Meh, LLaMA is right out for me because of its license. MistralAI makes great products and releases them with genuine open licenses.

Yep.

Yes, "you've been told" that by people who have no clue what they're talking about. Meanwhile, models just keep getting better and better. AI images have been out for years now. There's tons on the net.

First off, old datasets don't just disappear. So the *very worst case* is that you just keep developing your new models on pre-AI datasets.

Secondly, there is human selection on things that get posted. If humans don't like the look of something, they don't post it. In many regards, an AI image is replacing what would have been a much crapper alternative choice.

Third, dataset gatherers don't just blindly use a dump of the internet. If there's a place that tends to be a source of crappy images, they'll just exclude or downrate it.

Fourth, images are scored with aesthetic gradients before they're used. That is, humans train models to assess how much they like images, and then those models look at all the images in the dataset and rate them. Once again, crappy images are excluded / downrated.

Fifth, trainers do comparative training and look at image loss rates, and an automatically exclude problematic ones. For example, if you have a thousand images labeled "watermelon" but one is actually a zebra, the zebra will have an anomalous loss spike that warrants more attention (either from humans or in an automated manner). Loss rates can also be compared between data +sources+ - whole websites or even whole datasets - and whatever is working best gets used.

Sixth, trainers also do direct blind human comparisons for evaluation.

This notion that AIs are just going to get worse and worse because of training on AI images is just ignorant. And demonstrably false.

As for why I think the ruling was bad: their argument was that because the person doesn't control the exact details of the composition of the work, than the basic work (before postprocessing or selection) can't be copyrighted. But that exact same thing applies to photography, outside of studio conditions. Ansel Adams wasn't out there going, "Okay, put a 20 meter oak over there, a 50 meter spruce over there, shape that mountain ridge a bit steeper, put a cliff on that side, cover the whole thing with snow... now add a rainbow to the sky... okay, cue the geese!" He was searching the search space for something to match a general vision - or just taking advantage of happenstance findings. And sure, a photographer has many options at their hands in terms of their camera and its settings, but if you think that's a lot, try messing around with AUTOMATIC1111 with all of its plugins some time.

The winner of Nature Photographer of the year in 2022 was Dmitry Kokh, with "House of Bears". He was stranded on a remote Russian archipelago and discovered that polar bears had moved into an abandoned weather station, and took photos of them. He didn't even plan to be there then. He certainly didn't plan on having polar bears in an abandoned weather station, and he CERTAINLY wasn't telling the bears where to stand and how to pose. Yet his work is a classic example of what the copyright office thinks should be a copyrightable work.

And the very notion that people don't control the layout with AI art is itself flawed. It was an obsolete notion even when they made their ruling - we already had img2img, instructpix2pix and controlnet. The author CAN control the layout, down to whatever level of intricate detail they choose. Unlike, say, a nature photographer. And modern models give increasing levels of control even with the prompt itself - with SD3 (unlike SD1/2 or SC) - you can do things like "A red sphere on a blue cube to the left of a green cone" . We're heading to - if not there already - where you could write a veritable short story's worth of detail to describe a scene.

I find it just plain silly that Person A could grab their cell phone and spend 2 seconds snapping a photo of whatever happens to be out their window, and that's copyrightable, but a person who spends hours searching through the latent space - let alone with ControlNet guidance (controlnet inputs can be veritable works of art in their own right) - isn't given the same credit for the amount of creative effort put into the work.

I think, rather, it's very simple: the human creative effort should be judged not on the output of the work (the work is just a transformation of the inputs), but the amount of creative effort they put into said inputs. Not just on the backend side - selection, postprocessing, etc - but on the frontend side as well. If a person just writes "a fluffy dog" and takes the first pic that comes up, obviously, that's not sufficient creative endeavour. But if a person spends hours on the frontend in order to get the sort of image they want, why shouldn't that frontend work count? Seems dumb to me.

... when the original ruling itself plainly said that though the generated content itself isn't copyrightable, human creative action such as postprocessing or selection can render it copyrightable.

I still think the basic ruling was bad for a number of reasons, and it'll increasingly come under stress in the coming years. But there is zero shock to this copyright here. The copyright office basically invited people to do this.

Lockin-O-Matic chip

Ship go boom pop
Abork! Abork!

"Going to dee moon,
bork bork, bork bork,
hope we git theer soon,
bork bork, bork bork,
I cook best dish up theer
bork bork, bork bork,
Brave cook has no fear
bork bork, bork bork,
Taste yum yum, 'nauts cheer
bork bork, bork bork...

It's really odd a ban like this didn't happen a long time ago. I think there is valid criticism that the US shouldn't allow private businesses to control media (including social media) to the extent they do without more regulation, but not allowing a foreign geopolitical adversary to do it should be a no-brainer. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook are all banned in China. The fact TikTok has been allowed in the US for as long as it has is ridiculous.

It involves more work than that actually. To save a whopping 10 cents on BOM, apple stores all of the firmware on the SSD, which means you have to extract the contents of the SSD and load them on to another one. And you'll need additional tooling for that given macos doesn't allow you to read that area of the disk.

As an added bonus, if your SSD fails, your whole computer is bricked. You know what else? Apple doesn't even offer a service to fix it out of warranty. But wait, there's more: No independent repair shops will fix it either, because doing so involves copyright infringement and Apple will sue.

Well that's easy, don't buy a mac. You signed up for that when you made that stupid choice. I have to use one at work for testing and I really don't get the appeal of it. Unless you're doing hobby video editing crap they're a net negative. And even then I question that given they don't even have access to the best hardware for it.

I'm not necessarily going to defend this protest, but criticism of Israel is hardly some "woke Commie" position (whatever the hell that even means). One can sincerely believe Israel's actions against Palestinians is unjust, without, say, wanting state control of the economy.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It's been protected since 1791.

Dude you're seriously fucking bonkers if you believe that provides any material benefit at all. The absolute best it can do is add a very miniscule amount of energy efficiency, but we're talking on the scale of adding less than one second to a ten hour battery life.

I expect that general anxiety about anti-Semitism is driving this. Like it or not, condemnation of Israel comes with certain baggage, and as can be seen on campuses throughout the Western world, criticism of Israel can turn into anti-Zionism which then turns into anti-Semitism very quickly. The lines are very thin. The business world is very risk averse, and coming down on the wrong side of this particular debate can have a whole lot of consequences. Beyond that, of course, Alphabet is a business, not a society for activists, and while it may tolerate certain kinds of activism that may not be perceived as threatening the bottom line, right now, criticism of Israel is just a step too far.