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?

Part of that reaction is that any new capability is sold to them as "If you don't pay us to do this, we will go to a competitor. Or become one."

> English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide.
 
English dominates because not only are there a lot of speakers, but it is the modern business lingua franca and most anyone who owns a desktop computer today can probably grumble out a handful of statements or questions in english. Hindi and Tamil on the other hand, use completely different writing systems and beyond a couple of clever words have zero vocabulary overlap with "western" languages. Simply due to inertia of 2 billion speakers Hindi/Tamil etc will continue on forever, but I can't see them being targeted by western technology. Americans and Europeans already struggle with cyrillic and it's at least recognizably sorta phonetically similar about half the time. Tamil just makes my eyes glaze over when I see it on street signs in Malaysia or whatever.

and it's here today. No homelessness. No medical bankruptcy. No food insecurity. Affordable education. Decent places for everyone to live.

If you're only managing 2 people and you're not going to be hiring more then yes, you should be cut.

Also note that google has had record layoffs in the previous months, so basically they fired a bunch of engineers, and only afterwards they fired the managers who now had tiny teams due to the layoff. Priorities.

What are they even managing at that point? I would struggle to assign a team lead to a team that small. Presumably these were senior IC that needed a pay bump to keep them from going to another company? Maybe they assign a manager to every single internal product?

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.

Have you tried finding a specific app you've used before, perhaps 2 years prior, the good one that's freeware and not ad supported? The play store is atrocious and pushes inferior apps every time over other, better apps. There's 1001 free timer apps but the store pushes garbage on you if you try and search for this. I only use Spotify on my phone, specifically in the car.

Google play store has always been horrific, app search is so intentionally broken as to be useless. I might have bought a couple apps in the first opening years but it's not worth it anymore I don't have any "paid" apps beyond uber and spotify, and I'm working real hard to get rid of spotify.

Third parties don't belong in the kernel even on Linux. There IS an alternative.

That is up to you as the administrator to reject vendors who don't use the alternative and want to send you a custom kernel driver instead.

However... It's still possible for Crowdstrike to do something stupid that brings a system to its needs.

The software is able to block a file from being opened or read, for example. Now what happens if Crowdstrike suddenly detects _EVERY_ file as malicious and starts preventing the system reading any files at all? For example.. the Browser.. the Windows manager.. the Launcher, Desktop, etc.. Any programs that have to run in order for the user to successfully log in and use their system.

Probably on the computer side, immutable infrastructure will continue to reign supreme. Since 2015 there's been a big shift towards immutable infra/code. You can let AI fart around in lower environments but until everything passes all the tests, it won't get promoted to production (or end-users computers). You can see this in immutable package managers like nix already. Or in the Android case, it's completely locked down on the user side and only changes on major updates. Managing mutable infra is going to phase out over time, especially if AI gets involved.