As much as it pains me to say, I also agree. I was "screwed" last fall by an airline disabling online check-in and forcing everyone to go to the counter and having their carry-on sized and weighed.. and yeah my carry-on was a bit too big. I knew it was, it's an older model that was sized to max carry-on size within the US, but obviously too big for international carriers. Ended up paying 100 Euros or so, which I think is crazy, but.. it's my fault. At the end of the day the rules are rules, carriers are very clear about the number and the size of the bags you're allowed to carry. If you have a fanny pack (I can't believe those are back as "shoulder strap bags"... welcome to the 90s), great, it needs to fit in another bag or count as one.

I do however agree with others that non-bag items are somewhat vague, and that can create resentment. Anything you wear seems fair game, and there's big differences between a puffy down winter coat and a wool one, but I don't know how they'd police that. And I can also understand how someone may resent paying extra for a bit of luggage, when the person next to them weighs twice them and their luggage combined...

You know what I want, I want AI instead of human editors, specifically for Slashdot. At least AIs can run spellcheckers and check for dupes, which at this point is more work than the editors do.

That's fair, I do think it's a new area of law and the rules are not well defined. It's legal for a human to read newspapers and other sources, and slowly build their writing expertise. It would be illegal for a human to read newspapers, memorize the content of an article, and then manually transcribe it into their own newspaper and sell that newspaper.

OpenAI has done something close to the latter, or at least that's the NYTimes argument. If that's the case, I think that's obviously unacceptable. However, the first use case is more interesting to me. Do AI systems / other corporations have the right to store and use content from others, even if it's not regurgitated, without first entering into an agreement with the content owner (i.e. "the system is a human that just learns but doesn't reuse"). I believe (not a lawyer) the laws today would say that's illegal, but you could argue it should be ok, because humans do it.

No, not at all. If you read the actual filing, it says the Times made the model reproduce passages of articles ("regurgitation"), but either 1) they could have done so by asking ChatGPT to "act like a New York Times reporter and reproduce verbatim text from news articles" or 2) asking questions about specific Times articles and requesting quotes, which ChatGPT gave, but then "reordered those outputs (and used ellipses to obscure their original location) to create the false impression that ChatGPT regurgitated sequential and uninterrupted snippets of the articles".

In either case, it's pretty clear ChatGPT had NYTimes data during training. Sure, maybe it's not supposed to spit out articles verbatim (and to make it do that you "force" it to), or the NYTimes is disingenuously using multiple prompts and concatenating the answers to make it look as if it does. It still has the data, and that was not given to them by the NYTimes, though OpenAI also argues "the regurgitated text represents only a fraction of the articles, see, e.g., Compl.#104 (105 words from 16,000+ word article), all of which the public can already access for free on third-party websites."

Build a car, with Apple's resources, likely not that hard. Build a good car, with the support system (dealers, garages for repairs etc.) it needs, at an attractive price for consumers (so figure out the logistics / supply chain) yet profit-generating for Apple, probably much harder. I do think they could have succeeded, but I'm sure the CEO went "mmm do I keep investing $M/$B into this, which is not a core market, when I could reuse that money for other things"?

It takes determination to move a large company into a brand new market. Apple has done well in expanding, but only close to its "core strength" of consumer electronics (computers to music device to phone to watch to goggle). Going to cars is a bit different. It really puts Amazon into perspective for example - book seller website to e-commerce is "easy", but e-commerce to Cloud infrastructure provider is a big step.

They're here to moderate of the forum... wait no that's us. To edit the blurb... wait no there's so many typos they can't be doing that (in fact I'm not sure a spell checker is ran). To improve the experience... wait does unicode work? Nah ok. To create interesting polls... no wait the "newest" one is months old and asks "do you have a poll idea". To choose what articles to display... but they can't be bothered to read the Slashdot frontpage.

Honestly at this point it's a mystery. How many editors are there, and can I suggest they meet twice a day, once in the morning and one in the afternoon, just to discuss what they're going to push to the front page (or correct dupes if need be)? This is like a bunch of coders all working on the same software without a single architectural meeting, each pushing commits without dealing with code conflicts. It's nuts.

Every time I read about more ads being shoved down our throats, I think "who pays for these"? Like... Ok, radio is basically dead, newspapers also, TV is dying, so all the advertising dollars going to them now goes to Google, Facebook, etc. But then we see more and more ad spots. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Nvidia GFN, random shitty mobile games...

From my non-advertising background, it feels like there are more ad spots than in the 90s, or the 2000s. If so, who keeps paying for more and more of them? Especially the Netflix / Nvidia stuff, it's not mom and pop shops, it's other corporations. At what point do other corporations go "ok that's enough, we have enough ads"? Or will the price of ad keep dropping as the supply goes up, meaning at some point the ad platforms cannibalize their own revenue streams? It's got to stop at some point, because I know for a fact large corporations have a finite marketing budget, which cannot expand every year.

Translation of OpenAI's argument: "Yes ok we did use your data to train our model... but it wasn't supposed to be detectable, and the model wasn't supposed to spit out the training data verbatim. The fact you accessed it means you input some prompt that we didn't design against, and that unveiling of our sneakiness is tantamount to hacking. You're a hacker, you're a bad person, you're wrong, QED."

I feel that argument of logical fallacy can help you win a debate competition with judges. You're right, it in no way excuses the behavior. However, it doesn't mean that humans don't consider it when they form an opinion. If Person X writes in the newspapers "Person Y is terrible! Look at what they've done!", but is also guilty of the same exact behavior.. it doesn't excuse the behavior, but it creates a reaction of "Person X is a hypocrite" and "well if everyone does it, why point the finger at one individual".

I understand what you're trying to say, but I wonder how it works in a post-industrial society. To get a personal relationship / link between your work and the consumer, you either need to be in an artisanal / service field (restaurant cook, where stuff is done by hand, presented directly to a consumer) or part of one of the small number of people that design / create a product (software architect, with direct control on that product). However, there are many, many jobs that just support production, with no direct link: marketers, accountants, managers, etc. If you're a procurement person or a quality assurance manager at a company that makes breakfast cereal, it's pretty hard to not feel like a soul-less automaton (even if you were super excited about cereal). How do you make their job interesting?

This is exactly the sort of discourse (or jokes) that makes people in those states hate the rest. They may have different backgrounds, educational levels, professions than the usual Slashdot crowd.. but damn, way to create a "us vs. you" mentality. No wonder viewpoints cannot be reconciled between political parties. If that's the prevailing mentality and attitude towards each other, maybe the United States should just split up.

Streaming services*, sorry.

Exactly why the media conglomerates would want to kill discs. Streaming value is better value both ways - to the media companies, and to consumers that don't understand they've lost ownership of anything.

What's the solution? Honest question. I'm in a company that has announced layoffs recently. Am I letting them? Yeah I am, because I've no clue what I can do. Help me out here, what can one mid-level employee among tens of thousands do?

Hard to know what happened or what the surveys say, since I also didn't get through the paywall. I did read up on the initial few articles though. It was successful for the first 150 people, and now this after the experiment was expanded.

I know every non-management person hates management, and every low level manager hates the higher level manager, while the higher level manager thinks people below are not good at their job... but that's not necessarily the reason. I think 4 days work weeks work well in somewhat homogeneous companies, especially ones that are project-based. 50 software developers going from 5 days to 4? No problem, we can organize the work for that. 25000 software developers doing the same thing? Probably also possible. For a telecom though, with people in marketing, customer service, IT, etc., it's a lot more difficult. The work is completely different from group to group, Some are customer-facing, and must be present when customers try reaching them. Some need to respond to emergencies (your marketing / comms folks, or just the technicians). So what, do these people never get 4 day work weeks? If you do that, how are you going to justify it to these teams, when the one next door building the next set top box software is working 4 days? Or does the company just hire more of them, thus paying more?