patatahooligan @ patatahooligan @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it's not just "All OSs combined" vs "Linux only" but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they're talking about.

This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

• SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
• Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

What's impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

That's only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I'm having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

But even if you're right, that doesn't change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don't think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.

All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.

According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.

https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/

There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it's not just about the number of stories. It's also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it's not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

All that being said, I don't think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There's plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.

The sooner the screen stops moving the sooner your eyes can lock on, focus and read.

On the other hand, if I'm reading through a command's output and searching for something, abrupt movement of the contents make me lose track of where I am and it costs more time to reorient myself than the smooth scrolling animation would take to play out. More importantly (to me), it takes less mental effort as well. It's just a more comfortable experience. Ever since I switched to neovide instead of plain nvim I find myself enjoying long coding sessions much more.

It sounds like you just might not be negatively affected by the abrupt movement as much as some of us are. You might now get why we care about smooth scrolling because it happens to not do anything for you. That's fine and a good implementation would allow the user to toggle it on/off based on their needs.

Also you could scroll and end up with half a line visible on the top or bottom, which is just kinda weird and wasting space.

No, I imagine that's not the way most terminal emulators would implement it. Scrolling would still be done in whole lines, it would just animate smoothly towards the final position rather than jump instantly to it. You would not be able to end up on a half-line or something.

Is the bootloader really that important for a lost phone? If someone finds your phone can't they just tear it apart and read the storage with external tools? A locked bootloader sounds more like an anti-tampering measure and not for protecting your phone's content after it's lost.

You mean, I’m making an argument. Because yes. I am. I don’t see why this negative framing is necessary nor why this is noteworthy enough to bring up, unless you really just want to make me look bad for no apparent reason.

I don't understand how you expect me to not point out that you are using inequivalent concepts interchangeably and reaching conclusions different to what you initially stated.

No, seriously this the only part of the comment that is relevant:

They are what the AI is designed to extract, not Mario as a totality.

And it is stated as fact, in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Here I'll make it simple. Do you disagree on any of the below statements?

• There is a combination of elements that is protected by copyright regardless of whether any completely individual element would be protected. This "Mario-ness" or "totality of Mario" or whatever you want to call it.
• The Mario picture contains the "Mario-ness".
• The prompt does not include most of those elements and very clearly does not contain the "Mario-ness".

If any of the above seem false to you, explain why. Otherwise explain where this Mario-ness in the image came from. Explain how your answer relates to the initial statement that models detect empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.

That is the only thing that would be on topic. Everything else is just rambling. If you don't argue in favor of your position I reacted to, or if you don't understand the counter-point and respond clearly to it, then why are you replying to me at all?

Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. Why you think people probably plagiarize is doubly irrelevant then.

Analysis is definitely relevant, since to create a work that does not infringe on copyright

Show me literally any example of the defendant's use of "analysis" having any impact whatsoever in a copyright infringement case or a law that explicitly talks about it, or just stop repeating that it is in any way relevant to copyright.

But bring them all together in one place again without adding new patterns

Wrong. The "all together" and "without adding new patterns" are not legal requirements. You are constantly trying to push the definition of copyright infringement to be more extreme to make it easier for you to argue.

you generally can take ideas from a copyrighted work, but not the expression of those ideas

Unfortunately, an AI has no concept of ideas, and it simply encodes patterns, whatever they might happen to be. Again, you're morphing the discussion to make an argument.

Mario’s likeness isn’t in the model, but it’s patterns are.

Mario's likeness has to be encoded into the model in some way. Otherwise, this would not have been the image generated for "draw an italian plumber from a video game". There is absolutely nothing in the prompt to push GPT-4 to combine those elements. There are also no "new" patterns, as you put it. That's exactly the point of the article. As they put it:

Clearly, these models did not just learn abstract facts about plumbers—for example, that they wear overalls and carry wrenches. They learned facts about a specific fictional Italian plumber who wears white gloves, blue overalls with yellow buttons, and a red hat with an “M” on the front.

These are not facts about the world that lie beyond the reach of copyright. Rather, the creative choices that define Mario are likely covered by copyrights held by Nintendo.

This is contradictory to how you present it as "taking ideas".

You have absolutely no legal basis to claim they are infringement

You're mixing up different things. I'm saying that the image contains infringing material, which is hopefully not something you have to be convinced about. The production of an obviously infringing image, without the infringing elements having been provided in the prompt, is used to show how this information is encoded inside the model in some form. Whether this copyright-protected material exists in some form inside the model is not an equivalent question to whether this is copyright infringement. You are right that the courts have not decided on the latter, but we have been talking about the former. I repeat your position which I was directly responding to before:

What it detects are empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.

I don’t understand how an AI reading a bunch of books and rearranging some of those words into a new story, is different to a human author reading a bunch of books and rearranging those words into a new story.

Ok, let's say for now that these things are actually similar. Is a human legally allowed to "rearrange those words" in any way they want? Not really, because they can't copy stuff like characters or plot structure. Even if the copy is not verbatim, it has to avoid being "too similar". It's not always clear where the threshold is; that will be judged in court. But imagine if your were being sued for copyright infringement because of perceived similarities between your work and another creator's. You go to court and say "Well I torrented the plaintiff's work and studied it with the express intent to copy discernible patterns in it, then sell my work based on those patterns". As long as the similarities are found to be valid, you're most likely to lose. The fact that you've spent years campaigning how companies can save a lot of money by firing artists and hiring your pattern-replicating service instead probably wouldn't help your case either. Well, that's basically what an honest defense of AI against copyright infringement would be. So the question is, does AI actually produce output too similar to its training data? Well, this is an example of articles you can find on the topic...

So based on the above thoughts, do you feel like we hold AI generation to the same standard as we do human creators? It doesn't seem so to me.

But there's a lot of reasons why we should hold AIs to higher standards instead. Off the top of my head:

• AIs have been created exclusively to replicate patterns in existing works. This is not the only function people have. So we don't have to wonder whether similarities between AI inputs and outputs are coincidental. We don't have to worry about whether overbearing restrictions might inadvertently affect some other function.
• AIs have no feelings or needs. We don't have to worry about causing direct harm to them and about protecting their rights. Forbidding a person from reading a book just in case they copy elements from it is obviously problematic, but restricting AI's access to copyrighted work is not directly harmful in the same way.

No, not what I said at all. If you’re trying to say I’m making this argument I’d urge you (ironically) to actually analyze what I said rather than putting words in my mouth ;) (Or just, you know, ask me to clarify)

That was your implied argument regardless of intent.

Copyright infringement (or plagiarism) in it’s simplest form, as in just taking the material as is, is devoid of any analysis. The point is to avoid having to do that analysis and just get right to the end result that has value.

Completely wrong, which invalidates the point you want to make. "Analysis" and "as is" have no place in the definition of copyright infringement. A derivative work can be very different from the original material, and how you created the derivative work, including whether you performed whatever you think "analysis" means, is generally irrelevant.

What it detects are empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.

No it detects patterns. You already said it correctly above. And the problem is that some patterns can be copyrighted. That's exactly the problem highlighted here and here. For copyright law, it doesn't matter if, for example, that particular image of Mario is copied verbatim from the training data. The character likeness, which is encoded in the model because it is in fact a discernible pattern, is an infringement.

Yes if you completely ignore how data is processed and how the product is derived from the data, then everything can be labeled "data analysis". Great point. So copyright infringement can never exist because the original work can always be considered data that you analyze. Incredible.

the AI companies have a pretty good defense in the fact analyzing publicly viewable information is a pretty deep rooted freedom that provides a lot of positives to the world

They are not "analyzing" the data. They are feeding it into a regurgitating mechanism. There's a big difference. Their defense is only "good" because AI is being misrepresented and misunderstood.

I agree that we shouldn't strive for more strict copyright. We should fight for a much more liberal system. But as long as everyone else has to live by the current copyright laws, we should not let AI companies get away with what they're doing.

Take note Bluesky fans: Your “benevolent” controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board…

Isn't Bluesky an open-source implementation of an open protocol? And isn't Bluesky already a for-profit organization? The point is you don't trust the corporation. You trust the availability of the code and the protocol specification. People should be setting up instances just like they did with lemmy.

Does SteamOS offer something significant over other GNU+Linux distributions?

It's pre-installed on the device and pre-configured. If you can configure and troubleshoot a GNU+Linux system I don't think it has anything unique to offer to you. The thing where it boots directly into Steam big picture mode should be implementable on other distros as well. But most people can't or don't want to learn how to set up a Linux distro so it's actually a big deal for the average gamer. It's also made by a big corporation that people already trust, which might be something Gamers Nexus feels more comfortable implicitly endorsing by including it as a platform for their benchmarks.

The article doesn't explicitly state it, but the wording implies that this headline was not created by BBC. This appears to be a service running on Apple products producing its own summary of the news article. So the BBC didn't get burned by something they did and that's what they're complaining about.

On HDMI 2.1, you can do 8K30fps before you have to compress the stream with DSC, which is "visually lossless", so actually lossy. We don't even have 5K120fps or 4K240fps without compression. These are common refresh rates for gaming. So you could say that the highest resolution that supports all use cases without compromises is 1440p. That's definitely not enough even by today's standards. I think you're underestimating the time it takes for standards to reach widespread adoption. The average viewer is not going to have access to it until the technology is cheap and enough time has passed for at least a few hundred million units to have reached the market. If you think you're going to be using it in 2030 or later for your "average broadcast", then it needs to be designed today.

Of course HDMI is shit for reasons you mention. DisplayPort is better, but it's not an open standard either and it supports DRM as well. But designing for higher bandwidth is necessary and it has nothing to do with HDMI's problems.

Yes, this is normal and it's a good thing (unless you've come across a bug). I don't know exactly what app the screenshot is showing, but I'm guessing that the caching shown is referring to the filesystem cache. The kernel is keeping a cache of files you are likely to access again so that it doesn't have to read them from storage again. So what you're seeing here is that some memory contents were moved to swap to make room for filesystem cache. This is because the kernel believes you're more likely to access those files again rather than the memory contents. If it's right, then this a performance improvement despite the fear surrounding swap usage.

Setting a low non-zero swappiness value is telling the kernel that memory contents have priority over filesystem cache for remaining in RAM, or conversely that file cache is more likely to be evicted from the RAM. A value of 100 would mean that they have equal priority. So that memory content must have been very stale to be evicted despite having a significantly higher priority to reside in RAM.

So:

• don't worry about swap usage unless you're experiencing actual performance issues
• for ssd's the value should be close to 100
• for hdd's it should be low
• if you're using both on your system, the default value of 60 is probably a decent approximation of the optimal value

Source: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

Because patents cause issues for free software. Some examples:

• As far as I can tell, vlc is legal only because French law does not recognize software patents, see here.
• HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU is impossible, see here.
• I think Media Foundation is unsupported in Proton because of patents as well, though I'm having trouble finding a reliable source on that.