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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.

    SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people’s printed works.

    Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it’s passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.

    But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn’t apply to anything else. So you can’t use “physical medium” because books are a special case and have their own special US law.

    For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.

    • Book - I want to read them.
    • Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.

    Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.

    Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.

    • Book - I want to read them.
    • Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.

    And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.

    • DVD - I want to watch the movie.
    • MP4 - I want to watch the movie.

    That’s not transformative.

    • DVD - I want to watch the movie.
    • MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.

    That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole “fair use” thing.

    This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I’m not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.

    And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren’t LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it’s impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.


  • See entry level people believe it’s fundamentals. Smarter people understand that it’s reading people and knowing when they’re dumb enough to invest and knowing when to bail before they wise up. So if you think about it in those respects, it is indeed an honest to goodness “real” thing. People are really being ripped off by con-artist.

    But yeah, the days of the 1890s to 1930s of structured investment, measured risk, and mitigation of the unforeseen, those days are dead. There aren’t market fundamentals outside of being able to identify rubes.



  • Thom Yorke has literally tried everything for selling music. Though it all he’s seen the music industry eventually consume it.

    You can’t invent something new without it eventually turning into what was the old. We can always keep moving the tech, we can always keep inventing some new platform, but we never get to keep to ourselves forever.

    The reason why this keeps happening is because people keep trying to apply a solution that doesn’t apply to the problem. We don’t need some NEW method of delivery. We just need to get rid of the OLD system of industry.






  • Many local government’s aren’t on the home rule, they follow some form of the Dillon Rule. This applies to utilities and land use. For some local areas they are required by some degree to follow the State’s allocation and billing of utilities to remain classified as a public utility in the State.

    In many areas our legal framework at the State and local level were never made to handle what’s coming down the pipe with new advances. This is why I always indicate that data centers and their impact need to be addressed at the local level. That’s why I think Federal regulation is the wrong step for the building part of AI. This is very much a local and/or State level that needs to desperately be answered there.

    The good news is that we see more people who are involved with their local government with this issue. But this underlying issue has been one since the 1970s, it’s just that these companies have hired firms that are incredibly well versed in the shortcomings of local ordinances and State law. It’s super difficult to patch up flaws in the laws when they’re being exploited at rapid fire pace.


  • That supply is constrained artificially for particular markets. There’s nothing that stops Samsung, Hynix, or Micron from indicating particular runs for different sectors. And if those three had not removed other competition, we would have producers to increase that supply.

    Again, this doesn’t absolve the AI industry in the least. But we have makers that are only making limited selections of product for pure gain and are able to do that via their manipulation of the market. We don’t always have to have a good guy and a bad guy, it can bad guys all around.


  • We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming

    I need people to understand, AI is the current “thing”. We have an industry that produces memory for this planet that is a functional monopoly. Today their excuse is AI. But their excuse for that sudden increase changes roughly every four years. And we continue to let them get away with it, because we collectively blame the consumer.

    And do know, I’m not saying AI companies get pass from me. That’s not the point here. The large AI companies and us regular people are consumers of the exact same product that only three companies provide. Those three companies have been legally found guilty in several courts of law across the world of colluding to increase prices, and because there’s not really any other alternative, they chalk the fines up as the cost of business and we write it off as a necessary evil.

    But when we blame AI (which there’s lots to blame AI companies for, again that’s beside the point here) we are just blaming a consumer of a product. We are basically saying “Why do they get that thing I wanted. I should be the one who gets it, not them.” Now there’s a lot of industry regulation and international treaties that ensure we’re at the bottom of the list and AI companies pay into keeping that status quo. But let’s be real here, if it wasn’t them, it would be someone else.

    When we say the reason computers and technology is getting expensive is because of AI, we are actually avoiding the real culprit here. A tightly controlled market, not unlike say the diamond business of old. And should AI fade away (which math equations that represent ways to optimize pattern matching are something we’ve found to be incredibly helpful) that tightly controlled, highly colluded, industry remains. And then we eventually find ourselves right back where we left off and are convinced to blame something else.

    Again, this isn’t trying to absolve the sins of AI companies. But it’s to point out that this isn’t an “AI has done all of this all by itself.” And when we do that, we’re providing cover for an industry that largely runs corrupt with impunity.



  • So why wouldn’t that extend to all those other things I listed?

    There’s a fundamental difference between the action prohibited and the means by which that is carried out. We can ban drunk driving, now we can enforce that by arresting people driving drunk or shooting everyone who walks out of a bar that touches a car. The latter is extreme but technically does the thing we are after. If we murder everyone who walks out of bar drunk, we technically prevent drunk drivers.

    That’s the issue. We are trying to make it where computers keep us in check. That’s a bad idea for sort of the same reasons why installing breathalyzers in every car would be a bad idea. We’re trying to paper over actual enforcement. So that way when there’s a failure we don’t have to blame law makers for making bad choices or law enforcement for not doing their job, we can just blame computers.

    I just hope you can understand why that’s bad.

    Like… The flock cameras. Made to be able to pinpoint the motions of criminals so that law enforcement doesn’t have to. That’s a great starting intention, but having cameras that watch everyone at all times, that’s bad. And I think you can understand why it would be bad.

    Kids still drink, kids still vape, kids still get behind the wheel when they ought not to. It’s up to us humans to enforce our rules on other humans. And the more we forget that, the more we hand power over to whoever is controlling the computers or technical aspects or whatever.

    If parents don’t want their kids watching porn, that’s a pretty easy fix that doesn’t require us to hand over critical functions of our computers to some 3rd party to, at some later date, do something we know not of.

    Like goodness how is the bad aspects of this not obvious outright? Like how did we start getting to a point where we’re so blind to how all of this can go off the rails so quickly? All these are bad things for reasons that’s really complicated that might not fit in 5000 characters or less. But they’re bad. The whole having a computer verify age by scanning the barcode, what happens when that company signs off on a deal with health insurance? What would happen if the Kroger plus card data was sent over to your insurance provider? Everything you bought at the grocery store is something that your insurance provider has access to?

    Like c’mon how are we not seeing this? It’s not about “kid should have access to porn”, it’s about how we go about enforcing the whole “kids shouldn’t have access to porn.” You have to understand, I’m making a statement not about the “ends,” I’m making a statement about the “means.”

    We all seem to be always getting so caught up on the end goal that we forget to stop and consider the actual path we’ve selected. We’re so preoccupied with whether or not we can prevent something, that we don’t stop to think if we should reconsider how we go about it.

    Please I’m begging you, there’s a really important point in this and we keep failing to see it, A LOT! Like, I’m glad everyone is starting to understand the dangers of having a Ring camera everywhere, but it’s so frustrating that it took a Super Bowl ad for it to finally sink in how bad an idea it is when a lot of people were pointing this out very early on with the Ring TOS.

    I’m getting old and I’m getting tired that this keep happening, I don’t want any of us to be agreeing to something that’s got a pretty easy fix for it already, that’s got massive ramifications down the road if we go down the purposed path. It’s not ends, it’s the means, it’s the means. We keep selecting ones that have that really bad consequences.