donuts

1. My cat
2. Tough one, but probably my cat.
3. Not only do I love my cats, taking care of your pets if your responsibility as a pet owner. I have no love or relationship to a stranger, they don’t care about me and I don’t care about them, and It’s also not my responsibility to protect other people. An animal that I raised from near-birth, and who has always shown me basically unconditional love and affection seriously means as much to me as a child. My pets are there for me when I have a bad day, and they’re with me when I’m having a great day too. They bring so much joy and comfort into my life and they are so innocent and kind. Even after a lifetime of interactions I never have a single bad or negative moment with my pets. I don’t hate people and I wouldn’t like to have to decide in a fucked up scenario like you’re describing here. But to be honest, I’m probably saving my pet. Sorry.

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I feel like I’ve given my answer to this question regarding Beehaw once before…

But as I see it, the main driving force and overall source of value for services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc., is federation. That is to say, federation among a wide variety of different users and servers across the fediverse using protocols like ActivityPub is what sets this entire thing apart from legacy centralized and corporate social media, like Reddit or “X”.

I was initially on Beehaw myself and I liked the mature and kind atmosphere, but I ended up splitting for Kbin due to issues with defederation (on top of being curious and interested in Kbin as an alternative software to lemmy). But whether we’re talking about “Beehaw.org” or “Kbin.social”, in my view the federation is a huge part of the appeal, and I wouldn’t see myself continuing to use a server if it cut itself off from the rest of the network, regardless of whether they did it for “good reasons” or not.

Like, if Beehaw wants to be just a significantly smaller and more highly moderated centralized alternative to Reddit, that feels like a pretty weak pitch which, at best, might end up with a community roughly the size of a classic forum. I’m not really interested in that. I want the Fediverse to succeed as a decentralized, open, scalable, and community-moderated alternative to legacy social media. Frankly, my interest in Beehaw as a community hinges completely on it being a part of that movement or not.

I can understand how federation may have posed significant challenges towards your goal of detailed moderation and creating a safe and friendly space, but only in the sense that you were possibly not fully prepared for the level of exposure to a large number of federated users. But even so, if Beehaw is ever to grow into something bigger (which, to be honest, is not a given, especially if you set out on your own as just another disconnected and insular social media website), you will eventually have to deal with the harsh reality that the kind of moderation that you’re interested in doing is going to be a significant challenge as your community scales, federated or not. (For example, you may be prepared to moderate content in English, but are you prepared to moderate content in other languages? How will you know when someone starts spreading disinformation and hate speech in Burmese?)

Finally, I think you might want to consider the general movement towards federated social media. Between ActivityPub and the Fediverse, Meta’s interest in federating Threads, BlueSky being developed around federation to some extent, federation support in things like WordPress, and a number of other social media platforms tip-toeing their way into the idea, I personally feel that there is a pretty interesting paradigm shift happening right now. Some of that has to do with moderation, responsibility and government pressure on big tech, I think.

But nevertheless, social media is gradually moving towards federation, and I think that’s a good thing for the internet as a whole. You nice people at Beehaw will really have to search yourselves to determine whether you see the value in federation (both in terms of connecting people, but also in terms of allowing various communities to self-moderate to some extent) or not.

I do hope you’ll stay, even though it means facing the growing pains of moderation challenges sooner rather than later, because the fediverse is better with us all connected and communicating together. I’ll be sticking with the fediverse with or without Beehaw, but I do wish you all luck in your goals should you decide to set out on your own.

How about Tom Petty? Southern rocker with great lyrics and no bullshit. One of the greats as far as I’m concerned.

Voting a third party is not throwing your vote away. It’s actually often the best way to make your vote matter.

I strongly disagree with this.

Elections are simply a case of math. If you abstain from voting, write in some random name, or otherwise vote for a candidate who is statistically incapable of winning, then there are only still only two outcomes for your vote:

• In the best case scenario, like you’re describing, your vote has no effect on the outcome and your 2nd place candidate happens to win anyway.
• In the worst case scenario, however, vote splitting leads to the well-documented phenomenon known as the spoiler effect. In which case the 3rd most popular candidate, who may not represent anything close to the will of the democratic plurality, will win.

Personally I always plan around the worst case scenario when making important decisions, and so I don’t believe in the concept of the “protest vote”. Especially since so little concrete information can be derived from “reading the tea leaves” of 3rd party votes. (A big part of your premise revolves around the idea that someone out there will somehow get whatever message you’re trying to send by voting for a 3rd party candidate. And that’s obviously a very indirect and abstract form of protest even in the best case scenario. )

Also I think it’s a strech to attribute easily 20th century work reforms to 3rd parties as they exist today considering two points: (1) there was a radical shift in political power, generally towards progressivism, at that time and (2) it can be argued that many of these reforms could be attributed more to labor unions in general than any one political party.

Vote how you want, or not at all, but we can’t escape math in the end. Statistically speaking, a protest vote is at best a benign waste of a vote and at worst the cause of undemocratic election outcomes via the spoiler effect. So I’ll continue to recommend against it, and recommend for more democratic voting systems that are less prone to manipulation and spoilage.

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If you don’t pull you’re actively giving up more rope than anyone. That’s exactly the point.

BTW: If you regret that we live within a political reality where we have limited choices and the risks of wasting your vote are high, then you should join the movement to implement more democratic voting systems like Ranked-Choice (aka Instant Runoff) or STAR, as well as reforms to political dark money.

Even still, many of these changes are more likely to happen at a state/local level before anything can happen federally. But that’s just one more good reason to be interested and involved in regional politics also.

Uh, never? As an American I can easily recognize that we live in a 2-party political system in which you have 3 real options:

• Vote for the Democrats
• Vote for the Republicans
• Don’t vote / Waste your vote

American politics is a game of tug-of-war. You can spend as much time as you want lamenting that the rope isn’t exactly where you want it to be right now. But the fact is that one party is pulling the rope to the left and the other party is pulling it to the right. If you want the rope to move right you better join the people on the right, and if you want the rope to move to the left you better join the people on the left. And more to the point, if for whatever reason you don’t want to pull (maybe because it seems futile or maybe because you just don’t like the people on your team) then where can you expect it to move other than away from where you want it to be?

There is no politician on Earth who perfectly represents my politics, ideals or philosophy. If I wanted someone who perfectly represented exactly what I want I would get politically active and run for office myself. In lieu of that, what else can I hope for but to vote for the people who happen to be pulling in my direction, or at the very least pulling back against the mob of right-wing fascist criminals.

I don’t think Biden is perfect, but he’s certainly not evil. What’s more, I know exactly what we’re up against when it comes to Trump and the Republicans (who at best are spineless impotent political cowards, and at worst are fascist activists who want to strip people of rights, further rob the working class, deny climate change in the name of profit, destroy what little democracy we have, and weaponize the government against political enemies).

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again for all takers, name any politician who you think would be making more progress on important issues (healthcare, climate, education, transportation, lgbtq rights, women’s rights, the economy, etc.) than Biden right now and I’ll give you at least 3 reasons why they wouldn’t. (Hint: the House, the Senate, the courts, state legislatures, inflation, unstable geopolitics, post-pandemic economic change, etc.) Bernie or Warren could be sitting in the Oval Office today, and we still wouldn’t have universal healthcare (because of Congress), we still wouldn’t have been able to wipe out student debt (because of the courts), we still would have to deal with wars and terrorism overseas (because of aggression from countries like Russia and Iran), and we still would be feeling the effects of inflation (because of decades of low interest rates coupled with pandemic supply chain fuckery).

So yeah, I’m not gonna stop voting for the better candidate of the two, because what the fuck else would any reasonable person do? Pull the rope towards where you want it to go. It’s not hard.

It’s almost as if machine learning is a black box that you superimpose massive amounts of random data onto.

How I like to think it went down…

OpenAI board of directors and investors: So… it’s not a problem that our model is trained off a bunch of stuff that we don’t own and haven’t licensed, is it?

Sam: Nope… not a problem at all!

Relax, you’re only 25. You have plenty of time to fall madly in love, get married, fall madly out of love, get divorced, and repeat. Multiple times if you want to! People of all ages and in all walks of life are dating and getting together, so no, you’re never too old.

Also as far as weight goes, in my opinion you should lose it because you want to lose it, not simply because you think it’ll make you more attractive to others. You’re more likely to keep it off that way, and when it comes to building meaningful relationships I think being fit is much less important than being yourself and being comfortable in your own skin.

Copyright is an artificial restriction

All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.

AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There’s no having it both ways.

What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves.

I’m a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.

Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else’s code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you’ll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.

I’m also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a “fair use” of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it’s baked into the license.

Long story short, whether it’s code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as “fair use”.

tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright

TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I’m advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.

If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you’re entitled to think that.

But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don’t get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they’re doing is fair use.)

And when you add it up and realize that “AI” is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won’t someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!

If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

That’s because I’m a human being. I’m acting on my own volition and while I’ve observed artwork, I’ve also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I’m not owned or beholden to any company.

“AI” “art” is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

All of these are factors in determining whether it’s fair to use someone else’s copyrighted material, which is why it’s fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it’s not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else’s copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

AI training is using people’s copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that’s absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people’s copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is “fair” under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don’t get to unilaterally decided what people’s art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

Take Spotify for example, artists don’t get paid a lot per stream and it’s arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it’s worth it to be on those platforms. That’s not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that’s because it probably is–another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

Well, why shouldn’t they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?

There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.

Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else’s copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.

So again, what makes AI “fair use” and why shouldn’t companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?

Also, it’s such a uniquely North American thing to downplay the invasion of other countries.

(a) I’m not downplaying the invasion of other countries, so right off the bat you’re mischaracterizing what I’m saying.

If anything, you are downplaying Trump’s involvement in American wars in the Middle East, which he may not have started, but he was certainly a willing participant in them. Droning people with impunity and less accountability than ever before, and even assassinating an Iranian general in January 2020–an act that could have very easily escalated into a direct conflict with Iran and its allies.

Also it’s funny that you bring up the MOAB, because from what I remember it was Trump, not Bush, who dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan in 2017; resulting in the largest single explosive attack by America since the dropping of the atomic bombs during WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Nangarhar_airstrike

(b) Downloading invasions is very obviously not a “uniquely North American thing”. See: Russian downplaying of the invasion of Ukraine, Japan downplaying the history of their invasions of Asia, British attitudes towards imperialism and the pillaging of cultural artifacts from all over the world, Chinese annexation of Tibet and the literal filtering of information regarding it, and so on for all of human history.

Trump and Bush were both awful presidents and human beings, but I maintain that Trump was worse for America, for democracy, and for the Earth.

spreading COVID was more passive and the result of a lot of idiots ignoring good practice. One is negligence, while the other is malice.

When world leaders like Trump (1) ignore pandemic planning, (2) lie about the seriousness and gravity of the situation during the crucial early days and weeks of the pandemic, (3) turn pandemic precautions and public safety measures into just another pointless item in their culture war, and (4) spend just about every waking moment scapegoating scientists, fomenting conspiracy theories, and intentionally muddying the waters, it’s can no longer be considered “negligence”.

Right from the guy at the top, the Trump administration made calculated political decisions and came up with talking points that actively made COVID-19 worse, and we are still feeling the effects of it today. The pandemic may be “over” when it comes to public policy, but an incalculable number of people all over the world are still having health problems as a result of the virus (which is now endemic to humanity), and we are still very much in the middle of the economic fallout with still no end in sight.

Whether COVID was worse than the War on Terror is debatable and subjective (I’m not exactly a fan of either, frankly), but there’s no doubt in my mind that the effects of COVID on global health and economics were much more wide-spread.

Listen, I’m not really into quantifying human suffering like that, so let’s just suffice to say that both Trump and Bush were fucking terrible human beings who did lasting damage to the world.

It’s also very much worth noting that Trump was a willing and active participant in American wars in the Middle East, and he did so with impunity and with less accountability than his predecessors. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/ (Plus he assassinated an Iranian general in Iraq without the knowledge and consent of the Iraqi government, which is arguably a war crime and could have easily escalated into a war with Iran.)

I’m not sure how you can claim with a straight face that Trump caused 0 economic crises when we’re still in the process of recovering from a economic crisis tied to a massively bungled initial pandemic response. Remember how Trump and his cronies came out every day for about 4 months and pretended that there was no pandemic, that it was under control, and that it would magically disappear by easter 2020? That cost the world a lot of money and, much more importantly, a lot of human lives.

As for war and war crimes, Trump removed all transparency around drone strike operations that had been in place during the Obama administration, so…

Second source: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/trumps-secret-rules-for-drone-strikes-and-presidents-unchecked-license-to-kill