It’s non just Facebook either. Every big tech social media platform has headed in this direction of showing you stuff you don’t really want to see based on maximizing profit. For-profit social media seems to mostly be doomed to this outcome because it makes more money.

A restaurant has a sign that says “no shirt no shoes no service”. I walk in barefoot and order a burger. They serve me the burger. They had the right to deny me but they served me anyway. The responsibly to enforce their own terms of service is on them. Similarly youtube has the right to deny service to people blocking ads and sometimes does. That does not make ad blocking piracy for all intents and purposes. The onus to enforce their own terms of service is on them. And it would be very easy for them to take more drastic measures but they don’t.

I get that you’re trying to make an argument that morally it can feel like piracy, but it’s just not actually piracy. No copyright was violated. Youtube’s TOS doesn’t change that.

Linus wasn’t accused of sexually harassing anyone. His company was accused of being a hostile work environment with sexual harassment by a former worker, but the accusations weren’t against Linus himself. LTT hired a 3rd party law firm to investigate - LTT said the law firm basically said there wasn’t legal liability based on the documentation they could find and LTT used that to absolve themselves and threaten to sue the accuser if she said anything else.

But this was an LTT hired lawfirm and LTT themselves reporting on what the report said - and since it’s confidential you kind of just have to take their word that they’re accurately reporting the findings. Further there were initially some corroborators of Madison’s story who retracted and apologized quickly (assumingly after being threatened with legal action - Aprime is the example). Besides that a lot of the accusations were things that happened in person that wouldn’t necessarily leave a digital trail so it’s possible even if the 3rd party investigation was completely unbiased that everything Madison said was still true.

In the end believe what you want but it seems slimy enough that I stopped watching.

It’s like a free booth that offers products and says donations welcome. It legally is not stealing if you take a free product and don’t give a donation. The enrichment of the creator legally has nothing to do with whether skipping ads is piracy. The creator has the option to stop offering their content for free in the future if they don’t like the money they’re getting from the amount of people watching the ads.

Creators also get paid for in video ad reads and product placement. Media providers also make money on data collection regardless of the ads you skip. And furthermore advertising prices have always been based an statistics of reach. Companies like youtube have clearer data than the old Nielsen ratings but they’ve had a pretty accurate numbers of how many users skipped ads through time shifting too that have only gotten better since.

It legally is not piracy in most places. Ethically just watching they are probably making money off of you even if you skip the obvious ads but if you really want to go over the top you could still skip and just find other ways to give money to the platform or creator.

I’m close to shore on my ship. “Arr FM plays the best shanties” I say as I tune my radio to my favorite station. After listening for 15 minutes, “Not another ad, I hate these.” I turn the dial to another station still playing some music for 3 minutes and then start to turn the dial back to Arr FM. Just then a cannonball whizzes across my hand. “Oh no, the HMS Pearl is on my tail” I shriek, but it’s too late chain shot has already shredded my sails.

Robert Maynard boards our vessel and puts a sharp sword to my throat. “What say ye in defense you dirty ad-skipping pirate?”

I yell out “But ad-skipping and even ad-blockers are legal! Even the FBI itself suggests using ad-blockers. It’s the responsibility of companies that serve free ad-supported media to ensure the efficacy of their ads but there’s no legal doctrine that says I can’t skip or block ads. Sure it might violate their TOS but they can find ways to block me or make the ads harder to avoid - or even switch to a paid delivery format that is covered by the legal system.”

“That’s no excuse!” he says as he decapitates me. A just punishment for a obvious pirate trying to squirm out of responsibilities such as I. Don’t steal free media kids.

My dad gave me a gun for one of my earlier birthdays. It was a bolt action .22 that went right into a gun safe that I couldn’t access…It was a pretty shitty present as I didn’t enjoy hunting at the time but in retrospect I’m glad I learned gun safety and shooting.

Why the fuck would you buy a 14 year old an AR15 style rifle, especially after he already had a history of making school shooting threats at school? Dude deserves prison for a long time.

I DVR the game. Later that night I come home to watch. Oh it’s commercial time, I guess I’ll just fast forward 2 minutes.

Peter pan and tinkerbell float through my window. They capture me and tie me up. They shout at me, “Watching ad-supported media without watching the ads is a crime you monster!” as they hold my eyes open while ad after ad replay on the tv. Crime like this isn’t worth it folks.

I put the local football game on my tv over antenna. Oh a commercial, I guess I’ll walk away to take a piss now. The swat team busts down my door. I run for my scabbard to resist but with one peg leg I’m not quick enough. The seas are rough sailing for pirates willing to skip ads mateys.

Probably the sexual harassment one that’s when I left. The billet labs stuff was bad too though.

It just using mushrooms as a sensor. The mushroom senses light, that causes an electrical response in the mycelium, electronics sense that electric signal and use it as a trigger to perform whatever.

The cool part comes from these living components added to robots having the potential to be better and cheaper than the regular tools we use for the job but unfortunately no sentient mushroom robots to party with yet.

I’d be a fan of a law that companies who drop support of their product would have to release code that lets 3rd parties or users themselves offer alternative support. If you want to fully abandon a product opensource it. If you’re a big company that doesn’t want to do that release a feature for users to self host before you cut ties. I know it’s not a simple thing to do in the current world but if laws mandated it then tech would have no choice but to adapt.

This is super cool and helpful as a resource but I really don’t think people without a chemistry background should be doing anything more than following precise instructions, hopefully with some form of verification test at the end. The idea to have people without a chemistry background use a forked version of askcos and just run with it is a little scary.

The affordable Controlled Lab Reactor for diy is fantastic for helping people follow precise instructions to the letter just all of those instructions should be meticulously vetted by actual chemists and have some safeguard tests at the end where necessary. It seems the founder wants that vision too at the end of the conference just there’s not enough of a community yet to support it.

Yes in a certain sense pandora’s box has already been opened. That’s the reason for things like the chip export restrictions to China. It’s safe to assume that even if copyright prohibits private company LLMs governments will have to make some exceptions in the name of defense or key industries even if it stays behind closed doors. Or role out some form of ubi / worker protections. There are a lot of very tricky and important decisions coming up.

But for now at least there seems to be some evidence that our current approach to LLMs is somewhat plateauing and we may need exponentially increasing training data for smaller and smaller performance increases. So unless there are some major breakthroughs it could just settle out as being a useful tool that doesn’t really need to completely shock every factor of the economy.

They’re called help vampires in the programming world.

https://communitymgt.fandom.com/wiki/Help_Vampire

Most aren’t pro copyright they’re just anti LLM. AI has a problem with being too disruptive.

In a perfect world everyone would have universal basic income and would be excited about the amount of work that AI could potentially eliminate…but in our world it rightfully scares a lot of people about the prospect of losing their livelihood and other horrors as it gets better.

Copyright seems like one of the few potential solutions to hinder LLMs because it’s big business vs up-and-coming technology.

For what it’s worth, this headline seems to be editorialized and OpenAI didn’t say anything about money or profitability in their arguments.

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/

On point 4 they are specifically responding to an inquiry about the feasibility of training models on public domain only and they are basically saying that an LLM trained on only that dataset would be shit. But their argument isn’t “you should allow it because we couldn’t make money otherwise” their actual argument is more “training LLM with copyrighted material doesn’t violate current copyright laws” and further if we changed the law to forbid that it would cripple all LLMs.

On the one hand I think most would agree the current copyright laws are a bit OP anyway - more stuff should probably become public domain much earlier for instance - but most of the world probably also doesn’t think training LLMs should be completely free from copyright restrictions without being opensource etc. But either way this articles title was absolute shit.

You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.

There was this company Aereo that offered the ability to rent individual antennas in your local market and stream that over the Internet and the supreme court killed that too.

And they ruled Aereo was a cable company on the one hand so it was violating the law by not paying carriage fees…And then later when Aereo sought a compulsory license because it was a “cable company” according to the supreme court - they ruled against Aereo because it’s not a cable company.

It’s pretty obvious the public service part of OTA comes in second behind profit.

From wikipedia

“It’s an uncomfortable subject to most of the guys, so we don’t really discuss it too much. The process of the thing being made was never told to us. We were never told what it was. It was never supposed to be a Wu-Tang album. We were recording and being paid to do a certain amount of records by a guy whose name I don’t want to mention. He took all these verses—some of them were old verses—and put them altogether into a compilation of Wu-Tang songs and marketed it as a Wu-Tang album, and a single copy of a Wu-Tang album. We all had a problem with it because that’s not how it was described to us.”

—Method Man in 2024 on recording Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.