beejjorgensen

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I also struggle to see how authors are actually harmed by this use, which might be problematic for them in court.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I’m talking about using copyrighted material to train AI; you’re talking about using AI to replace authors, which is a separate, related issue.

If someone uses Stephen King’s books to train an AI, how many sales of those books are lost? Because it kinda looks like “zero” since the AI isn’t replacing those books.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

If it generates verbatim output, then we have a good old copyright violation, which courts could latch onto for standing.

But if I hire people to write books in the style of Stephen King and then train an AI with them, where’s King’s recourse?

And the AI could be trained on public domain data and still be a competitor to authors. It seems like the plaintiffs would have to be equally against this usage if they’re worried about their jobs.

But in those two cases, I don’t think any laws are broken.

I just think, aside from a plain old piracy violation, it’s going to be a tricky one in court. Sure you can’t just copy the book, but running a copy of a book through an algorithm is tougher to ban, and it’s not something that necessarily should be illegal.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I love the command line nature of Linux. It’s waaay easier to automate tasks than with a GUI.

I recently found out I could scan images from the command line. A few minutes of hacking later and I had some scripts that greatly sped up the process of scanning books over using the GUI.

And I can see your point of view, but the thing is that “Linux devs” do this for fun. And writing GUIs isn’t the most fun kind of programming for a lot of people.

If you need it done, you can pay someone to do it, or program it yourself. Otherwise the only other option is to wait upon the kindness of strangers.

As from the beginning, OSS devs will work on whatever they want to. Free work is not market-driven.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I still use my web hosting provider’s email service (with my own domain). It doesn’t cost me anything extra and isn’t mined like Gmail.

Getting my own for-life domain was a great decision, though, since I can change providers without changing addresses.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

For sure. I grabbed mine (beej.us) in 2000. My only regret is that I didn’t also get beej.com when it was available–last I looked it was being sold for half a million bucks thanks to the sexual connotations.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

“Right. Now… what was I working on, again?”

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn’t so easily distributed. And their lending system isn’t easily legally federated.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

That’s not illegal, though. (All of us save copies of copyrighted media.) It’s the distribution that’s in question.

The law is contrary to the interests of The People and needs to change.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

This is going to be interesting. Let’s say I buy an article then copy the entire thing and send it to my friend the AI enthusiast. I’ve certainly violated copyright law.

But if my friend then goes on to run the article through an algorithm, it’s not at all clear to me that there’s been a copyright violation by them.

Or, indeed, how you could word a law that prohibits algorithmic consumption of the data without making it impossible to ever simply view the data.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I’ll simplify, then. Can I download an article that I’ve paid for and have permission to download, then have an algorithm operate on that data?

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Just run it through OCR. Super efficient! 😅

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I genuinely wonder if Facebook notices a $100k/day fine.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Another option occurs to me: maybe Norway knows Facebook won’t care and just smells a way to make an easy $9,000,000. 😁

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

The irony of zoom buying keybase…

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I wonder how many weeks of my life have been saved over the years by using vim instead of a slower editor…

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

For those of us that remember IE6, this isn’t a fairy tale no matter what Mozilla says. We need a non-majority web browser or we’re going to pay (again).

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

It’s difficult to compute the additional world domestic product that was created due to vim, to compute the impact one person had on… everything.

A very sad day.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Pretty much all OS installs have the capability to go really wrong. Once a Mac user was making fun of me for needing to deal with weirdness installing Linux on an old Windows laptop. He stopped when I asked if I should install OSX instead. 😁

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Of course, but that’s beside the point.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

What a nightmare. Not sure how the Russian people get out from under this. I’m still pretty scared about the chances of similar laws in the US.

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I did this with a BASIC game called Wizard’s Castle that I played a lot of as a kid. The first step was to “reverse engineer” the manually-compressed BASIC code and write up a spec. Then I rewrote it in Rust as a learning exercise. 🙂

github.com/beejjorgensen/Wizards-Castle-Info

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

Seems easy to strip off or not add, and then you’d have a video with unknown provenance which the echo chamber will eat hook, line, and sinker. Wouldn’t you?

beejjorgensen, 10 months ago

I don’t want to necessarily gatekeep it, but I don’t want to go back to a centralized algorithmic platform in order to cater to everyone. I’m sure there are some things federated platforms can do to be more approachable, but some of them we shouldn’t do. But Twitter and clones are out there already for people to use–Mastodon doesn’t need to copy them.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

Slightly shorter:

pdftk old.pdf cat output new.pdf

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

This logic holds the ISP and backbone providers liable as well, does it not?

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

I have no problem with Twitter moderating content. The First Amendment says they can.

But the government moderating it–the First Amendment says they can’t.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

Just saw this in the passport line in Amsterdam for EU citizens. Not a lot of takers, but the ones who did got through fast. Tradeoffs.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

I had the same experience moving from GIMP to Photoshop. 😂

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

The one thing I can’t seem to get CUPS to do is share my printer with the LAN. I had it for a while where it would show up on the Macs, but then would vanish. It’s my only gripe.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

It continuously blows my mind that computers function at all when constructed on these nanometer scales.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

“It used to take me over an hour to space an alien queen out the airlock, but with this new exoskeleton, I can get the job done in under 5 minutes.”

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

This was not our experience with raw JS programs in the 10k-20k loc range composed of scores of files.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

Musk tweeted. “Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots.”

So how’s that plan to get rid of all the bot accounts coming along?

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

I have an old brother laser I’ve refilled by hand a couple times. But when it dies I might just use the 5¢ printer at the library for the few print jobs I need.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

I’ve been editing OSM for years. (896,339 edits in 3,427 changesets, apparently!) For me, it’s all about the free data. I once got a thank you note from someone who worked for a city with a particularly large municipal park. I’d added almost all the trails to the park and other information, and they’d used it to produce a printed map for the general public. Exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped for!

Personally, I do a lot of dualsport motorcycling and most backcountry maps around here are subpar. I map tons of trails and 2track and put them on the Garmin so I know where I’m going.

OSM is also great in lots of Europe–tons of detail.

JOSM is great.

Someone just recommended Organic Maps for the phone–it’s way snappier than Google Maps, but still not great with finding addresses.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

There’s a list of ready-made providers of .

I’ve had the best luck with BBBike and OpenMapChest for getting pre-built map files.

Basically you have to get one of these files with all the data you want in it and then stick it on your SD card on the GPS. (The GPS should mount like a thumb drive. If you already have a gmapsupp.img file on there, you might want to back it up in case things go sideways.) Some GPSes support multiple gmapsupp.img files, but a lot don’t. Here’s a thread on merging .

When I needed super fresh data, I’d download raw OSM data from Overpass and use mkgmap to build the gmapsupp.img.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

From what I’ve read, it is not, but it basically contains Firefox to do the rendering.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

Spam is a menace, but bayesian filters and whitelists work quite well together.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

It depends on if the summary is an infringing derivative work, doesn’t it? Wikipedia is full of summaries, for example, and it’s not violating copyright.

If they illegally downloaded the works, that feels like a standalone issue to me, not having anything to do with AI.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

The biggest thing I de-Googled was gmail. I had my own domain already so it wasn’t tough to move (to my web hosting provider’s included email service).

I switched to Firefox+uBO from Chrome.

They de-Googled RSS for me (now on Newsblur).

Things I still use:

• Drive for backups (but have a local backup in case their AI bans me)
• YouTube Premium (I hate ads)
• Contacts (Cardbook addon for Thunderbird works well with this)
• Calendar (Thunderbird supports natively)
• Keep (Shared shopping list)
• Pixel phone (I don’t really care for Apple, either)

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

What a lovely experience that’s going to be.

beejjorgensen, 11 months ago

+1 on having your own domain. I was using gmail for a long time, and recently switched to my hosting provider’s included-with-purchase email. Having my own domain made the move transparent to everyone, and relatively painless.

beejjorgensen, 1 year ago

I think most billionaires have a bit of their brain set to believe in themselves rather more than is warranted. It's great for making money, but maybe not something you want to put your life on the line over.

beejjorgensen, 1 year ago

Netflix is my go-to for streaming services. Mainly because there's a dedicated "Netflix" button on my Shield remote that I keep hitting on accident.

beejjorgensen, 1 year ago

Whoa--there's an app for that! https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/30/shield-tv-remote-remap-netflix/ Thanks!

beejjorgensen, 1 year ago

About 90% of my visits to reddit are via RSS (to read comments). If they remove it, I'll never visit except for reading my local town feed.

beejjorgensen, 1 year ago

I'm looking forward to this. There's a related bug that drives me crazy when it repeatedly executes an uncommanded scroll-to-top-of-page that should get fixed with the websockets purge.