I think in most EU countries - after lobbying from US copyright corporations - it is explicitly banned to make copies from an illegal original. This was in order to criminalise downloads from torrents whether you seed or not. And the potential punishment typically involves jail sentences in order to give the police access to the surveillance necessary to prove the crime. Plus copyright violations being the only crime that in all EU countries also yields punishing damages.

Now I know this because I was against every single one of these unproportional laws, but some copyright organisations over here should know this. Just saying it would be fun if Meta got to pay out punishing damages. And even funnier if Zuckerberg got some jail time.

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

Maybe. But I would counter with that it’s an attitude towards their cynicism. Deep down they know their lies aren’t true, they just consider lying in service of power a natural thing.

As an example, witness one Matthew Miller (the Biden press conference guy) who after smirking his way through lies about how Israel is totally going to investigate itself after the latest atrocity, now has appeared in an interview saying he was just representing the administration, that wasn’t his own view. He knew he was lying in service of at least atrocities (he isn’t ready to admit to it being a genocide), he just considers that natural.

It appears he has stopped smirking, I guess that was his tell that he was lying.

“We’ve set fire to a bunch of money - now you need to give us more” - tech companies “investing” in “AI” to their customers.

I for one has not stopped finding it funny that the 100 billion dollars in profit is their definition of AGI.

I find it a bit interesting that it isn’t more wrong. Has it ingested large tables and got a statistical relationship between certain large factors and certain answers? Or is there something else going on?

Which “Word” do you mean? Is it Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Office) desktop app Word or Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Office) online app Word? Or maybe another program, that is slightly different and also named Word? Maybe Microsoft has put a descriptor on it, perhaps the word “new”, which won’t at all be replaced by another “new” version in a couple of years.

All making it rather hard to search for solutions to problems with these oh so similar, yet when it comes down their problems rather different programs!

Ah well, we change what we can and rant about what we can’t.

Asimov being Asimov, the human consequences of the decline and fall of the galactic empire happens mostly of screen.

How exactly Trantor in a couple of hundred years went from a bustling planetary city to a planet where the last survivors scratch out a living from farming the former imperial grounds, is better left unexplored. If you are living in that world you are much more likely to be among the masses were stuff happens that will eventually be noted by Foundation scholars as “population decline”, than being a Foundation scholar.

“Elsa” does not feature in “The Snow Queen”. The kids in that story are Kai who gets abducted by the Snow Queen and Gerda who rescues him after a long journey which she manages by being good and very, very Christian. It’s also pretty racist, though tame by European 19th century standards. I don’t know who made up Elsa, but I guess they had long signed over their rights to Disney.

As the purpose of the system is what it does, the purpose of copyright is to centralise ownership and control. But then again that is also the purpose of the AI bubble. So they will fight, and the public is likely to lose.