Beej Jorgensen @ beejjorgensen @lemmy.sdf.org

Instructor, author, developer. Creator of Beej's Guides.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm talking about using copyrighted material to train AI; you're talking about using AI to replace authors, which is a separate, related issue.

If someone uses Stephen King's books to train an AI, how many sales of those books are lost? Because it kinda looks like "zero" since the AI isn't replacing those books.

I also struggle to see how authors are actually harmed by this use, which might be problematic for them in court.

I love the command line nature of Linux. It's waaay easier to automate tasks than with a GUI.

I recently found out I could scan images from the command line. A few minutes of hacking later and I had some scripts that greatly sped up the process of scanning books over using the GUI.

And I can see your point of view, but the thing is that "Linux devs" do this for fun. And writing GUIs isn't the most fun kind of programming for a lot of people.

If you need it done, you can pay someone to do it, or program it yourself. Otherwise the only other option is to wait upon the kindness of strangers.

As from the beginning, OSS devs will work on whatever they want to. Free work is not market-driven.

For sure. I grabbed mine (beej.us) in 2000. My only regret is that I didn't also get beej.com when it was available--last I looked it was being sold for half a million bucks thanks to the sexual connotations.

I still use my web hosting provider's email service (with my own domain). It doesn't cost me anything extra and isn't mined like Gmail.

Getting my own for-life domain was a great decision, though, since I can change providers without changing addresses.

"Right. Now... what was I working on, again?"

That's not illegal, though. (All of us save copies of copyrighted media.) It's the distribution that's in question.

The law is contrary to the interests of The People and needs to change.

Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn't so easily distributed. And their lending system isn't easily legally federated.

I'll simplify, then. Can I download an article that I've paid for and have permission to download, then have an algorithm operate on that data?

This is going to be interesting. Let's say I buy an article then copy the entire thing and send it to my friend the AI enthusiast. I've certainly violated copyright law.

But if my friend then goes on to run the article through an algorithm, it's not at all clear to me that there's been a copyright violation by them.

Or, indeed, how you could word a law that prohibits algorithmic consumption of the data without making it impossible to ever simply view the data.

Just run it through OCR. Super efficient! 😅

Another option occurs to me: maybe Norway knows Facebook won't care and just smells a way to make an easy $9,000,000. 😁

I wonder how many weeks of my life have been saved over the years by using vim instead of a slower editor...

The irony of zoom buying keybase...

I genuinely wonder if Facebook notices a $100k/day fine.

For those of us that remember IE6, this isn't a fairy tale no matter what Mozilla says. We need a non-majority web browser or we're going to pay (again).

Of course, but that's beside the point.

It's difficult to compute the additional world domestic product that was created due to vim, to compute the impact one person had on... everything.

A very sad day.

Pretty much all OS installs have the capability to go really wrong. Once a Mac user was making fun of me for needing to deal with weirdness installing Linux on an old Windows laptop. He stopped when I asked if I should install OSX instead. 😁

What a nightmare. Not sure how the Russian people get out from under this. I'm still pretty scared about the chances of similar laws in the US.