They’re terrified their little boys will lose value on the pedophile market.

Can’t have a shenanigasm without shenanigans 🤷

River Monsters

It’s everyone’s right to save what they find on the Internet!

In case you don’t understand how the Internet works, here:

1. Your computer: “I would like that file, please.”
2. Their computer: “OK, here you go!”

YouTube is literally sending your computer the stuff you asked it to send. Content that was uploaded by the copyright holder specifically for that purpose. How is this piracy‽

I’ve spent loads of time working on Linux-based appliances! Most ran Debian and were fantastically simple to work with. Standard tools, simple/fast filesystems, and no surprises.

The Android filesystem abstractions alone make it, “not a real computer” in my eyes.

Want to save a file in your home directory? Forget it! There is no home directory! You’ve got “internal storage” and only certain, specially-permissioned apps can read and write stuff there… And even then, only in specific locations.

Want to write a script that does, well, anything? Well, you can enable access to bash but how do you schedule it? There’s no cron. No systemd timers. You need a special app.

In fact, to do anything on Android pretty much always requires a special app! Built for your specific version of Android (that acts more like a desktop than a phone).

The filesystem is slow AF too. Want to use regular git? Hahaha! Good luck! It’s worse than NTFS!

If they run Android, they ain’t real computers.

Better question: What does a very hungry caterpillar that eats AI metamorphose into?

Being able to look up and verify just about any fact in seconds via a magical device that fits in your pocket and only needs to be charged once a day, then never using it to do that.

This post has triggered my outrage!

…because this is totally normal database stuff. Like, where’s the meat? My phone could handle 500 million rows of data. Is that supposed to be a lot?

I’m not exaggerating about the phone part: A modern smartphone can handle an SQLite DB with billions of records (aka “ROWS”, LOL).

“Sarcasm”

At least they’re being honest about it. 99% of the companies training AI or selling people’s data to AI companies are doing so without telling anyone.

Having said that, Twitch streams are public almost all of the time so complaining that they’re being used in ways the creator never intended is a bit like complaining that someone caught you picking your nose in public.

We learned this lesson in the 90s: Once something goes public on the Internet, it is no longer under the creator’s/publisher’s control. People can and will do whatever TF they want with it. As long as they’re not redistributing it without permission, that is legal.

It’s everyone’s right to do whatever TF they want with the stuff that’s literally sent to their computer on purpose. That includes using that thing to train AI.

It’s not the only animal like this! The Iberian Ribbed Newt (Pleurodeles waltl) will push its own ribcage out of its chest (turning them into spikes) and secretes toxic venom through those bones…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_ribbed_newt

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.