hedgehog @ hedgehog @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

Vi was just Ex’s visual mode, and Ex was just Ed with visual mode added. Ed introduced modal editing, though, not Vi.

Well, when you consider that more than 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - I’d say a lot of them.

Your reply has nothing to do with fair use doctrine.

My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences.

Often, yes.

The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer?

The political right exploits fear, and the fear of AI hits close to home. Many people either have been impacted, could be impacted, or know someone who could be impacted, either by AI itself or by something that has been enabled by or that has been blamed on AI.

When you’re afraid and/or operating from a vulnerable position, it’s a lot easier to jump on the anti-AI bandwagon. This is especially true when the counter-arguments address their flawed reasoning rather than the actual problems. They need something to fix the problem, not a sound argument about why a particular attempt to do so is flawed. And when this problem is staring you in the face, the implications of what it would otherwise mean just aren’t that important to you.

People are losing income because of AI and our society does not have enough safety nets in place to make that less terrifying. If you swap “AI” for “off-shore outsourcing” it’s the same thing.

The people arguing in favor of AI don’t have good answers for them about what needs to happen to “fix the problem.” The people arguing against AI don’t need to have sound arguments to appeal to these folks since their arguments sound like they could “fix the problem.” “If they win this lawsuit against OpenAI, ChatGPT and all the other LLMs will be shut down and companies will have to hire real people again. Anthropic even said so, see!”

UBI would solve a lot of the problems, but it doesn’t have the political support of our elected officials in either party and the amount of effort to completely upend the makeup of Congress is so high that it’s obviously not a solution in the short term.

Unions are a better short-term option, but that’s still not enough.

One feasible solution would be legislation restricting or taxing the use of AI by corporations, particularly when that use results in the displacement of human laborers. If those taxes were then used to support those same displaced laborers, then that would both encourage corporations to hire real people and lessen the sting of getting laid off.

I think another big part of this is that there’s a certain amount of feeling helpless to do anything about the situation. If you can root for the folks with the lawsuit, then that’s at least something. And it’s empowering to see that people like you - other writers, artists, etc. - are the ones spearheading this, as opposed to legislators.

But yes, the more that people’s fear is exploited and the more that they’re misdirected when it comes to having an actual solution, the worse things will get.

Have there been any US ruling stating something along the lines of “The training of general purpose LLMs and/or image generation AIs does not qualify as fair use,” even in a lower court?

Copyright can only be granted to works created by a human, but I don’t know of any such restriction for fair use. Care to share a source explaining why you think only humans are able to use fair use as a defense for copyright infringement?

Someone in another comment shared a link to this - is this what you’re looking for? https://github.com/tfeldmann/organize/

I’m Tim Apple and I think that’s a great question. Why don’t they just do that?

Are you talking about them installing it via Testflight?

Regardless, I would not expect the $100 annual fee for developers to go away

By that description, the vast majority of people are evil. Well, both evil and good, since most people at least occasionally do things that aren’t in their self-interest to help others. But primarily evil, thanks to the inaction clause on the evil side and nothing comparable on the good side.

They’re also more evil the more educated they are, since they’re more aware of ways that people are suffering harm that they could potentially abate.

For example, if you are not homeless and you are aware that some people are homeless and a storm is coming, if you don’t help them all find shelter - to the extent of bringing them into your own home even if it means you end up not having a place to sleep - by your definition, you’re evil.

I’m not a fan of that definition, either for D&D or anything else, but if it works for your table, great!

The Thinkpad X1 Extreme line-up does not have soldered RAM.

On X—which used to be called Twitter before it was bought by billionaire edgelord Elon Musk

I mean, really? The guy makes my skin crawl, but what a hypocritically edgy comment to put into an article.

How is that comment hypocritical?

Did they misinterpret the VM limitation, or does the personal license not cover VMs?

So your stance is “We can’t be perfect when it comes to implementing free speech, so why even bother defending people’s right to freedom of expression at all?”

Encouraging censorship would hurt more marginalized people than it would help.

I'd prefer a world in which we protect the vulnerable rather than the protecting the folk who are trying to hurt the vulnerable

You think free speech is an unattainable ideal, but when you’re asked to clarify whether you’re talking about government censorship, too, or “just” corporate censorship, you reply with this fairytale nonsense?

Even if we limit the scope of that to just Cloudflare and other internet infrastructure companies, they’d basically have to stop offering their services to anyone to the political right of Bernie Sanders. Not that I’d have a problem with that, but it’s never going to happen. Sure, a single company could do that, but that wouldn’t change the fact that the rest of them don’t.

Being upset about Cloudflare “protecting” nazis is misplaced anger. It’s like being upset because the police stop you from hurting nazis. Like, there are so many reasons to be anti-police, but this isn’t one of them. Being frustrated because they’re in your way is one thing, but saying they’re shitty people because they protect people (even when those people are nazis) is toddler level logic.

Are there things to be angry about with TDS? Absolutely. There’s the nazis. There’s Trump. And there’s the people whose actual responsibility it was to protect the vulnerable - law enforcement, mostly, but government in general here - and who did nothing, as far as I can tell.

So your stance is basically “We can’t be perfect, so why even try?”

Would you prefer a world without the first amendment in the US, for the UN to abandon the idea of freedom of expression as a human right, and all that entails? Or is it just censorship by corporations that you’re cool with?

You don’t think that the concept of free speech exists?

I’m not talking about the free speech of Cloudflare, aside from like one paragraph. I’m talking about the free speech of law abiding US citizens.

Cloudflare isn’t a monopoly. Why do you think it is?

Cloudflare acted against their self interest by not taking down TDS sooner. It would have been in their self interest from a public image perspective to do so. Why would you suggest otherwise?

Why do you think that both the EFF and I are the ones who are confused here?

It’s an educated inference - I don’t believe that requiring a paid dev account to sideload would satisfy the EU, and I don’t think a system that requires a paid dev account would be meaningfully different from the current state of things.

But then again, I will be surprised if the EU allows Apple to charge a commission on fees related to apps distributed outside their store, and they’re doing that anyway, so who knows.

You’re welcome, and thanks for the reply!

I think drawing the line at nazis is a good idea in theory, but a very difficult one to implement in practice. For example:

• If someone doesn’t self ID as a nazi, how do you determine that they are one?
• What if the site’s owner self IDs as a nazi but this particular website is just a bunch of cooking recipes?
• Suppose the site owner probably isn’t a nazi, but the site has a bunch of users and a subset of them are creating content that crosses the line, and the site has a hands off approach to content moderation. If the site is 1% nazi content and 99% fine, do you block them entirely unless they agree to remove nazi content? If not, at what threshold does that change? 10%? 51%?
• Once you’ve done that and they’ve agreed, do you have to establish minimum response times for them to remove nazi content? If the nazi content isn’t taken down until half the site’s daily visitors have seen it, the content moderation isn’t very effective. But if you require them to act too fast, that could result in many people being refused service because of other bad actors.
• The bad actors aren’t even necessarily nazis. If it’s known that Cloudflare refuses service to sites that leaves nazi content up for more than X amount of time, then it becomes feasible to take down a site that allows comments by registering a bunch of accounts and filling it with so much nazi content that the site’s moderation team can’t handle it in time. How do you prevent this?
• Do you require them to ban nazis?
• If they do, but the nazis just register new accounts, do you require them to detect that somehow? Do you have to build that capability and offer it yourself? Now you’re policing individual users. You’re inevitably going to end up stopping Grannie from registering for an account because of someone else - they jumped on her wifi, compromised a device on her network, or something along those lines.

This is all pretty complicated, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The revised line they drew with Kiwi Farms (as well as the “we follow US law” line they already had) is a much simpler one that’s still morally defensible:

“We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”

One word you used stuck out to me: “deplatform.” I wouldn’t call this deplatforming. I’m used to seeing that word used to refer to someone being removed from social media, having their YouTube channel shut down, having their podcast removed from Spotify, etc.. I mentioned this in another comment on this post, but those situations are fundamentally different, and it follows that the criteria for doing so should be different. In that other comment I also talked a bit about why I think free speech is infringed if you can’t publish a website, but isn’t infringed if you can’t create a Facebook account.

You also might find this Wired article interesting - it has quotes from and background about the CEO of Cloudflare related to the TDS’s removal, some insight into the internal company dialogue when that was all ongoing, etc..

If you have to be dragged kicking and screaming by public outcry before you cancel Nazis, you support Nazis.

If the only way you can say that Cloudflare actively supported nazis was because they didn’t cancel them, it sounds to me like Cloudflare didn’t actively support nazis. Why is it so hard to say “Cloudflare didn’t cancel nazis” instead of lying and saying they “actively supported” them?

But you know what happened as well as I do, so your framing of events that way is interesting...

Yes, I do, which is why I’m confused as to why any reasonable person would think that Cloudflare’s actions here are in any way problematic.

Cloudflare considers themselves to be akin to a public utility. Do you think that public utilities should be able to refuse to provide their services to law-abiding nazis? I’m talking phone lines, electricity, gas for heat, water, etc.. If so, why? Should it be limited to nazis? How do you ensure that only nazis are prevented from having running water and electricity?

Because ultimately this comes down to a company treating themselves as a public utility, and structuring their processes for determining if they would offer services to a company or individual under that basis, and then, having an established process, being resistant to making an exception to that process to refuse service to a group of nazis. Cloudflare said that there was a huge uptick in the amount of takedown requests that they received after they took down 8chan and The Daily Stormer. If their process were amended to prohibit certain kinds of legal speech, they would face increased pressure to take down even more sites, and not just sites belonging to nazis.

Again, this is all about the ability to have a website on the internet and not about being able to have a platform on social media, Youtube, Spotify, etc.. The sites, effectively, are buildings, but the internet is like the land. I’m not saying anyone should be required to let a nazi in their building. Criticizing Facebook for not de-platforming nazis is fine. This is about access to what are effectively essential public services.

I see being able to run a website as an extension of the right to free speech. Because hosting a website on the internet requires the involvement of companies - domain name registrars, DNS hosting services, ISPs and the network, etc. - if you are consistently refused one of these services by these companies, you’re effectively denied this right. If you try to go start up your own domain registrar, you still have to deal with a company - the domain name registry. If you try to start up your own domain name registry, you still have to deal with a company - ICANN. The assets of these companies are protected by the government, and if you were to try to force your site onto the internet, the government would stop you. This probably isn’t technically government censorship, but it serves that same effective purpose. No, it isn’t government directed, but being directed by the market is just as bad, and in some cases, worse.

If you’re fine with a company refusing service in this instance, with the rationale being because they fundamentally disagree with the site’s content, it follows that it should be fine for such a company to refuse service to sites of politicians they don’t like (or who are in a race with one of their bigger customers or donors), anti-fascist forums, far-left and far-right forums, sites providing information on abortions, sites dedicated to open source projects that they or one of their stakeholders don’t like, storefronts for products they dislike, etc..

Maybe you think that would all be fine? I don’t. I think that sounds like something out of a dystopian late stage capitalism short story, and I want nothing to do with it.

If you’re not at least in agreement that it wouldn’t be fine, then I don’t know what to say. Why do you disagree?

If you are in agreement: it follows that access to internet services should generally be treated like access to public utilities, even if the companies aren’t technically considered to be public utilities. Legally prohibiting such companies from refusing service without actually classifying the companies as public utilities would itself be a violation of free speech. But it is still reasonable for them to behave like public utilities.

And given that this is reasonable, saying “Cloudflare supports nazis because they behaved like a public utility and didn’t ban these sites run by nazis, even though there was a huge public outcry” is a nonsensical statement. It’s basically “Cloudflare supports nazis because they did something reasonable, even when nazis were involved.” By that logic, “Cloudflare supports Hillary Clinton because they provide services to her site” is a reasonable statement. Does Cloudflare support every site that they provide services to? No, obviously not. Do they support every site that they’ve refused to honor a takedown request against? Again, no. Why is that answer different when nazis are involved?

I was looking for a quote from the EFF and found this article that covers the topic from Cloudflare’s perspective: https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/ - it’s worth a read, IMO.

Anyway, here’s the EFF bit:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has taken a stand that what it calls “intermediaries”—services like Cloudflare and GoDaddy that do not generate the content themselves—should not be adjudicating what speech is acceptable. The EFF has a strong presumption that most speech, even vile speech, should be allowed, but when illegal activity, like inciting violence or defamation, occurs, the proper channel to deal with it is the legal system. “It seems to me that the last thing we should be doing is having intermediaries deputizing themselves to make decisions about what’s OK,” says Corynne McSherry, legal director of the EFF. “What law enforcement will tell you is that it’s better for them to be able to keep track of potentially dangerous groups if they’re not pushed down into the dark web.” She adds: “I want my Nazis where I can see them.”

Another topic the article covers - not in EFF’s words, but in the CEO of Cloudflare’s - is that beyond just the “intermediaries” like Cloudflare making these calls, you have vigilante cyberattackers who DDOS the sites of people they don’t agree with:

Prince spoke about the peril posed by DDoS attacks. We might all agree, Prince argued, that content like the Daily Stormer shouldn’t be online, but the mechanism for silencing those voices should not be vigilante hackers.

I agree with this, as well as with the EFF’s take, and as far as I can tell there simply isn’t a rational criticism of Cloudflare’s resistance to banning The Daily Stormer that doesn’t literally require accepting that free speech isn’t all that important.