No, I don't need to give you apologies for my correct analysis of your behavior. If you go and shit in the middle of the street I judge you. If you go and hand over other people's data to the big corporates I judge you. No problem here. I'm not putting everyone else down, just those people that choose to do evil. Especially those people that do it so thoughtlessly that they probably aren't even aware of having done it.

It's not enough. The value of electricity is extremely variable based on both location, time and the extent to which it fits with previous plans for electricity. The price that they pay will vary depending on time but if they are coming in with new, unpredicted, demand then the cost of satisfying it becomes even higher and they should be paying even more per unit than the other people that are more or less following what was predicted.

On the other hand, if the AI people can move their demand to places and times with spare electricity, for example the North of Scotland when it's windy, that would mean they could quite rightly get very cheap electricity and not really cause any problem for anyone.

I guess this ends up as ethics vs law and how you see that. As I said, my decision has been that I don't enrich by not buying

Android itself is clearly owned by google in a privacy sense, but you do get the freedom to install your own software in a way that Apple never allows. Android devices with unlocked bootloaders and operating systems converted to one of the Android Open Source project based alternatives such as LineageOS are approximately owned by the person possessing them. GrapheneOS is reportedly privacy respecting, though I haven't used it yet so can't comment on usability. Whether that's worth the hassle, though, is a question only you can answer. You'd want to be quite experienced with them before starting recommending them to others I'd think.

The GDP of Qatar is about $220B -- just slightly more than what they think one of many AI companies is worth?

Good luck with that, guys.

Indeed a law or at least a clarification of existing law around what some phrases like 'authorized', 'derivative', 'novel', 'fair use', etc mean in the context of the web are needed.

Law is the only place you can have your cake and eat it too. A lock does not have to be indestructible. Even if you secured your house with a flimsy luggage lock it would still be B&E, if someone forces it.

Those Anubis screens seemingly being put in front of everything suck donkey balls but if you made it any faster or easier it would not work. CAPTCHA has already reached a point where if it is difficult enough to defeat AI it will defeat a lot of people or at least frustrate them too. However the presence of either should be enough to clearly establish that automated agents are not welcome/authorized.

The answer is someone need to get their prosecutor to go after Altman and company for 'hacking' their site.

I wouldn't. I'd start with everything free and get the songs into a free environment.

Personally I try to completely boycott the commercial music industry. If I want/need to listen to something from them I use one of the free streaming services and avoid delivering revenue where I can. I look for music from alternative sources where possible. I buy old CDs and the like.

If I wanted to start from the situation like your flatmate, I'd consider my ethics on that. I don't make unlicensed copies myself because I don't want to encourage use of their products, however you might consider it reasonable to use unlicensed copies where they are doing something unethical like running a "rental" model contrary to the reason that they have been allowed to have copyright. IMHO, copyright in the US was allowed only where it leads to more, unprotected works in public access. The US supreme court has criminally expanded the rights of copyright holders to allow DRM and rental. You would be justified in making unlicensed copies to get around the supreme court's breach of the constitution.

In the case that you have accept that logic, the thing is to get software which exports a list of the songs and playlists you have and then get copies from wherever available on the internet and move them all into an app like VLC that can be used both on an iPhone and elsewhere. Gradually move away from an iPhone to a device you actually own.

Depends on the jurisdiction but 'successor company liability' is the term of art.

Committing fraud on the creditors is one way to get liability. One can imagine users here as creditors since the prior company was on the hook for services purchased.

Ask a judge in the jurisdiction but it quacks like fraud in many jurisdictions.

Firstly, not everyone, because I've made it clear I understand that there are those that have good reasons like being forced by corporate. Secondly I am accepting comments like "I've got software I can't move" and I guess people know that Microsoft will eventually force them off Window 10, so that's an okay excuse. Getting a little bit of a raise never hurts though.

However, having said that, the people that end up using the spyware edition just because they like it deserve a certain level of contempt. Nobody processes just their own data, they have their friends and children's addresses. They know about what the small companies that support them are doing. They are trusted by others. When you stay on a system that's spying on you that is socially irresponsible. Continuing to collaborate with Microsoft through choice is certainly not as bad as murder but it's definitely a worse social evil than parking in disabled parking spaces.

The Amish absolutely are actually a great example of the type of immigration no nation should want.

Granted they are not as harmful as some groups but what generally happens is:

The Amish move into a somewhat rural area. They start buying up a lot of property usually zoned agriculture and such so that they don't have to comply with construction standards and building codes that require things like hot water and flush toilets. They keep buying essentially gentrifying they area pushing out the locals which breaks up the community, a community they then don't participate in at all socially and minimally fiscally. IE recall those are not 'residences' they construct so they get taxed usually like raw or crop land. Every thing they do is inward, they don't shop at the local grocery, they don't use the local hardware store, they hire local trades to build anything.

but... what does happen as soon as someone in their community is seriously ill or whatever they are at the local hospital, and its usually indigent care because they don't believe in medical insurance.. When they have structure fire, they call the local brigade to help them put it out but none of them join or become members. Amish country aside (parts of OH, Lancaster PA etc) , Amish groups end up being a massing drain on most of places around them.

I don't dislike the Amish but if you look at the economic impact on the more rural parts of New England where they have moved into, it is plain as day the surrounding communities were better off before they arrived.

That has already happened. Note the discussion around DeepSeek and the Tiananmen Square protests the Chinese government likes to hide from their population. The Chinese government identified this as a bug in the AIs and reported it at ring 0 priority. The AI companies understood and "fixed" that bug.

No, think is one of those "I know it when I see it things" like pornography. There are a bunch of edge cases and places where we aren't sure and we don't agree. However, there are straight forward simple cases where everyone who's engaging in good faith (another of these) can clearly see that it's pornography even if they aren't properly able to define the word itself. Since nobody has come up with a good definition of thinking so far, demanding one as an entry to the debate is no good.

When a user cuts and pastes from an LLM straight into an answer we know that's not "thinking".

When a clever lecturer comes up with a question which LLMs get wrong 99% of the time, which most people will cut and paste into the answer but which the "thinking" student will spot and will be able, after a bunch of work, to correct then we really see that both the lecturer and the student were "thinking".

Personally I'd start by assuming that the Chinese university teachers are far ahead on this and that they know exactly how to force LLM users to think. The current arrogance of many in the West who think that China isn't up to their standard suggests to me that either we're seeing the effect of Chinese/Russian social network manipulation or the West is setting itself up for a fall.

They know they are frightening educated / intelligent people off. They already make an enterprise edition so they could just make it easy to switch off all the spyware and run as normal, possibly with a small charge. Instead they decided that if you aren't willing to be and pay to be enterprise and you aren't a sucker who lacks understanding of the value of privacy then they don't want you.

To be fair, I'd probably count that as "forced by corporate". It's the corporation making your software, but it's a corporate decision. Still, if you are in that situation you should be desperately trying to get an alternative. If there's an application you are using there's probably enough other people that it would be worth getting together and funding an F/OSS alternative to escape onto.

They've likely realized that suckers are much more profitable and that the worse they make the OS the higher percentage of suckers they get. Anyone remaining on Windows by now is either forced by corporate or educationally subnormal.

NSA_KEY is already taken too.