Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk

All IP laws are fundamentally “honor system”. The idea of digital locks is a pipe dream, only possible as long as legal threats scare people away from looking too closely at how the lock works.

But every digital lock can be broken, because we only know how to make one type of computer: the turing-complete universal von neumann machine. It can run any program, as long as it’s presented the right way.

So yes, it’s piracy. Just like how the crime of “breaking and entering” means “breaking the seal” and entering without permission (not necessarily breaking a physical lock), piracy just means unauthorized use of IP-law-protected content (not necessarily breaking a digital lock).

Breaking a digital lock is an additional crime on top of piracy, under the DMCA. 5 years and 50k fine for a first offense, I believe.

Now as to whether we should even have a concept of “piracy” to begin with… that’s a reasonable question.

I was gonna say… “no internet connection required” is not the key attribute of AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even require a network connection. It’s a weird comparison.

Beautifully put.

I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.

Big agree.

But also: people seem to only focus on the output side of the task of writing code, and forget that the developer also receives input from the codebase in return.

Even if you end up with exactly the same code artifact after completing a work item, you’ll have a better understanding of the codebase without delegating swaths of it to AI. But bosses tend not to consider this.

Tech bros have successfully convinced people that mental states do not exist, or at least do not matter — for laborers, anyway, cuz they’ll happily claim that their superior thoughts are exactly why they deserve to be billionaires.

Code is a liability (not an asset)

Okay but “Kafka, Esq.” goes hard.

Related: Jevons Paradox

Oh there’s lots of trans people in orchestra

There is a big difference, and I’d argue the Claude refactoring is worse. Content was already pursuing the common denominator. But open source was a place where you could actually bring some nuance, examine things in detail, and build a shared understanding of deeper truths. But why bother with the icky social factors of working together to build something with people all around the world that can evolve and last for 10+ years, when you can boil a swimming pool to produce a half-baked one-off solution instead?

You absolutely may. Intel is valid too.

Buy a used Optiplex.

Gets you an acceptable case, mobo, CPU, RAM, and probably SSD for about $200. Add a used 3050/3060/4060 GPU and an upgraded PSU.

It’s not gonna knock your socks off, but it gets you going without over-spending and you can carry some of that forward when you upgrade later.

It says it’s multiple studios, which I assume were acqui-hired. So it’s not just “VR developers”, but also UI designers, concept artists, QA, PMs, HR, IT, tech writers, community managers, sales people — maybe even localization, reception, janitors… who knows. The structure of these things can vary wildly.

Idk, for a game where sugar skull pirate puppets race rowboats that can boost and drift, it’s hard to call it out-of-place.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Clarification: revenue from advertising their own paid services, not revenue from selling ad space to third parties

People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:

Traffic is down 40%

This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

Trying desperately to keep the ponzi scheme going, but his biggest customers already have warehouses full of GPUs that will never get connected.

The bubble is full, dude. Just try to minimize the damage from the pop so we don’t try to figure out what size pitchfork your dumb leather jacket is.

It also discouraged you from finding/starting an open source solution for those problems, thus undermining the high-quality open knowledge ecosystem that it relied on in the first place.

As Cory Doctorow says: code is a liability, not an asset