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Comment Remote screening (Score 1) 57

The problem is the leak is very hard to plug. Sites legitimately need to know your screen dimensions for stuff like layout.

I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.

Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.

It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.

(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)

An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on

A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.

VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.

For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 2) 117

This is all moot because it's false that if you use AI you cannot gain copyright on the work. I literally hold a copyright registered with the US copyright office (I registered with them, despite not being a US citizen, because they're precedent-setting), fully disclosing the use of AI in the process, and directly speaking about the matter with a copyright examiner.

What the standard is is that raw, unfiltered outputs are not copyrightable (and even then, there's wiggle room; the argument put forward by the copyright office was "based on their current understanding" (as of several years ago) and presumed very minimal control by the user over the outputs (which was actually already obsolete by the time they put it out, but that's nitpicking)). But the human creative action you take with those outputs can cause the resultant product to be copyrightable. This can be things like sample mixing, mastering, adding vocals, etc, but can also even just be the selection process itself. Yes, assemblage, selection, curation, etc are all potentially copyrightable acts.

In my case, while the samples were (overwhelmingly) AI, the whole project was weeks of work, involving hundreds of generations, track splitting and reassembling, things down to the level of editing individual phonemes (or for example in one part, stripping the vocals and instruments from a sample down to just the residual "other" channel, throwing it into reverse, and then piling on progressively more reverb and volume up to a sudden cutoff to create a tension-point transition). No issues whatoever registering the copyright on it. I'm sure you could do far less and still have a copyrightable work.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 117

I think people need to keep in mind that marketability (aka enjoyability), talent, and effort are three independent axes. You can be talented at one or more aspects of music production, a genuine skill (play a guitar, sing, etc), but put forth either high or low effort, and make good or terrible music, all independently. You can put forth a lot of effort, but you may or may not be talented, and it may or may not be good. You may make a great enjoyable marketable track, but may or may not have notable talents, and may or may not have put in a lot of effort.

In general: I judge how much I want to listen to it by its enjoyability; I attribute how much the author deserves credit / how much it's "art" by how much non-rote effort they put in; and I value the artist's skill based on their demonstrable talent. All of this independent of what specific tools were used. That said, knowledge of certain facts may colour one's enjoyability of a track. If you hate AI and know / suspect it's AI, that'll strongly colour your enjoyability of it. Or if you know the artist is a bad person or whatnot, that again can colour your enjoyability of a track that you'd otherwise enjoy in a vacuum.

Comment Re:Not a pop yet (Score 1) 58

One thing I've been thinking recently is being in the AI trade but only with high seniority, not common stock. So if there is a "pop", but the underlying business remains sustainable, the high seniority investors end up with the assets and make a mint when the market returns to balance, whereas the stockholders are the ones who suffer. This could mean a mix of convertible bonds / convertible ETFs, preferred shares, senior corporate debt, physical infrastructure (power suppliers, REITs, etc), BDCs and private credit vehicles, etc. Or possibly even common stock in some of the diversified giants (Google, Microsoft, etc), who - while they'd take quite a temporary hit in a crash - would survive and then buy up all the distressed players.

Comment Re:Not a pop yet (Score 3, Informative) 58

Situational Awareness is a "hedge" fund that did the opposite of hedging - they made a bunch of leveraged bets that were all linked to each other in typical market movements. It was headed by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a guy just a couple years out of college, whose employment career had been very brief stints at the FTX crypto exchange firm (until it collapsed) and at OpenAI (until he was fired a year later over an alleged information leak). No financial management experience whatsoever. But he was into Effective Altruism, writing AI whitepapers, all that sort of stuff that Silicon Valley tech bros like, and so when he started a hedge fund, $45B was quickly pumped into it.

Nah, this isn't a sort of bubble-popping event. It's a tangential player in the stock market, not some key participant in operations or loans in the AI ecosystem. My main concern: inference IS profitable. Very. But the heavy leverage of the industry is also very real, and can very much still spread like a contagion. And a likely trigger for that is inflation, triggered by trade wars and the ongoing Hormuz and Ukraine conflicts (or worse, new ones added to the list!). One, inflation directly increases their costs, but two, it causes central banks to raise rates. This starves companies of capital (both loans and equity), incl. to refinance existing liabilities, while also hindering income (e.g. new orders get put off or cancelled). It can easily flip a leveraged company into insolvency, and then that can ripple if there's nothing to stop it.

An investment opportunity can be brilliant, a massive world-changing field with huge margins, but still be a terrible investment. One, because the companies you invest in need to survive continuously and not get blipped out by an adverse market event until they have more ability to withstand them. And two, also, because there's a problem where investors don't merely value the whole market as if it has high odds of success, but value the specific player they're invested in with high confidence as if it will dominate said market. Which, obviously, all players combined cannot do.

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 1) 116

"government money grab."

Please rewind back to the part where we have a $2T budget deficit that will absolutely implode the economy and kill millions by the interruption of all goods and services as the dollar becomes with $0. There are many money grabs needed. The more the merrier. Just do it where people can afford it.

Comment Re: I think it's missing some nuance (Score 1) 91

Certainly! Your point raises a crucial, multifaceted issue that merits deeper examination. It's not just about detection accuracy, it's about the evolving interplay between human intention and algorithmic assistance — a dynamic that resists simple binary classification.

When we delve into the mechanics of modern AI tools, it becomes evident that the boundary between "correction" and "generation" is increasingly porous. Consider the following nuances:

Gradual authorship spectra: Text exists on a continuum — from fully human-crafted prose, to human writing with AI-suggested punctuation, to passages where the AI has restructured entire paragraphs. Detection tools, however, often operate on categorical assumptions that fail to capture this complexity.

The feedback loop phenomenon: Furthermore, as writers internalize AI-suggested patterns — Oxford commas, em dashes, and certain syntactic rhythms — their "human" baseline shifts. This creates a fascinating, almost paradoxical scenario: the more one learns from AI feedback, the more one's unassisted writing may trigger detection algorithms.

Contextual markers vs. stylistic choices: Notably, certain signals — like the increased use of "delve," "testament," or negative parallelism — may reflect genuine stylistic evolution rather than automated generation. It's a testament to how AI influences language culture broadly, not just individual documents.

In conclusion, the challenge you identify is not merely technical but philosophical — forcing us to reconsider what we mean by "authentic" voice in an era of human-AI collaboration. The question, ultimately, is not whether a tool assisted in the writing, but whether the ideas, arguments, and intellectual labor remain genuinely human.

I hope proves helpful! Please let me know if you would like to delve deeper into any specific aspect of these findings, or if you would like me to explore the broader implications for content strategy.

Comment Re:Death of Expertise (Score 1, Interesting) 107

Last week I was struggling with sharing my main computer's resources with 3 other windows 11 machines. I used ChatGPT to navigate the details and got it done under the AI's direction. It all works now.

Then it hit me after the AI offered me the equivalent of a network engineering and Windows 11 systems administration set of courses, giving me the number of hours it thought it would take me to learn it, and so forth. I remember the Win 11 sys admin knowledge was estimated at 1000 hours. (wow). But treating it like a job, at 40 hours a week, that's 25 weeks. Less than half a year. Hmmmm....

Anyway, it occurs to me that the AI could be asked to do this entry-level education to prep newcomers for working the job for the employer that sponsors the employee's training. If the AI costs just $22 / month as my ChatGPT subscription does, then is that not cheap training?

I'm seeing a training revolution on all levels in the works. K-12 could possibly be done as homeschooling far more effectively than what was rolled out during COVID. Students would have to show up at a school only for things that absolutely couldn't be done at home, like Physical Education and things requiring a laboratory to work. And bringing back auto shop and vocational training could be greatly enhanced by AI under the direction of subject matter experts, such as actual mechanics and factory floor workers in the vocational sector, to greatly expand industrial America.

I had no reason to speculate the upsides of data centers until last week when I was offered an educational course by an AI that springs from a data center somewhere. Whaddaya think? Is the AI revolution as totally amazing as it looks to me now? It looks to me like it could dwarf the industrial revolution.

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