A few years ago I bought the EU version of Fruit Loops. I noticed right away that it looked very different. I also noticed that it tasted like crap. If I remember correctly it was so bad that I looked at the ingredients and wasn't surprised when I saw a vegetable listed there. That was just wrong.

I don't eat a lot of Fruit Loops. I probably have 4 bowls a years. Plus, I think that it has always been a poor idea to market heavily sugared cereals to children as healthy. However, I will admit that if we ruin Fruit Loops (or worse, Cap'n Crunch) because someone finally figured out that these cereals are not good for us, then I will be very sad.

My parents limited my exposure to these foods, and I have limited my children's exposure to them as well, but as an occasional treat they are hard to beat. There are lots of foods that I know are terrible for me, that I still eat occasionally. Now, I suppose I won't have that chance. It is unlikely that U.S. manufacturers will make a special version of their foods just for California.

Even if AI works like your brain (which personally I think is a gross oversimplification), there are still limits as to what I can do with other people's copyrighted material. It is one thing to read The Fellowship of the Ring. It is another thing altogether to read The Fellowship of the Ring and then write a book Companionship of the Amulet that has roughly the same plot. The more similar my work is to the original work the more likely it is to be ruled derivative and then what I can do with my work becomes strictly curtailed.

This is especially true when you are dealing with AI. The people training the models argue that they included the copyrighted works under "fair use," and reproducing bits of a whole text in the output of an AI process probably is covered. However, copying the full text of a work (or an image) into the memory of an AI model probably is not covered. This is exactly how we ended up with laws like the DMCA, and the courts have been siding against decrypting a work as fair use for a long time. The fact that AI works can't be copyrighted makes it easy to conclude that AI generated content is nothing but the uncopyrightable derivative content of every input that went into the model. It would be legal, but it would be completely worthless from a commercial standpoint.

Controlling how copyrighted material is used is 100% what copyrights are about. This really is no different than me taking a book that I like and making a recording of me reading it. I am entitled to do this. I can even copyright my performance, but I can't monetize (or even share) that performance without the express permission of the original copyright holder. That's even despite the fact that there is a genuine creative act by an actual human as the written word is turned into an audio performance.

Generative AI has none of these rights because there is no person involved. I can reuse experiences that I have stored in my brain, and generate works that, while similar to other copyrighted material, are original enough to warrant copyright protection. To a certain extent that is a right that I have as a human. Generative AI doesn't have that right, nor that protection from creating works that are derivative by default. I suspect that authors and artists have the right to keep their copyrighted material from being copied wholesale into the memory space of the system making the model in the same way that I can infringe copyright by simply copying digital copyright material from magnetic (or other) media into the memory of my computer. That bit isn't fair use, as it involves the entirety of the work, and it is precisely the boundary that copyright holders have already used to control how digital copyright material gets actually used.

George RR Martin is a person. Generative AI is not. George should absolutely be able to control how his copyrighted material gets copied into an AI model. This is essentially the same right that keeps Hollywood from making a movie of his works without his permission. The AI people can continue to build models, they will just have to use either material that isn't copyrighted, that they own the copyright to, or copyrighted material where the artist has opted to allow their content to be so used. Alternatively, I suspect that George would be fine with the idea that everything generated with a model that included his copyrighted material would be deemed a derivative of his work. With a model generated from enough copyrighted material that would make for content that was very hard to share, but it would absolutely work for the sort of non-commercial work that much of generative AI content fills.

The precise details as to how this plays out will be decided by these lawsuits. However, it is extremely unlikely that the generative AI people will be given carte blanche to include any works that they want into their models and then be able to use the output of those models however they want. Worse, there is precisely zero chance that they will give AI models the same rights as human artists.

The people that aren't getting their deserved raises don't need a union. They are, after all, still getting a raise, they just aren't getting the extra merit bonus that they would traditionally have gotten for being substantially better than their peers.

I feel the same way about my phone. It is the one computing device that I use that I don't really trust. This is why I am always glad when a site allows for an authenticator app. It usually gets listed as Google Authenticator, but you can use whatever you want. I tend to use KeepassXC on my Linux boxes. Heck, it's really just a shared secret that you can use to generate number passcodes based on the time. You could write your own if you felt so inclined.

Thanks for the lift there.

Actually, it turns out that over 25% of the Apple Cards went to people with credit scores below 660, and the default rates on the Apple cards are twice as high as were expected. People assumed that Apple customers would be well to do, but like many parts of the growing luxury goods market a surprising amount of the business comes from people who are shockingly bad at math.

Goldman Sachs gave out cards to a whole pile of Apple enthusiasts who couldn't afford to pay their bills. These customers used their cards to pay for expensive Apple hardware and services and then defaulted on the loans. That's great business for Apple, but it has added up to billions of losses for Goldman Sachs.

It's not a false dichotomy at all. If we are going to reduce CO2 emissions then people are going to have to make sacrifices. If your plan is to tell the Chinese that they have to continue to live like they did in the 9th century then it is going to fail. I've lived in the highlands of Peru, and the reality is that I would like to think that I would have risked anything to give my family a better life than that.

Not to mention that the West is falling all over itself trying to sell our lifestyle to the Chinese. To a certain extent, no matter what you do for a living, your relative affluence is based on selling third world people parts of the lifestyle that you currently enjoy.

No matter what you might believe about the people currently living at the bottom of the world's totem pole, chances are good that there is someone willing to offer them a job in the modern world, and there is someone else willing to sell them the means to emit more CO2. Trying to stuff that genie back in the bottle is just not going to happen. I suppose the west might get lucky and China might decide to starve millions of its citizens again, but that's pretty unlikely.

I actually think that we both agree. CO2 emissions are going to rise no matter what any of us do. The lure of modern life is simply too great, and our current economy is based around selling stuff to people.

I recognize that the planet doesn't care who creates the CO2. But the Chinese certainly care. Any plan that says that Westerners can emit 4 or 5 times as much per capita as the Chinese can is unlikely to be very popular in China, and since their cooperation is going to be critical in any plan that actually moves the needle, I think that we have to care about what they think.

Blaming the Chinese for the problem when there per capita emissions are so much lower than western emissions is hardly fair. Asking other people to make sacrifices that you are not willing to make basically never works.

So here we are, headed for a cliff. You aren't willing to give up your comfortable life. Heck, if you look closely at your life you'll probably find that at least some of the money you have comes from allowing third world countries to emit more CO2 than they ever have before. You can't hardly blame the Chinese (or the Indians, or Brazilians, or whoever) from wanting to buy the same sort of lifestyle that we have enjoyed basically forever. If you work in technology chances are good that you, at least at some level, profit from marketing that lifestyle to the rest of the world.

If the scientists are right, and we do change the climate, then it will probably eventually come to war. The only other alternative is that we preemptively go to war to force the third world back into their agrarian pre-industrial lifestyles. I suppose that if we kill enough of each other then the problem will sort itself out.

The people in China only want the same things that you already have. If you look at per capita carbon emissions you would realize that you are the greedy one.

If everyone in the world were willing to live the same way that the average Chinese person lived 10 years ago the problem would be solved. You would just have to give up your car, your access to the Internet, any traveling via plane, air conditioning, beef, and who knows what else. Of course, that doesn't sound like nearly as good a plan as keeping the Chinese in the third world forever. Clearly we should have access to all of this awesome lifestyle-changing technology, but they should be happy with a rice paddy and a water buffalo to plow with.

That's what I do as well. I have a phone that stays locked up at home, that I use for those banking tasks that I can't do on a proper laptop. For me that is mostly cashing checks. That's still 100 times more handy than banking has been for me in my entire life.

In fact, I can't imagine why any sane person would put their banking information on something that they carried around in their pocket (the fact that it is controlled by Apple or Google is another problem as well). My credit card allows me to safely spend ridiculous amounts of money at basically any vendor. I don't use Venmo (or another cash app), but my wife does. Access to a limited supply of funds on your phone is handy in the same way that I used to carry around cash. My wife's Venmo is not connected to a bank account. Transferring money to and from Venmo is something that is done on an actual computer that I control. I don't keep super close track of how much money is in my account. Instead I use a budgeting app to keep track of how much I have in my budget currently. At first this takes a bit of discipline, as you learn to live within a budget instead of just spending all of your money. In the long run, however, it guarantees that you will have a bank account with enough money in it that it would terrify you to have access to that money on your phone.

Patent trolls don't sue everyone. They sue companies with deep pockets. This makes sense because if they sued a smaller company with a similar patent they would not only receive far less money, but the small company could probably count on Google (and others) to help so that a bad precedent is not set.

As long as Google continues to lobby for stupid software patents then I am happy to see them reap what they have sown. This is the patent situation that Google has paid good money to protect and promote. Worse, they have worked very hard to spread this regime around the world. If enough patent trolls win big lawsuits against Google maybe Google will finally see that software patents are bad for everyone that actually writes software.

This is the system that Google paid for. We could have software patent reform, but Google knows that forcing software developers to maintain a patent portfolio shifts the balance of power towards the big developers. If Google starts to see competition from some startup they can leverage their patent portfolio to squeeze the little guy. The only downside, for Google, is that non-practicing entities can see where the market is going, file bogus patents that cover things that they know that the large players are working on, and then wait around to profit from doing a bit of paperwork. Google is big enough that if they wanted to they could do something about stupid software patents. Their influence is a huge part of what is keeping it around.

So until they change their stance on patents I am all for this sort of patent lawsuit. Patent trolls invariably go after the deep pockets. I wish them the best of luck.

Google has a long history of giving up if they don't experience immediate overwhelming success. Google certainly could have afforded to keep Google+ going, and everyone has a Google account. Over time it is almost certain that they would have at least been able to put pressure on Meta in that space. It's not like Meta never makes missteps.

That's just not what Google did.

Personally, I think it is likely that Twitter is particularly vulnerable. Investing in Threads definitely seems like a better investment for Meta than Virtual Reality.

I have been happily paying for Netflix for years. I originally got it because it had shows that my kids wanted to watch, and it was inexpensive. I have six kids, and Netflix was a deal. At some point I upgraded to the fanciest package because, every once in a while, I needed more concurrent streams. So now I am on the Premium Ultra HD program. Fast forward a few more years and my two oldest have moved out of the house. However, they took the Netflix username and password with them, and they use them occasionally. I, on the other hand, according to Netflix's usage stuff haven't watched a show in two months (I actually think that it has been longer since I have finished an episode of something on Netflix).

Looking at the Activity logs for each of the profiles it looks like none of us are really watching anything on Netflix.

I was going to rant a bit about how I am paying for multiple streams, and I should be able to use those streams how I want. However, it turns out that we not only don't use Netflix every day, we don't even use it every week. We could drop down to 2 streams and not run into problems. I am definitely overpaying. I wouldn't have checked, however, if they hadn't been rocking the boat.

Back in the 90s I started playing with PGP. I created a private/public keypair and I started signing emails and newsgroup messages that I wrote. Of course, no one was trying to impersonate me, so this was a complete waste of time, but it was good clean fun.

What I really wanted to do, however, was send actual encrypted messages. This required someone else get involved in my little fantasy. I published my public key everywhere, but just like no one was interested in impersonating me, no one was interested in sending me encrypted messages either. There was, however, a girl that was interested in me for other reasons, and with a bit of fast talking, I was able to set up her computer so that she could send me actual encrypted messages.

It was a bit of a pain, and at least on two occasions I had to go over to her apartment and help her unlock her secret key so that she could actually read what I had sent her, but it did give me a chance to actually use military grade encryption! If you squinted hard enough this even seemed like something that normal people might do.

Except that they never did. Not even criminals ever switched to using encryption. More than anything this shows that criminals are idiots. I mean, honestly, it is not that hard. You really only need to exchange public keys, and you can do that in public.

What Signal (and other programs like it) have done, was remove that particular barrier to entry. When I use Signal to talk to my friends I don't have to worry about what their public key is. Signal handles that part. Nowadays that's not even just Signal. Google messages handles it for me for basically everyone using Android. And yes, because they handle it there are lots of ways that this can be abused. However, it is mostly good enough, and it is a way better default than just sending plain text. More importantly, it is easy enough to do that for the first time in my life people are using end to end encrypted communication by default.

Law enforcement can try and put that particular genie back in the bottle, but I don't think that is likely to work. It is simply too easy to pick a service that does mostly the right thing. Honestly, I think the real thing holding people up from using encryption before is that the cryptography nerds wanted webs of trust and other ridiculous strategies when something as simple as letting Signal handle matching public keys was good enough. With my hard core nerd friends I did verify their public key by hand (the first time I set it up). When they got a new phone I realized that ain't nobody got time for that. It still works way better than anything else I have ever used.