Guy in the back is going to get his kneecaps kicked out.

Koalas have nearly identical fingerprints as well:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/koala-fingerprints/

“IP theft” is a rhetorical term invented by the MPAA/RIAA in the 90s. It’s not a real crime. It’s just propaganda.

There’s no law on the books that even remotely resembles “IP theft”. Here’s what we’ve got:

• Copyright law. Which can be violated. Normally, when you violate copyright that’s a civil offense. Not a criminal one. Criminal prosecution of copyright violation is pretty rare, though there’s been a recent uptick with lawsuits against illegal IPTV sites and Anna’s Archive.
• Trademark law. This is all about dealing with counterfeits and fraud (e.g. misrepresenting a trademarked brand).
• Patent law. Pretty self explanatory, except software patents shouldn’t exist. Every software patent that’s ever been granted is 100% bullshit and should never have happened.
• Trade secrets. Not really relevant to this discussion but there’s laws about it that are really, really hard to litigate (again, civil law). You could copy the secret recipe for Coke but that wouldn’t be “theft”. It’s… Complicated.
• Some obscure stuff like integrated circuit topography and in Europe there’s laws around databases.

Not a single one of these laws deals with “theft”. The entire concept of theft is orthogonal to intellectual property.

Until the MPAA/RIAA started their marketing campaigns in the 90s, “IP theft” as a concept didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing. It still isn’t a thing. It’s propaganda/marketing BS.

Are you forgetting the IP theft

I’m going to come out and say it: IP theft isn’t a thing. IP is not something that can be stolen. It can have its license violated or it can be copied against the wishes of its owner. What it absolutely cannot be is “stolen”.

A car can be stolen. A phone can be stolen. A book or a CD or a DVD can be stolen. The concepts or ideas or literal content of what amounts to Intellectual Property cannot be stolen. It can only be copied.

If anything has been stolen it’s the commons that is the public domain. It was taken away for about four generations. Long enough that no one remembers the IP that’s only just now becoming public domain. It’s a loss far greater than anything related to AI.

I’ll also say this: Even if an AI were trained on nothing but public domain works (like most image generating AI a la ImageNET) people would still be spouting bullshit like, “it’s stealing IP!”

Just want to point out that nearly all new data centers use closed loop water cooling. That only makes sense in very, very dry places in the world that also have extremely cheap water.

For example, cooling towers would make no sense in Florida because the ambient humidity is too high. Even though water is plentiful.

Oh my. This is a huge can of worms—especially on Lemmy. There’s a lot of anti-AI hate on this platform. Almost to the point of it being a religion.

For reference, when people say, “AI” they’re usually talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI (e.g. diffusion models that make images). Having said that, “AI” is an enormous topic of which LLMs are a small, but increasingly popular part.

Furthermore, when people here on Lemmy say, “AI” they’re normally talking about “Big AI” which consists of:

• OpenAI (ChatGPT)
• Microsoft (Copilot)
• Anthropic (Claude)
• Meta (Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Llama models, and more)
• Google (Gemini and shittons of other things people don’t see and often don’t even have names people outside of Google would recognize)
• Amazon (because they’re hosting the data centers that power a lot of the other players and also do AI stuff on their own)

Is AI inherently bad or evil? No. It’s just the latest way of giving instructions to a computer. Considering that all computer programs are literally just instructions, an AI model is just a really fancy and often expensive way of performing the same function. Albeit with a lot more breadth and flexibility. Note that I didn’t say “depth”, haha.

The “bad” or “evil” part of AI is mostly due to the large players (aka “Big AI”) spending literally over $1 trillion so far on data centers and hardware. There’s so much demand for their services that they’re having to build their own—often dirty, fossil fuel—power plants just to power it all.

A lot of the talk around data centers is based on myths. For example, generating an image with AI doesn’t use a liter of water. A study came out that no one actually read (beyond the summary) that stated that a really long conversation with an LLM could in theory use up half a liter of water, assuming the data center was powered by a fossil fuel power plant that was using water for cooling (as in, the heat dissipation required 0.5 liters of water from the cooling pond next to the power plant, not potable/drinking water).

LLMs do use up a lot of power though! People often assume this is from training the AIs (which I’ll get to in a moment) because everyone “knows” it’s a long, involved process that can take months (even with a $50 billion data center specifically made for AI). However, it’s actually all the people and businesses using AI that uses up all that energy. The biggest, most power-hungry step is “inference” which is the point where the LLM tries to figure out what you just asked of it.

The important point here is that AI is actually being used.* There’s real demand for it! It’s not just fools asking ChatGPT for strange pizza recipes. It’s mostly businesses using it for things like writing and checking code or investigating server logs for malicious activity or any number of very businessy IT things.

The demand for AI services is so great that they can’t build data centers fast enough. Big AI, specifically is having trouble keeping responses within satisfactory time windows. The business models are still developing but they’re actually not charging enough to make up for their spending in a lot of cases. Specifically, OpenAI and Microsoft are losing money like crazy, trying to compete.

I ran out of time… I’ll reply again about the copyright situation, training costs, and open weight (aka open source) models in a bit…

So that’s why I occasionally dozed off in there, despite taking ADHD medication and having plenty of sleep!

Also, it explains the microphone I found in my alarm clock years later.

Note: I really did find a microphone in my alarm clock years later! It had its own battery and was not spliced into the incoming power, which was, well… Amateurish!

Somewhere, out there, is hundreds of hours of audio recordings of me snoring. Or perhaps, the only remaining evidence of my superpower.

The news really stinks lately.

I have ADHD, which means I have to go to a psychiatrist every three months to refill my prescription. It’s silly, really but required by law.

Before he died suddenly of an aneurysm, my former psychiatrist was fascinated with me. He said it was because I’m always so jovial… Which I understand now is something of an oddity at a psychiatrist’s office 🤣

Anyway, because if this, he would often give me tests and puzzles to develop “a baseline”. Apparently so he wouldn’t lose his own mind from the more extreme patients he often dealt with 😁

I signed his forms (it was all above board) and he’d test my reaction time, run me through various questionaires about my thoughts, and time how long it would take me to solve simple puzzles. Only challenging one was one of those “fold the boxes in your mind” tests which I assume I aced (that’s my jam!)

I didn’t mind at all! It was actually quite fun working with his staff and psychiatrists in training who were the ones who were always there, recording the results. I would make jokes like, “I’ve been practicing my jumping!” Then pretend to be disappointed that they were only going to ask me questions and not test my jumping ability.

I was the lab rat. Probably the control lab rat but it was still fun and interesting. The best perk was that when I walked into his office, the receptionist would notice me and send me right to the back. No matter how many people were sitting there, waiting.

There were snacks, but only for children ☹️

Now that I think about it, the various tests and questions could’ve been a ruse! They were actually testing my willpower, sitting next to bowls of mini packages of M&Ms and Reese’s the entire time! 🤔

Now I’m imagining his notes:

“Subject 294 still hasn’t taken or attempted to steal any candy. Despite timing his appointment precisely around lunch time and keeping him here for an extra half an hour. He’s still laughing and joking with the staff. I may have to order an ice cream machine.”

🤔 We can now terrorize people all over the world using mere words, from the toilet.

Electronic devices are becoming so small it is becoming realistic to distribute them via the wind, with velcro-like exteriors that attach to people like burs.

Well I think it’s fine 🤷

By my non-existent authority, I decree it OK.

It ain’t much, but it’s dishonest work.

Jokes on us: Because of the gravity issue, alien life on such planets jumps right to stargate technology.

“They spent almost a thousand years fooling around with rockets!”

Ah but we’ll never run out of electricity. We will run out of oil.

Furthermore, adding new electric capacity is easy in comparison to adding more oil infrastructure.

Want gas to be cheaper? Get more people to buy electric cars!

If it relies on SIM cards that means it doesn’t work at all with regular computers or when the device connects over WiFi, right? Seems kinda useless.

Of course, all age verification checks on the Internet are useless regardless but this Japanese method seems extra useless.

In short: The anime left a scientist bamboozled.

Milk protein can be grown in labs now:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daphneewingchow/2025/02/24/first-lab-grown-whole-cows-milk-to-debut-in-the-us/

Whoah there! I was talking about communism, specifically. Not socialism (which isn’t well defined).