ChemicalRascal

It really doesn’t have to be a “fact of life”, and it isn’t in many places, such as Australia and England – nations with very similar degrees of economic prosperity, and very similar cultures, to the USA.

The Looker is fantastic. I was particularly disappointed to learn that Blow took it as an insult, though.

Solar wind is not going to just yeet stuff around like that. It’ll have some sort of impact, but it’s not like, you know, actual wind.

Whisked off into space by what, exactly?

A large swarm of satellites, forming an adjustable solar shade, sitting around L1 for Earth-Sun is likely the best approach we would have. The swarm wouldn’t be in a geosynchronous orbit, though, but instead a heliosynchronous one.

Good stuff, Georgia. Especially with it being unanimous. Though given Trump’s demonstrated typical approach, I can’t imagine the rebuke from the court will prevent him from making similar attempts in the future.

Realistically? Something a lot like what we currently have, but with everyone having access to prompt healthcare, living in comfort. A focus on community and cooperation being more dominant in the culture, rather than competition and comparison.

Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be “in the know” about why one sub has “true” out the front.

With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there’s a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won’t be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.

I just learned to accept that I am weird and filthy.

Oh, good! That’s excellent then.

That would essentially be patching the vulnerability. A temporary fix would be just preventing the sidebar from being editable.

(Ideally the vulnerability would be patched, but these things take time.)

I suggest reading my entire comment.

I did, buddy. You’re just wrong. You can copyright data. A work can be “just data”. Again, we’re not talking about a set of measurements of the natural world.

It’s only a work if your brain is a work. (…) The weights that make up a neural network represent encodings into neurons, and as such should be treated the same way as neural encodings in a brain.

Okay, I see how you have the hot take that a generative model is brain-like to you, but that’s a hot take – it’s not a legally accepted fact that a trained model is not a work.

You understand that, right? You do get that this hasn’t been debated in court, and what you think is correct is not necessarily how the legal system will rule on the matter, yeah?

Because the argument that a trained generative model is a work is also pretty coherent. It’s a thing that you can distribute, even monetise. It isn’t a person, it isn’t an intelligence, it’s essentially part of a program, and it’s the output of labour performed by someone.

The fact that something models neurons does not mean it can’t be a work. That’s not… coherent. You’ve jumped from A to Z and your argument to get there is “human brain has neurons”. Like, okay? Does that somehow mean anything that is vaguely neuron-like is not a work? So if I make a mechanical neuron, I can’t copyright it? I can’t patent it?

No, that’s absurd.

Also, neural network weights are just a bunch of numbers, and I’m pretty sure data can’t be copyrighted.

Just being “a bunch of numbers” doesn’t stop it from being a work, it doesn’t stop it from being a derivative work, and you absolutely can copyright data – all digitally encoded works are “just data”.

A trained AI is not a measurement of the natural world. It is a thing that has been created from the processing of other things – in the common sense of it the word, it is derivative of those works. What remains, IMO, is the question of if it would be a work, or something else, and if that something else would be distinct enough from being a work to matter.

No, I know how these neural nets are trained and how they’re structured. They really don’t contain any identifiable copies of the material used to train it.

Go back and read my comment in full, please. I addressed that directly.

No? No. Not all work is analogous to training a generative model. That’s a really bizarre thing to say, and I’m shocked to hear it from you.

The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn’t contain any identifiable “copies” of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.

That’s a HUGE assumption you’ve made, and certainly not something that has been tested in court, let alone found to be true.

In the context of existing legal precedent, there’s an argument to be made that the resulting model is itself a derivative work of the copyright-protected works, even if it does not literally contain an identifiable copy, as it is a derivative of the work in the common meaning of the term.

If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.

A key distinction here is that a human brain is not a work, and in that sense, a human brain learning things is not a derivative work.

It’s not a technical split, but an ethicsl split.

It’s less than an ethical split, actually. If A does not federate Threads, but B does, Threads still does not meaningfully impact the experience of users on A. No defederation between A and B is needed for A to maintain their desired experience.

As such, there isn’t a split. There’s an ethical difference, but the impact is negligible, and thus it doesn’t require disassociation, which would be what an “ethical split” would be.

Until recently the fediverse took pride in the fact that they watched out for eachother. If tgere was an instance that didn’t moderate nazis, they defederated or at least muted it.

Or if they were Beehaw, and the other instance got too big. lemmy.ml soft-blocked HTTP requests from the KbinBot. And so on and so forth. Add in all the drama that went down in Mastodon between instances. You’re painting a very rosy picture of a tidy, well-behaved Fediverse when in reality it’s been pretty messy.

Not that this is relevant, as mentioned above.

Now, that the instance in question is run by a corporation with a history of bad moderation, desinforamation and hate-speech they get the benefit of doubt, because (…)

Again, this isn’t relevant in the context of causing a split. Let’s assume Threads is full of Nazis. 100% of users are Nazis. No! 200% of Threads users are Nazis!

None of those Nazis will be able to get content onto A in the earlier example, at least not from within Threads. If A wants to block Threads, they can just do that. Blocklists don’t have to be common between other instances, it literally doesn’t matter.

Thus [Meta] will not let the rest of the fediverse become competition.

Meta does not have a way to impact Fediverse projects without the consent of the project they attempt to impact. They cannot “stop” Mastodon or Lemmy or Kbin in any way. It’s FOSS.

Why exactly do you believe that a partial mass-defederation of Threads would “split” the fediverse? That’s not how interactions between instances works.

You’re absolutely right. Heliocentrism and geocentrism aren’t “questions of reference frame”, they’re cosmological models.

Nobody is using a geocentric model when they launch satellites, as any geocentric model that works with our existing observations of the universe ultimately does not have a functional understanding of gravity. And it will be remarkably difficult to keep a satellite in orbit if you disagree with the universe about how gravity works.

Urgh. He’s seriously trying make a comeback after Godus? You’d think he’d have thrown the towel in and retired.