I had just heard the expression: “It helps the general effort.” It was in a Discworld audiobook. It made me think: “Yeah, I could use some help right now.” That was still rattling around in my head when I had to come up with a username. I don’t remember what I was having trouble with, so I guess that worked out.

Yeah, one would think so. And those were the hobbyists that Gates was addressing in that open letter.

“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.

I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.

In the US, copyright is limited by Fair Use. It is still IP. Eventually, you’d just be changing how Fair Use works. Not all for the better, I think.

Maybe one could compare it to a right of way over someone’s physical property. The public may use it for a certain purpose, in a limited way, which lowers its value. But what value it has, belongs to the owner.

What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?

That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.

Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.

“Property is theft.”

the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.

So, not actually abolishing IP, then.

It’s a bit of a split among libertarians. Some very notable figures like Ayn Rand were strong believers in IP. In fact, Ayn Rand’s dogmas very much align with what is falsely represented as left-wing thought in the context of AI.

It’s really irritating for me how much conservative capitalist ideals are passed off as left-wing. Like, attitudes on corporations channel Adam Smith. I think of myself as pragmatic and find that Smith or even Hayek had some good points (not Rand, though). But it’s absolutely grating how uneducated that all is. Worst of all, it makes me realize that for all the anti-capitalist rhetoric, the favored policies are all about making everything worse.

I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.

There’s that episode of The Orville where social media is the law.

https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule

Maybe I’m talking more about enforcement than actual law,

Probably. Different countries in Europe have very different traditions there. I think the former socialist countries are still more relaxed. But the EU-line is rather dominated by countries like Germany.

Come to think of it. Switzerland officially takes a very lenient approach. It’s legal to download media files for personal use. But as you can see here, that leaves research and business hanging.

I don’t know any European country that has anything like the copyright clause in the US Constitution, or anything close to Fair Use. I don’t see the argument.

There’s a good chance that European AI companies like Mistral are breaking the law. We will have to see how it eventually goes in court. Recently, there was a decision in a Munich court against OpenAI. By that standard, even Apertus might be in trouble. But I doubt that decision will stand.

Plutonium-238’s half-life is 87.7 years, Americium-241 is 432.6 years. Which… is almost 5 times longer, so… not sure why that’s cringe?

What’s cringe is the word “staggering”. Natural radioactive isotopes have half-lives on the order of billions of years. All elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae. Billions of years have passed since the novae that created that heavy elements now on earth. Anything with shorter half-lives is no longer around. (More correctly, one should talk decay chains.)

What’s staggering is that these isotopes are available at all. They are artificially created in nuclear reactors. Mass production of Pl-238 began only during WW2 for bombs. That’s almost a half-life ago. The shorter half-life makes the availability of Pl-238 much more impressive.

I believe they’re referring to the fact that it’s not an element of major topic. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

There are over 100 named elements. I don’t think I could name half of them. Americium is relatively prominent because of it’s use in smoke detectors. And while I’m at it: Americium is the element. Americium-241 is a specific isotope; a specific variant, chemically identical to other variants but with slightly different physical properties.

There are a number of isotopes suitable for RTGs. It’s a matter of trade-offs. There’s half-life, which is basically how fast the properties of the material change. There’s also energy density and how bad the radiation is for the device. And always, there’s cost. Fun fact, in Chernobyl they did try robots, but the electronics could not withstand the radiation. People don’t withstand it either, but there’s a lot of them.

I find it very unexpected. It used to be understood that IP laws favor monopolies. EG I don’t remember the OS community being on the side of Oracle in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

Maybe it just passed me by.

For fastest inference, you want to fit the entire model in VRAM. Plus, you need a few GB extra for context.

Context means the text (+images, etc) it works on. That’s the chat log, in the case of a chatbot, plus any texts you might want summarized/translated/ask questions about.

Models can be quantized, which is a kind of lossy compression. They get smaller but also dumber. As with JPGs, the quality loss is insignificant at first and absolutely worth it.

Inference can be split between GPU and CPU, substituting VRAM with normal RAM. Makes it slower, but you’ll probably will still feel that it’s smooth.

Basically, it’s all trade-offs between quality, context size, and speed.

Badly. This was released almost 3 months ago and completely failed to make a splash, just like the other European models you have never heard of.

There’s a lot of denial about this, but you just can’t make such models competitive in Europe. The copyright industry is too strong. This combines with a general culture of data ownership and control. Case in point, the copyright industry is especially strong in Denmark, and they are also champions of chat control.

Yes.

Shout-out for The Radioactive Boy Scout. (RIP)

Yes. And also:

Its half-life is a staggering 432 years, five times longer than plutonium-238.

Cringe…

AI slop?

GEMA’s social media game is certainly top. Nice to see the money being put to good use.

If all seats are filled,

Sure. Everyone’s Taylor Swift. Let’s just assume that.

The actual truth is that if you do not play GEMA music, you have to provide evidence of that to GEMA. Young musicians who foolishly reason that they don’t have anything to do with GEMA will be dragged through court.