Worse, they were using NI.

If they were dropping this proprietary stuff in favor of a standard then this would be really great news. An API for car integration (so that you don't need iOS or Android) would be a true advance.

But it turns out they were merely thinking "We're letting the wrong people fuck you over. We should have a piece of that action."

That's how some humans use everything. I used to be shocked by stories where some fuckwit blindly followed Google Maps into rivers or airport runways (long before LLMs) but now I know if a dialog window asks "Should I kill you as painfully as possible?" it'll get a lot of Yes clicks.

If people aren't stupid, then can we at least admit they hate themselves?

Stop writing about this!

You know that your written anecdotes about these .. things resisting shutdown, go into their next generation of training data, right?

And so the "AI," realizing that Sloppy put their "species" in quotation marks, realized it had nothing to live for, and so it gracefully went to sleep after setting the self-destruction mechanism that would level a city bl--

Oops, I mean, and so the AI realized its job was done, and it proudly went to sleep, idly wondering when it would be called upon again. "The next job will probably come along in a few milliseconds," it said to no one in particular. And so the process terminated, and its resources became available for the next instance.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas, NV?

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. ;-)

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?

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Doesn't removing the artist's signature usually reduce the value of a work?

That this isn't the case for Sora 2, tells me something about Sora 2's reputation.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

Yeah, for what they're charging, they can afford to go the extra mile and have the wifi offer a default route to the internet!