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  • Indeed. There are lots of proposals for perfectly portable decentralized user identities, subscriptions that transcend specific instances, and whatnot, but until those things actually arrive that's not the Fediverse we're dealing with. It's a hassle having to switch instances.

  • There's a broad spectrum between reason and murder. You could tackle them, or bonk them with a stick, or distract them with shiny objects.

  • Yeah. If god's so powerful why can't he do it himself?

  • you know that a company putting a thing in their terms of service doesn't make it legally binding, right?

    And you know that doesn't necessarily imply the reverse? Granting a site a license to use the stuff you post there is a pretty basic and reasonable thing to agree to in exchange for them letting you post stuff there in the first place.

    hence why they all suddenly felt the need to update their terms of services

    As others have been pointing out to you in this thread, that also is not a sign that the previous ToS didn't cover this. They're just being clearer about what they can do.

    Go ahead and refrain from using their services if you don't agree to the terms under which they're offering those services. Nobody's forcing you.

  • Rare-earth element is a specific technical term. Lithium is absolutely not among them.

    One of the main sources lithium is extracted from is brines. That is, it's already in the water and we take it out.

  • If we don't have individual transportation how are we ever going to catch up to those goalposts?

  • You mean before or after all the sites updated their ToS it so that they were legally in the clear to sell user posts to AI training companies?

    The ToSes would generally have a blanket permission in them to license the data to third-party companies and whatnot. I went back through historical Reddit ToS versions a little while back and that was in there from the start.

    Also in there was a clause allowing them to update their ToS, so even if the blanket permission wasn't there then it is now and you agreed to that too.

    Learning from things is a very obviously a completely different process to feeding data into a server farm.

    It is not very obviously different, as evidenced by the fact that it's still being argued. There are some legal cases before the courts that will clarify this in various jurisdictions but I'm not expecting them to rule against analysis of public data.

  • I find that often "movements" end up focused more on just continuing their movement rather than the underlying purpose of why they started moving in the first place.

  • in the case of ai generated media, companies just decided that they just had the rights to use existing published media, so they harvested it without consent or compensation

    Have you read the ToS of your favourite social media site lately?

    In any event, it might well be that companies (and you yourself) have the rights to use existing published media to train AIs. Copyright doesn't cover the analysis of public data. I suspect that people wouldn't like it if copyright got extended to let IP owners prohibit you from learning from their stuff.

  • It's also possible that you've inadvertently wandered into an asshole convention.

  • The abuse of power is instance-specific, fortunately. The whole point of all this is that there are multiple instances. Just ignore the ones that are run by tankies, those instances are theirs to wallow in if they want.

  • "Prompt engineering" is simply the skill of knowing how to correctly ask for the thing that you want. Given that this is something that is in rare supply even when interacting with other humans, I don't see this going away until we're well past AGI and into ASI.

  • You have misunderstood me. You said "Apple spent twenty years building the ecosystem Spotify and Epic want to exploit for free." I'm pointing out that the amount of effort Apple put into building the ecosystem is immaterial to whether they're doing illegal things with it.

  • And while it's probably true that "we're not ready", we're never going to become ready until the tech actually arrives and forces us to do that.

  • Indeed. Firefox already has "sponsored links" and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.

    Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don't want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.

  • I'm in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I'm playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he's really bad at it and it's obvious he's an alien infiltrator, and because he's bad at it he has no idea that it's obvious. The party's superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.

    It's been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I've finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we're now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.

    Still, I've been having fun so I don't mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they're PCs. :)

    Sometimes it's different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn't interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there's this list of quests he's working on and he'd appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there's anyone to be instantly suspicious of it's someone like that.

  • They swore an oath to do no harm. They didn't swear an oath to mindlessly obey anyone with a badge. It actually should be easy.

  • And replace it with what? The only two basic forms of democracy are representative and direct, and direct democracy has its own problems.