It is ENTIRELY true that China's manufacturing is rooted in "unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance".

It is ALSO entirely true that the US auto industry is likewise rooted in ""unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance" AS WELL AS anticompetitive trade practices, monopolistic behavior, market manipulation, mendacity, and grossly deliberately unsafe choices.

The Chinese are awful, but at least they deliver shitty cars that are cheap. The US companies are likewise awful, but they deliver shitty cars that are overpriced as well.

I'm not sure I see any winners here.

Audacity has been on a very long journey to modernize itself. It wouldn't shock me to learn that they shipped it with functions that are being most widely used or easiest to carry over just to get over the hurdle of getting a major release out the door. It's a beloved tool; I know a bunch of people for whom it's a production linchpin, and I think the developers working on are aware of the number of edge cases where only some tiny fraction of their users make use of a feature. Those people can stay on version 3 for now.

IIRC, a lot of what needed to happen with Audacity was an overall change in user interfaces, which required a lot of deep thought about how people interact with the application. It may be that some of the unhandled features just don't align with the current user experience.

It's a good idea.
I just was renewing my dl with the state of MN and to avoid really stupid amounts of time in registration (going from a normal to "enhanced" id they have you upload not just the front and back of your dl but also your passport. So I instead accepted that I'm going to spend my whole fucking day in their office.

"A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,"

OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.

I look forward to you refuting a single stated fact?

"It's immune to EMP."

Not quite. Well yes, obviously the COPPER doesn't give a shit about emp but as I understand, emp induces current in wires/circuits, generating voltage that fries things. Anything connected to those wires will absolutely fry to EMP unless hardened.

I believe something about the unstated part of their name being "Not Elon".

For me, price is not the killer. Even if it were $50, I wouldn't. Or even free.
AI + camera toothbrush? No thanks. Far too many ways for data to go awry.

a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI

How about no? Does no work for you?

Let's remember that Trump was always a east coast Democrat who opportunistically jumped into the 2016 election as a Republican because it was an opportunity for self promotion and free press. Nobody - including him, I believe - thought he'd win.
When he did, his liberal friends turned on him with their typical viciousness, which hurt his all important ego. They spent 4 years in (essentially) permanent impeachment hearings, based on information provided by Russia, which in his simplistic view, entrenched his victim complex and obsession with revenge.

Couple this, then, with the triumphalist left who felt when they defeated the wicked witch, they could do no wrong, and so decided to spend 4 years taking a Victory Shit on everything they could, from inviting 30 million illegals into the country to having trannies flop their frankentits out at the White House on Easter.

Trump is an exponential narcissist, childish, crude, and frankly rather dumb.
Think how odious and repellent the Left have to be to lose to him TWICE?

The previous poster likes to frame it as a vast right wing conspiracy but the truth is never quite that convenient. Most organized churches & clergy in the US are now about gay priests & rainbow banners, actively spreading and refuting their remaining few hyper conservative rural congregations. Democrats have always been a majority in the US, since the Republicans were formed to get rid of slavery. The only reason any Republican ever wins is that enough Democrats get tired of their own party's bullshit and vote right. In the last election EVERY SINGLE DEMOGRAPHIC BLOCK SHIFTED RIGHT (aside from, predictably, white women). Think about that. Blacks & Hispanics - in particular black men - voted in unprecedented numbers for Trump. Or, more accurately, against a Democrat machine that has milked them for votes for 70 years. The election wasn't really (by modern margins) that close.

Don't let the ideologically captured slashdot fool you. The country, having seen Trump as president once, and offered another 4 years of Obama-Biden-Harris said "No, thanks, we'll take the nutball instead". Instead of swallowing the party line of your own European media, maybe ask yourself why. And unlike Democrats, don't just start with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with you must be stupid. That's an ideology for a child.

I don't even faintly dispute that Trump is a shitty, egotistical president. He is. And he makes some really walk decisions. But he is really what the left made him, and I suspect that only a colossal who like his would have been able to buck the malignant insider cabal of both parties. In this case the medicine is unfortunately nearly as bad as the disease.

"You think techologists have a right to torrent their work for free and profit off of it?"
To answer your specific question: Not at all. (reductio ad absurdam is one of the lazier fallacies, btw). I never even implied that. If they torrented an artists' actual work in the sense of sharing that exact work for free they absolutely should be punished to the same degree Pirate Bay or Anna's Archive is, absolutely.

Of course, that isn't what they're doing, is it?

I was merely commenting on your assertion that "The pinnacle of current technology rests on torrented media and unpaid creatives" like visual artists & musicians whinging that their art has been 'stolen' to feed AI programs ... are in fact hoisted by their own petard, which is built frankly of their own greed.

Put it this way:
- Mary draws a picture (or writes a song) that is genius. Everyone loves it.
- Mary puts that artwork online to either a) sell it or b) sell her competence so other people will buy her work. (I'd guess "a" applies more to musicians, "b" to visual artists but either way the principle is the same).
Now, as far as "stealing" in the context your post seemed to mean, two things can happen.
1) Sam sees/hears the piece, thinks, that's pretty cool and learns to copy it from 01-99% successfully. Now, he cannot copy it 100%, as would be him creating identical artwork and claiming "this was produced by Mary". I think we can agree either of those would be theft? But if he creates something similar, or something stylistically comparable - maybe even openly acknowledges 'like Mary's work' - as long as he actually did it himself, openly acknowledges the source, he's legally fine afaik. I don't even know if he HAS to acknowledge her as a source, but that's polite. As long as he clearly did it himself, I think he's probably ok.
2) an LLM comes along, does the exact same thing. Except this time, Mary insists her art is stolen and demands compensation.

The very concept of 2 is absurd. CERTAINLY she can demand attribution, but money? Are the LLMs ever claiming they are ACTUALLY reproducing Mary's work? I don't think so. Just because they can compress the learning process of decades into a few hours' churn doesn't change the principle.

The irony, to me, is that Mary bitches about the LLMs stealing her work when it never could have happened if she didn't initially digitize her product in search of audience/sales. THAT'S ultimately what provides me a chuckle. If Mary CHARGES people to look/listen at her work, and the LLMs sneak past it, it's theft. But if she's put it up to be enjoyed for free, it's ALSO there for anyone - human or algorithm - to learn from. You can't have it one way but not the other.

I know if I worked at Amazon "You don't need perfection to start." would absolutely come up in my next review.

I kid, I kid. Galley slaves never get to speak to the captain nor even the drummer for the deck you're on. Today they just get an email "Pull harder or we toss you to the sharks in an hour" - maybe that's what her 100k lines of code does?

Take a look at who the current frontrunners are for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

For that matter, look at what's going on during the current midterms. They've got a golden opportunity to make major gains ... and it's looking more and more like they're going to piss it all away.

I'm enjoying the framing of "technologists vs creatives" as if creatives didn't owe nearly all of their modem income to the technology they condemn (now).

Put it this way: if you never record anything you make, nobody can "steal" your sales by torrenting your songs. If you only earn income from live performances, nobody can sign you to an "exploitative" streaming contract. If you digitize nothing, there's no way Claude or x or anyone can churn it into their llm. Of course, not doing these things also means you forego participating in the lottery of "maybe I'll be discovered and become a big star!".

It's still your choice.

Musical performers as a class profited IMMENSELY from the invention of recording technology. Formerly they performed (and were paid) based on skill, reputation, and ultimately patronage. Are they entitled to more than that?

As seen in replies to articles in various tech sites. Almost word for word.