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2 yr. ago

  • Well... maybe.

    Artists are able to work off of commissions, assuming that there is a demand for their art. (Getting that demand is the tricky part.) If people don't want their work on its own, then they have to work at a corporation - maybe making concept art, or drawing animation cels, or whatever. None of that art is owned by them; it's typically in the contract the artist signs when they become employed. Anything they make belongs to the corporation.

    I used to work for Disney - in their theme parks, not as an artist - and even my employment contract said that any idea I had while Disney was my employer was property of Disney. Literally, if I had an idea on the job, I could not monetize it. If I thought of an idea for a video game or novel or movie, Disney owned that idea just because they were my employer.

    Now. Could they enforce that? No way. But they could try, and as Tom points out then it doesn't matter if I'm in the write or not - Disney has expensive lawyers, I do not.

    Scientists need grant money to do science. You have to convince a panel of experts that you have a good idea, and that your idea is worth throwing grant money at. Then you use that grant money to pay yourself and your assistants while you perform an experiment. This grant money can be from a university... or it could be from a corporation doing research and development for new concepts or ideas. If you make a discovery, the corporation might be able to patent that, since you were on their payroll at the time.

    Making things Creative Commons doesn't magically make money appear. When you get paid by someone wanting to publish your work, they are specifically buying out your copyright on that work - they can do whatever they wish with it after. (Famously, this is why the first Harry Potter book is called "Sorcerer's Stone" in the US, because the publisher owned the copyright and changed the name.)

    Creative Commons, therefore, is completely at odds with traditional publishing, since you can't sell your copyright to them. You can still self-publish, of course... but that's a whole can of worms. Not to mention that it's incredibly easy these days to have AI churn out 80k words of BS and sell it on Amazon for $1.99. You don't need many sales to break even.

  • 100%.

    It gets tricky, though. For example, I'm using a website called "Sudowrite" to help me write a novel. I've been kicking this idea around since 2007. I have a general idea for what it should look like, but I always struggle with Act 2.

    Literally over a decade's worth of notes. And not a good Act 2.

    But I was able to use ChatGPT and Sudowrite (especially its "Story Engine" tool) to finally understand what Act 2 was missing. And now I'm able to rewrite what I've already done, making it better. AI is a tool just like a word processor is a tool.

    Lest anyone think I'm writing an ad here - I'm not. Per their FAQ, Sudowrite says that I own the copyright on anything that I generate with their stuff.

    Who owns the copyright to what I write?

    You do. Anything you write in Sudowrite and anything Sudowrite suggests for you belongs to you.

    But if I don't modify it, that's clearly not true (as you mention). Furthermore, I can actually have it suggest things that might run counter to that idea.

    I've had it suggest lines from Kafka - good lines, too. I've read Kafka, so I recognized them... but what if I didn't? I don't own the copyright on those lines, as Tom Scott points out in OP's video. Kafka's original German is public domain... most translations are not.

    You can highlight some text in the tool and say "Write this in the style of Douglas Adams." It knows who Douglas Adams is. It knows what his work sounds like. And the only way it knows is because its model was trained on his work. When I did this, one of the suggestions included Zaphod Beeblebrox, which was certainly not mentioned in my text. It also suggests spaceships and aliens and futuristic gadgets, all written in the kind of prose that you'd expect from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

    How would it know that, if it hadn't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

    It's why Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. While the model may be a bunch of statistics, it also must know what her text is like - to some degree. We can argue over how, but going back to the AI suggesting Zaphod Beeblebrox... if I didn't know HGTTG maybe I'd think that's a cool name for a character? How can Sudowrite say I own the copyright when it's clear that they don't own it, either?

    Which sort of brings me back to the beginning. AI has the potential to be a wonderful tool - again, like going from a typewriter to a computer. I have had this idea for literally 16 years now, and Sudowrite was literally a game changer. I knew all of act 1, act 2 was... ehhhh, and then act 3 was never satisfying without a good act 2. I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there. AI really helped, because it understands story structures - and how to make good stories (with some prodding - it's not perfect). And now, whenever I'm stumped, I can type some stuff into the prompt and it'll generate ideas for me.

    But that only works if we really figure out where the line is for copyright. I'm trusting what Sudowrite is telling me... but I'm taking a risk, because what if they're wrong?

  • Yep! The Reddit version, at least. Dunno if the Lemmy/Kbin sorts are the same or not.

    Before that, it was sorted by top. I think subreddits were top/day, and comments were top/all time. Frontpage was top/day for all the subreddits you were subscribed to (or top/day for a selection of "default" subreddits if you didn't have an account).

  • Things change over time.

    For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that's not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.

    But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.

    I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don't "get" the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I'd love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.

    I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I've found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).

    Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can't post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that's not in the fedipact, there's this feeling where now I can't join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I'll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there's a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.

    Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don't like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it's abused, and how you really can't trust that admins of a server you join won't be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.

    So now, if I want to like my fiance's posts... I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.

  • Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.

    Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don't know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.

  • /vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.

    That said - I haven't been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I'm sure it's probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan...

  • To be fair...

    There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I'd argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

    I don't like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don't like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn't suit their political views.

    I don't think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind "avoid using Lemmy" than "avoid using Calckey/Firefish".

  • Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.

    And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made - look how successful TikTok is, and think that Twitter literally had that a decade ago and decided to shut it down.)

    So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.

  • There's been multiple waves to Lemmy.

    Since the start of July, it's largely petered back. A lot of the folks who are diehard anti-Reddit are here, but until Reddit fucks up again it'll probably quiet down.

    Reddit will fuck up again, mind. Digg didn't die instantly, either - it was a slow, drawn-out death.

  • The only correction I would make is that Kbin does let you follow communities from other instances (even Lemmy instances).

    Until a couple weeks ago, it would show local magazines first... but if you dug deep enough, after all the local magazines were listed it would start listing remote communities across Lemmy/Kbin.

    It's changed very recently to always sort everything by subscriber count, with an option to toggle between local magazines and everything on the threadiverse.


    As far as "I tried to go to posts I knew existed but weren't showing up" - like everywhere else on the fediverse, someone needs to follow that content first. So the reason why they saw their Mastodon content is because someone followed their Mastodon account from Kbin. When they searched for things that didn't appear, it's because nobody on Kbin was following those accounts.

    If they searched the full @username@instance.social and hit "follow", then future posts would appear in the microblog tag and be searchable.

  • I believe it would also extend to anything that can be confused with the white and blue logo in the context is social media.

    I can't take the Android droid logo, make him blue, give him a squiggly antenna, and then try to make him the logo of my new phone company.

    While Meta doesn't own the letter X, if the government says "People might get confused between these two marks" that's a valid reason to reject the trademark or prevent the company from calling itself that. See https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/likelihood-confusion:

    Likelihood of confusion exists between trademarks when the marks are so similar and the goods and/or services for which they are used are so related that consumers would mistakenly believe they come from the same source. Each application is decided on its own facts, and no strict mechanical test exists for determining likelihood of confusion.

    So basically it would come down to a judge deciding if the marks are too similar to each other or not.

    To determine whether a likelihood of confusion exists, the marks are first examined for their similarities and differences. Note that in order to find a likelihood of confusion, the marks do not have to be identical. When marks sound alike when spoken, are visually similar, and/or create the same general commercial impression in the consuming public’s mind, the marks may be considered confusingly similar. Similarity in sound, appearance, and/or meaning may be sufficient to support a finding of likelihood of confusion, depending on the relatedness of the goods and/or services.

    So I could use something similar to the Android logo to sell fishing supplies, since the likelihood of confusion is small - Android doesn't make fishing supplies. We only have an issue if I start selling phones or if Android starts selling fishing supplies.

  • I daily drive KDE Neon.

    Sometimes install scripts don't work as expected, since things check if you're on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever specifically and "Neon" doesn't match their regex. It's usually not a big deal and fairly trivial to solve.

    Regardless, I've actually started to get away from the command line and have embraced the app store. Discover is actually pretty darn good and has lots of the things I want to install. I can choose if I want to install from Discover via Apt, Flatpak, or Snap.

    I usually install Flatpak stuff. The Steam Deck has taught me that Flatpak is generally as good or better than actually installing via apt - you don't need to wait on your distro to update sources, and you aren't adding random PPAs. Sometimes you need to fudge the permissions with Flatseal, but it's a one-and-done thing.

    I use Microsoft Edge as my browser (yes, really - the Chromium version is just as good as Chrome, it has nifty vertical tabs, I get news on my "new tab" page, and all my settings are saved there). I use Thunderbird for mail, plus Steam, Zoom, Discord, etc. Surprisingly few KDE apps are preinstalled, to be honest - the only KDE apps installed are the ones I want anyway.

  • A lot of users push for Discord. Very few (comparatively) push for Lemmy/Kbin.

    I was a mod of a 500k+ subreddit. We wound up basically being forced to make a Discord a few years ago because users wanted one so badly. It wound up becoming more active than the actual subreddit itself, and has a bigger mod team (most of whom aren't even mods on the subreddit, just Discord).

  • Have you ever moderated somewhere of any significant size?

    I was once a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit on Reddit. Without AutoMod, the place would go to shit within a month. AutoMod caught so many things that would otherwise disrupt the community.

    It's not "authoritarian" to automatically remove posts of people spamming the N-word, especially when you can easily tell the users are trolls. Nor is it "authoritarian" to remove spammers trying to shill their T-shirts or sending links to scam websites. Or those annoying bots that would copy user comments and then try to pose as "real" users so they could build up karma and get around spam filters easier.

    At a certain point, it is impossible to keep up with everything happening in your community. While reports are important, mods do have to sleep. We do have lives, and we don't pay attention to the communities we help run for every waking moment of our days.

    If I wanted to ban every person who used the letter "e", I could do that without a bot. A modbot makes it easier, but simply having a tool available doesn't make the person using that tool more or less authoritarian. Not to mention both Kbin and Lemmy have open moderation logs, so you can easily see if a place has a moderation style you disagree with.

  • Can you please stop spamming this everywhere?

    We don't care about Reddit. There are places you can share that. Posting it to every community on every instance you can think of isn't helping; it's just pissing people off from the constant amount of spam.

  • You are technically correct, but surely you must know at this point that's not at all how domains are used on the internet. Bit.ly isn't hosted or affiliated with Libya.

    And if you ever doubted that the maintainers of Lemmy are tankies, well have I got a post from you, from the horse's mouth:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuckthewhitesupremacistredditadminswantme/

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuckthewhitesupremacistredditadminswantme/

    Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

    Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

    So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

    Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

    Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

    I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

    The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. They chose ".ml" because they are Marxist-Leninists. They first advertised on /r/communism and that post outright states they're Marxist-Leninists.

    Thinking they chose .ml because they really like Mali is absolutely ridiculous.

  • Your phone doesn't listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.

    It also serves ads for things based on who you've been around recently. The example given was the guy's wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.

    This wasn't because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.

    The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It's the same sort of story we've seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.