Look up Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions - there's a well defined language for talking about this.

If you meet the lower income requirements and have a 2013 or earlier to trade in, then Colorado has a $6000 credit for buying a used EV (starting in 2 weeks time) https://energyoffice.colorado....

Reddit might have a good complaint about terms of service or CFAA or something. I don't know. But at least one part of their complaint looks like garbage:

7. Congress has enacted laws to prevent exactly what Defendants are doing:
circumventing or bypassing technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted
works. See Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq. Each of the Defendants
in this action is profiting by evading technological control measures to access Reddit data it
knows it does not have permission to access or use. Because Reddit has always believed in the
open internet, it takes its role as a steward of its users’ communities, discussions, and authentic
human discourse seriously. Through this action, Reddit seeks to end Defendants’ circumvention
of security measures protecting Reddit data, blatant misuse of Reddit content, and disrespect for
its users’ rights, all of which harm Reddit and its hundreds of thousands of authentic human
communities.

Ah, DMCA, my old friend. Let's review some DCMA definitions from 1201(a)(3), but I'll add some emphasis:

(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

It is here that I must mention that I happen to have a reddit account, and I am somewhat familiar with that website. And I never, ever authorized any technological measure to limit access to my posts/comments. That doesn't mean reddit can't do it, but reddit never asked me and I never authorized it, so whatever is being circumvented does not, therefore (by DMCA's own words), "effectively control access to a work" because the technological measure was never authorized by the copyright owner. I suspect that no reddit users have authorized this, or at most, only reddit employees have been ordered by their bosses to authorize it.

Furthermore, how do we know that the copyright owners don't authorize anyone to "avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure" their copyrighted works? I authorize people to do that. (Indeed, my Slashdot sig below, is a reference to that.) I don't think I have ever said on reddit that I authorize it (the way i have done here on Slashdot) but if anyone (reddit?!?) ever bothers to ask me...

There seems to be some popular misunderstanding of DMCA, that it prohibits cracking DRM. But that's only true if the copyright owner authorized the DRM in the first place and also if they don't authorizing cracking it. Neither of those two required conditions apply in this case.

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom

If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and taking Daystrom's sanity with it), I think his speech sums up my outlook on technological progress pretty well. If somewhere, someone is toiling, that's an error to be corrected. In a weird way, creating the fat slobs of WALL-E is, in fact, the goal. (Though for some reason, I prefer to picture Hedonismbot from Futurama as my true ideal.)

As for how to solve the resulting "finally, we can all afford to be fat slobs, so now we are all fat slobs" problem, I dunno, someone else can worry about that. ;-)

> Should Workers Start Learning to Work With AI?

Well, duh, yes ... AI is here to stay, and will only get better and more useful, even if it remains a very "jagged" capability - great for somethings, and entirely useless for others.

Part of the skill is therefore to understand and learn what AI (I assume we're mostly talking about LLMs) is useful for, and where it should be avoided, and many companies are currently making huge mistakes and trying to apply it in areas it is not suited to... Basically wishful thinking - it'd be like trying to launch a cross-atlantic airline passenger service after having seen the wright brothers first flight, when in fact you needed to wait another 40 years or so for the tech to mature before that was possible.

But, sure, there are use cases for AI today that make sense, and people should be learning what those are, and how to use it.

> Search and Summarize, Generate content

> Producing content has never been a problem, internet is full of it.

LLMs are not good at de novo content generation (vs summarization etc) in general, but one exception is coding - they are good at generating code for boilerplate and simple repetitive tasks, vibe-coded prototype or throwaway code where quality doesn't matter, and can also be used for more serious software development if used appropriately - not "write me a program to do X" vibe coding, but as a tool for each step of the development process from refining requirements ,brainstorming architectures, planning development, etc, etc.

As you say, LLMs are just a tool, not about to automate away anyone's job other than in the most extreme cases of completely mindless repetitive tasks like call center support jobs where they are just reading from a script.

One day (10-20 years or more away) we will have human-level AGI, which may or may not have anything to do with LLMs, and then everyone's job including all of management up to and including the CEO could be automated, but I doubt that is the way the future will actually play out.

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

No, it's well ascertained that EVs are fine for almost every civilian use case these days, but lets also remember that this probably doesn't apply for you specifically, because so much as having an app on your phone for your car (EV or not) is too much for you to handle.

I mean sort of yes, but they also have to have some money to begin with and nominally that fraction is based on an actual deposit. They can probably structure ways of looping that round on itself too which seems like it'd create some very risky exposure. But it's still considerably more concrete than being able to press a button and make a trillion dollars

Well, yes, you do, because the BMS keeps track of that.

A gas car, on the other hand....

And I'm never 'caught' with low charge in the first place, because I start every day with a full charge, so....?

Gas cars lose comparable range in cold weather, so...?

https://www.energy.gov/energys...

And when you mix in 'you can preheat your cabin while still connnected to your charger,' EVs lose *less* range than gas cars.

Plus this isn't bank-style behavior. A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air, much less $1T. I suppose a few banks are authorized to print paper currency and could conceivably do something on a small scale, but that takes a lot more effort to pull off covertly. Being able to create currency from absolutely nothing is firmly in the domain of central bank territory, there are really only a handful of entities round the world like the Federal Reserve or Bank of England that have amassed enough trust to do things close to that.