The point of encrypting something that gets decrypted midway by an organization is that there are worse actors than the organization out there. I’m not really scared of Steam abusing my credit card info, but I am afraid of random internet strangers.

Also remember that https doesn’t just protect your data, it also verifies that you’re actually on the website you think you are. The internet is basically unusable without this guarantee, especially on a network you share with others.

So no vetting at all presumably since you didn’t mention it? So how do you know that Dashlane is safer than a password scheme that might be guessed by someone after they’ve already compromised a couple of your passwords?

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

Both su and sudo originally meant “superuser” because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to “switch user” because this functionality was added later.

It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU

First time I’ve heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.

Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.

just gimme the damn option.

That’s what they did initially. Unfortunately, keeping around an antiquated optional feature that no developer wants to work on isn’t free. It ends up being a hurdle for improving other stuff and at the same time it doesn’t work as well as the user would expect. There is more context here if you’re interested.

Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

That’s what I’m saying.

intentionally violate copyright

Why is it intentional? Some characters come up even in very generic prompts. I’ve been toying around with it and I’m finding it hard to come up with prompts containing “superhero” that don’t include superman in the outputs. Even asking explicitly for original characters doesn’t work.

For the most part it hasn’t happened.

And how do you measure that? You have a way for me to check if my prompt for “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance” is strikingly similar to some unknown person’s deviantart uploads, just like my prompt containing “original superhero” was to superman?

The status quo…

Irrelevant to the discussion. We’re talking about copyright law here, ie about what rights a creator has on their original work, not whether they decide to exercise them in regards to fan art.

until they get big enough

Right, so now that multi-billion dollar companies are taking in the work of everyone under the sun to build services threatening to replace many jobs, are they “big enough” for you? Am I allowed to discuss it now?

This is an argument-by-comparion.

It’s not an argument by comparison (or it is a terrible one) because you compared it to something that differs (or you avoided mentioning) all the crucial parts of the issue. The discussion around AI exists specifically because of how the data to train them is sourced, because of the specific mechanisms they implement to produce their output, and because of demonstrated cases of producing output that is very clearly a copy of copyrighted work. By leaving the crucial aspects unspecified, your are trying to paint my argument as being that we should ban every device of any nature that could produce output that might under any circumstances happen to infringe on someone’s copyright, which is much easier for you to argue against without having to touch on any of the real talking points. This is why this is a strawman argument.

You don’t own a copyright on a pattern

Wrong. In the context of training AI, I’m taking about any observable pattern in the input data, which does include some forms of patterns that are copyright-able, eg the general likeness of a character rather than a specific drawing of them.

your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful

My ideas on copyright are very progressive actually. But we’re not discussing my ideas, we’re discussing existing copyright law and whether the “transformation” argument used by AI companies is bullshit. We’re discussing if it’s giving them a huge and unearned break from the copyright system that abuses the rest of us for their benefit.

a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that’s never seen it.

Right, but then you would have to very strictly define Micky Mouse in your prompt. You would be the one providing this information, instead of it being part of the model. That would clearly not be an infringement on the model’s part!

But then you would have to also solve the copyright infringement of Superman, Obi-Wan, Pikachu, some random person’s deviantart image depicting “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance”, … . In the end, the only model that can claim without reasonable objection to have no tendency to illegally copy other peoples’ works is a model that is trained only on data with explicit permission.

If AI companies were predominantly advertising themselves as “we make your pictures of Micky mouse” you’d have a valid point.

Doesn’t matter what it’s advertised as. That picture is, you agree, unusable. But the site I linked to above is selling this service and it’s telling me I can use the images in any way I want. I’m not stupid enough to use Mickey Mouse commercially, but what happens when the output is extremely similar to a character I’ve never heard of? I’m going to use it assuming it is an AI-generated character, and the creator is very unlikely to find out unless my work ends up being very famous. The end result is that the copyright of everything not widely recognizable is practically meaningless if we accept this practice.

But at this point you’re basically arguing that it should be impossible to sell a magical machine that can draw anything you ask from it because it could be asked to draw copyright images.

Straw man. This is not a magical device that can “draw anything”, and it doesn’t just happen to be able to draw copyrighted images as a side-effect of being able to create every imaginable thing, as you try to make it sound. This is a mundane device whose sole function is to try to copy patterns from its input set, which unfortunately is pirated. If you want to prove me wrong, make your own model without a single image of Micky Mouse or a tag with his name, then try to get it to draw him like I did before. You will fail because this machine’s ability to draw him is dependent on being trained on images of him.

There are many ways this could be done ethically, like:

• build it on open datasets, or on datasets you own, instead of pirating
• don’t commercialize it
• allow non-commercial uses, like research or just messing around (which would be a real transformative use)

Seems like a petty technicality to me.

The “transformation” is the petty technicality in my opinion. Would it be transformative if I sold you a database of base64 encoded images? What about if they were encrypted?

Hell, you can hire me to paint based on prompts you give me. That’s the exact same service an AI provides, no? I’m going to study copyrighted materials to get better at my service. Surely if pictures -> AI model is transformative, then pictures -> knowledge in my brain is transformative as well. So you give me the prompt “Mickey Mouse” and I draw this. This is “custom art”. You think you can use that commercially? And if you realize that you can’t, why do you think I should be able to legally sell you this service?

Pictures and things that draw pictures aren’t the same thing.

And that’s completely irrelevant because “things that draw pictures” is not the work being sold. You’re buying pictures.

Except it’s not really transformative because the end product is not the model itself. The product is a service that writes code or draws pictures. It is literally the exact same as the input and it is intended specifically to avoid having to buy the inputs.

Keeping code around isn’t free. Interfaces change, regressions pop up. You have to occasionally put in work just to keep it in a working state. Usually in cases like this there are discussions on the mailing list about who is going to maintain them and nobody volunteers. You can do that if you’re so passionate about keeping these drivers around.

Linux 6.1 will be maintained for another 10 years by the CIP. The hardware in question will be almost 40 years old at that point. I don’t have a violin small enough for users losing free support after 40 years from maintainers who most likely don’t even own the same hardware to test on…

The scam is that they undermine the actually viable platforms by offering something that is literally too good to be true. Then when all their competitors are dead their store will go to shit and you won’t have an alternative. When the time comes, you will wish you’d spent some money on a real store rather than play for free on theirs. See enshittification.

It seems like it’s using blocks that are half a character tall, and I imagine using the combination of foreground and background colors to get two colors into each character space.

Therefore your horizontal resolution will be equal to the length of each line in characters. Your vertical resolution will be equal to two times the number of lines on the screen. So maybe it’s doable with high resolution and tiny font. I don’t know what the limits for those are.

This looks like it represents the image with block characters, so it ends up being very low res. I suspect it will be horrible at rendering text.

@[email protected], maybe you can hack this together with something like plymouth. Normally it’s for the boot process, but it might work for shutting down as well.

This is very common among big tech companies and we should start treating it as what it is, a scam.

Thanks for the explanation. I don’t really know how flash storage works. The fundamental idea of the problem I described would still apply, though as long as the input block size for dd extends to more than one page of the underlying storage.

For example, say that exactly three pages fit in a block. If dd attempts to read pages A, B and C (ABC) and fails to read B, you would want the corresponding part zeroed in the output to preserve the offsets of all the other pages (A0C). But instead dd reads whatever it can for the entire block, then pads the rest of the block size with zeroes, effectively moving C forward (AC0). So essentially you magnify errors.