 1080p > 4k > 8k is logical progression.

The illegal killing of an immigrant

There, slightly fixed.

Honestly, this idea has me pretty mortified as well. Just seeing ”rm -rf /” as part of a string sends chills down my spine.

Granted, any reasons or explanations to cause a string being cut short to this godforsaken form and accidentally run is extremely unlikely, but a valid theoretical possibility: I can easily imagine someone mistyping the first letter after root and, wishing to delete it, pressing Backspace while simultaneously accidentally grazing the Enter key.

Sure, the chances of it happening are about the same as a gun user accidentally dropping their gun, clumsily catching it in the air and accidentally shooting someone right in between the eyes as a result.

The licence over 100 pages long, with deliberately convoluted language no one ever expects you to read. Some services even block you from accepting if you haven’t scrolled to the end, but then most give a “Skip to bottom” button!

And since most EULAs are not grounded in reality and as such unworkable, they’re pretty much just a scare tactic.

Do you think US’ians don’t think the US is “America”?

I think non-US Americans are already used to it.

It’s easier to screw over consumers than businesses.

Busunesses like to complain. They have long-term contracts. They have a lot of purchase power. They’re more likely tp swotch to a competitor. When they threaten, they’re more likely to go through with the threats since they have both money to burn and employees to blackmail with pay cuts.

Among other things.

There’s a lot of consumers, so those that do jump ship usually don’t cause a big dent in profits when they do. Consumers are also less likely to jump ship in the furst place since they have only their extended family and their family lawyer to look out for them (if). They usually have “bigger” problems than the electricity bill: car payments, mortgages, school bills, you name it.

Again, among other things.

Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.

But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.

Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.

Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).

Some economist please corrcxt me if I’m wrong, but: Trickle down may not work. However, trickle up should.

If you do say, UBI, people will spend the stuff. And the money will go to the big players. They’ll buy their food at Walmart. Or meds at Target Pharmacy. Or get a loan at JP Morgan.

Unlike, say Walmart, who won’t buy their huge private jet collection from the swathes of less-than-well-off people across all of America.

So even if UBI made people lazy, even if it made people less productive, the money will still disproportionately end up in the hands of the rich.

Because historically (and for the most part today as well), it costs money.

Sure, today stuff like ChatGPT and the somewhat older Google Translate exists, but that doesn’t solve the cost issue. (And I’m skirting on the huge elephant in the room called quality for a bit of brevity).

There’s a huge chance someone paid a good chunk of money for all the books you find dirt-cheap at a flea market, check out at a library or happen to find in your own house.

Printing physical books is expensive. Publishers also want a margin, and a lot of authors want royalties.

In the end even if the publisher and author are both good souls demanding nothing, someone needs to foot the cost of printing. But before that, you’d need to go through non-trivial talks with most authors’ publishers and/or authors themselves.

Then you need to arange for translation, typesetting and printing if you’re not doing it yourself. That takes both time and money.

And if you were to do all that yourself, it’d be a huge time investment, with a potential lawsuit if you don’t do those damn talks. So most just don’t bother.

Businesses are incredibly inefficient, even though some are “successful” and have a lot of cash to burn. They need to pay workers, bills, buy and fix equipment, and of course, a cut needs to go to the top people. Usually the “golden” 80-20 rule applies to almost everything: 20% of books make 80% of money, 20% of employees make 80% of money, and a different 20% of people do 80% of the work, etc. And of course, in this world, it’s all about the money.

A translation is usually initiated by a publisher that has a manager who wants to get his section’s metrics up to go cry to his own manager about how good he is to get a raise or not get fired. This is a daily grind. Sometimes (but quite rarely), that leads the manager to the decision of publishing a new book. Usually such actions are guided by things like bestseller lists, reviews and personal biases of the manager and the company as a whole. Sometimes the publisher hires an agency to try to approximate the demand for such a book (even more money spent). Then they do the talks. This also costs money, and the result is also a cost of money (the royalties to be paid). Then comes translation, then printing, then distribution to bookstores, and finally advertising.

These are just the steps that come to mind. All cost money, and all the books you see for sale in a bookstore went through all of these steps. For a library, not as much (but still the vast majority) did.

Sure, not every situation is the same, so there are companies that specialize in providing translations of well-known works or companies whose manager at one point said they need to publish 25 translations yearly (instead of one individual one), so they kind of “flood” the market.

But sometimes it’s just the whim of a newspaper whose management thought printing classic works of shorter length and bundling them with their newspaper would drive up newspaper sales.

It’s incredible how each document (edition of a book or otherwise) has multiple stories (of the author, publisher, translator, seller, advertiser, buyer, worker in logistics/delivery driver,…) that shaped the life of it. Some lasted a few hours, and some took hundereds of man-hours. All of this somehow translates to money.

That’s the long answer.

The short one is: 80% the economy and 20% human laziness.

It’s a both-ways situation.

They allow only the Fisher-Price version of phones so less-than-power-users don’t do something stupid.

They also allow only Fisher-Price so power users can’t beat Celebrite as easily.

Nor does it “read” its input. It doesn’t even process it.

It’s built/tuned using it. Or as AI techros would say, trained.

Wearing a pink blouse and skirt, complete with rainbow-colored nails.