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Comment Re:Doesn't like military using their services (Score 1) 299

To be fair, it is private property owned by a company that employed at least some of the protesters, in a building that the protesters presumably worked in, so it's not quite as clear-cut as occupying someone else's yard. More like your teenage kid occupying your yard.

Comment Cue all the people acting shocked about this... (Score 4, Informative) 38

... 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.

Comment Re:This is just sad and funny at the same time (Score 1) 234

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.

Comment Re:insubordination (Score 1) 234

"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.

Comment Re:insubordination (Score 0) 234

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.

Comment Re:Sigh... (Score 1) 49

Here we go again with this.

NVidia shipped 100k AI GPUs last year, which - if run nonstop - would consume 7,4 TWh. Crypto consumes over 100 TWh per year, and the world as a whole consumes just under 25000 TWh per year.

AI consumption of power is a pittiance. To get these huge numbers, they have to assume long-term extreme exponential scaling. But you can make anything give insane numbers with an assumption like that.

I simply don't buy the assumption. Not even assuming an AI bust - even assuming that AI keeps hugely growing, and that nobody rests on their laurels but rather keeps training newer and better foundations - the simple fact is that there's far too much progress being made towards vastly more efficient architectures at every level - model structure, neuron structure, training methodologies, and hardware. . Not like "50% better", but like "orders of magnitude better". I just don't buy these notions of infinite exponential growth.

Comment Re:Stupid nomenclature. (Score 1) 35

Confusing terminology by co-opting accepted terms already in common use.

We're going to name this golf cart "Jet Plane"!
We're going to call this jet plan "submarine"
We're going to name this sailboat "family car".
We're going to make this snowmobile "toboggan"

Sorry. Stupid shit like this makes it impossible to take anything these people say seriously.

Now that I realize how they use terminology, suddenly Amazon's search results make sense. If I really want a Bluetooth keyboard and not some wireless USB keyboard, I should search for FireWire keyboard, and if I really want a wireless USB keyboard, I should search for PS/2 keyboard.

Comment Severe design flaw? Stupid user choices? (Score 1) 49

It's hard to know whether this is something harmless or a sign of a serious design flaw in Discord without more information.

If this company is just assuming that Dumbledore32168 is the same user on server A and server B, then either:

  • users chose to use the same name on every server with the expectation that people from other servers would recognize them, in which case there's really no problem at all, or
  • some servers don't allow you to set your username, in which case that's a real problem, and a good reason to use something other than Discord,

and I have no idea which of these is the case.

If, however, they are doing something more clever and matching people even when they have different usernames, then this suggests a *major* design flaw.

It should not be possible for anyone other than the actual owner of the server to obtain any identifier for a user that is shared across multiple servers. Other people should be able to see your local (per-server) username, period. There are reasons for a signed-in user to pass uniquely identifying values *to* the server, and there are legitimate reasons for the server to store that mapping, but there are no reasons for there to be any web-facing API for converting from a username back to that identifier, period, under any circumstances. Even things like private messaging should be sending the local username or a local user identifier, not any sort of global identifier.

And even during the sign-in/sign-up process, the identifier sent from the authentication server to the content server need not be shared across servers. There's nothing inherently preventing discord from providing a different per-user unique identifier to each server, and if privacy were a serious consideration in the design, they would be doing this. So again, if they are successfully tracking users across servers when usernames don't match, then Discord's entire security architecture needs a major overhaul, because that would mean that Discord as a platform is severely flawed architecturally, and that privacy was not a serious consideration in its design.

So could someone from Discord please clarify what is happening here?

Comment Not purposeless (Score 3, Interesting) 24

These actually likely served a purpose. If some other company made an exact copy of their mask, they could go to court and immediately prove that it was a copy. It's the chip design equivalent of the "Stolen from Apple" art hidden inside the Mac ROM code so that if someone tried to sell a clone similar to what happened with the Franklin Ace, they would potentially have an easy way to prove in court that the code was copied.

Comment Re:Well... (Score 3, Insightful) 121

It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

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