BreadstickNinja @ BreadstickNinja @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Are you really incapable of understanding that the comment was broadly about people killed in the name of religion, and "burning at the stake" was synechdoche for a larger phenomenon? Or are you just playing dumb to be a troll?

Okay, but that's a meaningless hypothetical that is not a consequence of reducing income inequality.

The U.S. had substantially lower income inequality during the 50s and 60s and it drove massive economic growth, the expansion of the middle class, opportunities for education and homeownership without a lifetime of debt, and so on.

The Scandinavian countries have much lower levels of income equality than we have today and their citizens report far higher levels of satisfaction with their lives in addition to having better health care outcomes and other effects of a more egalitarian society.

So you can ask whatever rhetorical question you want, but I'm not sure what the point is when your proposed scenario has nothing to do with reality.

Biden isn't going to do a damn thing to fundamentally alter our Israel policy. He's been hawkish on Palestine for decades, and despite how much the youth vote disapproves of the war, there's also a substantial part of the base as well as independents who strongly support Israel.

There have been several opinion polls recently showing that a majority of Americans support Israel over Palestine, even as Israel has killed 20x as many people as Hamas.

Biden is in zugzwang. Keep supporting Israel's slaughter, and the youth vote will stay home. Oppose it, and he'll be labeled a Hamas sympathizer or an anti-Semite. Continue to do nothing, and he looks weak and ineffective. Every move is the wrong move.

It may not happen in the western world in the modern era, but blasphemy is still punishable by death in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Brunei, and Mauritania. Apostasy is further punishable by death in Malaysia, Maldives, Qatar, Somalia, UAE, and Yemen.

Critical to understanding whether this applies is to understand "use" in the first place. I would argue it'd even more important because it's a threshold question in whether you even need to read 107.

17 U.S. Code § 106 - Exclusive rights in copyrighted works Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1)to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; (2)to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; (3)to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending; (4)in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly; (5)in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and (6)in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

Copyright protects just what it sounds like- the right to "copy" or reproduce a work along the examples given above. It is not clear that use in training AI falls into any of these categories. The question mainly relates to items 1 and 2.

If you read through the court filings against OpenAI and Stability AI, much of the argument is based around trying to make a claim under case 1. If you put a model into an output loop you can get it to reproduce small sections of training data that include passages from copyrighted works, although of course nowhere near the full corpus can be retrieved because the model doesn't contain any thing close to a full data set - the models are much too small and that's also not how transformers architecture works. But in some cases, models can preserve and output brief sections of text or distorted images that appear highly similar to at least portions of training data. Even so, it's not clear that this is protected under copyright law because they are small snippets that are not substitutes for the original work, and don't affect the market for it.

Case 2 would be relevant if an LLM were classified as a derivative work. But LLMs are also not derivative works in the conventional definition, which is things like translated or abridged versions, or different musical arrangements in the case of music.

For these reasons, it is extremely unclear whether copyright protections are even invoked, becuase the nature of the use in model training does not clearly fall under any of the enumerated rights. This is not the first time this has happened, either - the DMCA of 1998 amended the Copyright Act of 1976 to add cases relating to online music distribution as the previous copyright definitions did not clearly address online filesharing.

There are a lot of strong opinions about the ethics of training models and many people are firm believers that either it should or shouldn't be allowed. But the legal question is much more hazy, because AI model training was not contemplated even in the DMCA. I'm watching these cases with interest because I don't think the law is at all settled here. My personal view is that an act of congress would be necessary to establish whether use of copyrighted works in training data, even for purposes of developing a commercial product, should be one of the enumerated protections of copyright. Under current law, I'm not certain that it is.

I agree with the first part, but not the second.

The impact of the financial crisis reverberates to this day, and that drives a huge proportion of the issues, but the crisis in my opinion was inevitable. From my perspective, the Post-War Economic Miracle, as it's called, catapulted Japan through all the stages of economic development into an almost accelerated version of the same problems that are afflicting the U.S. and other Western countries.

The dream of infinite growth in the Japanese context fell flat for the same reasons it is falling apart in other developed countries. A rise in standard of living and wages led to offshoring and outsourcing of production, the hollowing out of the middle class, a work culture at odds with family life, and so on. The country's land and businesses were valued in the late 1980s as though it could remain competitive internationally with a mostly domestic supply chain, even as the production costs of its goods continued to rise along with the needs of its population, which in a globalized economy turned out to be a pipe dream.

We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton. But the conservatism of Japanese society certainly plays a role, in that the country is highly resistant to change, and also due to a rigidity that stifles innovation, making it hard to start new businesses outside the keiretsu/conglomerate structure. The U.S. has somewhat mitigated its manufacturing decline through the creation of new service sector and especially tech businesses that operate internationally, which path is less available to Japan due to the rigidity of its business structure.

But the part I disagree with is the idea that Japan has rejected industrial society. Japan is still extremely proud of its culture and the impact it's had globally. They love that people in western countries eat ramen and sushi, play Nintendo games or watch anime, and they have a deep reverence for their globally successful businesses and particularly the auto industry. They have no desire to reject or withdraw from industrial society, they just haven't been able to figure out amidst external economic barriers, and internal cultural and financial barriers, how to move forward.

Yes, but not to mention Asia as in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh! 1.5 billion people living on the Asian continent, but "Asian" in popular American usage seems to only refer to China/Korea/Japan, and maybe Southeast Asia to a slightly lesser extent.

That's not even necessarily mixing the two up so much as failing to distinguish cultures within "Asia" in the first place. A lot of people think of the whole region as one place. Put some soy and garlic on something? You've got an "Asian" dish. Never mind that there are numerous regional culinary traditions within China alone.

See also: Africa.

I've sometimes heard it phrased that "Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980."

Yes, generally blue states contribute more in taxes than they receive in federal spending and generally red states receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes. Although there are exceptions, such as Texas (net contibutor) and New Mexico (net recipient).

I had a friend who worked for the military in Taiwan diplomacy for a while and there's a whole rigid structure around how we talk about it internationally that they hammer into diplomatic and military officials.

One of the things he told me is that the people of Taiwan have to be referred to as "the Taiwans" and not "the Taiwanese," because the -ese ending might give the impression that we're alleging a separate national identity, which conflicts with the official position we've maintained for decades with China.

So yeah, I don't think this statement is worth reading into as anything other than a continuation of our long-standing position on Taiwan. Although admittedly, that position leads to some silly-sounding contortions of language.

Many of the fiercest critics of Israeli policy in this country are Jewish. Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein. In November, Bernie Sanders demanded "an immediate end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law."

All of these Jewish people are antisemites according to the ADL.

The conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism is intentional.

Shulamit Aloni was an Israeli national hero; she spent 30 years in Israeli politics and won the nation's top civilian honor, the Israel Prize.

She was also strongly passionate about human rights and pursuing peace with Palestinians. And she fiercely criticized the Israel supporters who conflate criticism and antisemitism. She called it a "trick" that Israeli hardliners use to justify their treatment of Palestinians and deflect criticism of Israel government policy.

And it is a trick. When you criticize Russia, nobody says you must be racist against Slavs. When you criticize China, no one accused you of a deep-seated hatred of Han Chinese. But Israel supporters use accusations of antisemitism to stifle any criticism of their government - which over the past 20 years has been completely taken over by ultranationalists and zealots.

No government should be immune to criticism, including Israel's.

It sounds from the article like the ultimate issue is use of Nintendo IP, not Valve's.

Though I've never understood why Nintendo is so authoritarian about its IP.

Really? But Israel controls the West Bank and...

Oh yeah, that's right. It's full of illegal Israeli settlements and displaced Palestinians.

There are definitely crazy stupid people who choose to represent themselves in court. There are some great SovCit videos on YouTube.

It does not tend to go well for them.

In high school, weed mulch was all we had.

Huh, I was gonna guess it was 5G.

Doctors Without Borders reports that well over a hundred children in Gaza are dying every day. Israel kills more children every week than total civilians died on 10/7.

Hamas' attack was heinous, but it is not even close to being a justification for killing one in every hundred Gazans and counting. The actions of a terrorist group do not absolve Israel of responsibility in its mass slaughter of children, for which you are a despicable apologist.

That's exactly how percentages work. The pre-war population of Gaza was 2.3 million. If Israel kills 23,000 Gazans in three months, then that's 1% of the population.

If Israel kills another 23,000 Gazans in the next three months, that's another 1% of the pre-war population, and Gaza's population will now be 98% of the pre-war total. And so on.

If you're trying to say that percentages can only be calculated in the context of compound rates, then you're flat-out wrong.