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Comment Re:The American Dream (Score 2) 18

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

Comment Re:Is paraphrasing copyright infringement? (Score 1) 33

If I read copyrighted material and then write my own story using information in what I read is that infringement?

It depends. If you wrote the same story, but with just the names of characters and places changed, then yes. In general, it depends on how similar your story is to the original.

Do clif notes have to pay for the rights to publish notes on other authors books?

No. Their notes were written by them and so are copyrighted by them. If they give excerpts, that falls under fair use. They can't quote the entire book, however, even if they give notes on every paragraph.

Isn't this is what ChatGPT does?

There are two parts to this: whether the copy of what CharGPT was trained on was a legally obtained copy in the first place and whether ChatGPT can be induced to regurgitate verbatim copies. The NYT demonstrated that, with the right prompting, ChatGPT can be induced to regurgitate copies of NYT articles.

Once I learn about something I am able to tell people what I have learned. Am I breaking the law if I tell my grandkids about a story I read.

It depends how you tell them. If you give, for example, highlights, then no. If you write down a copy and give them the copy, then yes. Also note that, assuming you either paid for your copy of the book or you borrowed it from a library, then the copy you used was a legally authorized copy to begin with.

I just don't see a lot of difference between asking an AI a question and having it tell me what it has learned than asking a human and having them tell me what they learned assuming they were trained on the same materials.

In many cases, ChatGPT used unauthorized copies to begin with. At that point, they're already guilty of copyright infringement. If the book the human read was an unauthorized copy, then that human is guilty of copyright infringement. Whether they tell you anything is irrelevant: they're already guilty.

Assuming both legally obtained the info they were trained on.

Bingo.

Comment Re:Is paraphrasing copyright infringement? (Score 1) 33

ChatGPT doesn't copy most works

It copies every work verbatim. It has to have a copy in the first place to train from. If it made its copy from an unauthorized copy to begin with, then it's already guilty of copyright infringement. At this point, the training is irrelevant.

For example, if its web crawler came upon an unauthorized PDF of a book that somebody uploaded to some web site, then the uploader and every downloader has committed copyright infringement. What they do with the copies is irrelevant: they're already guilty.

Comment Re: Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 1) 249

The dollar being the reserve currency of choice is one thing, what really matters is that oil is traded around the world in dollars. That effectively expands the dollar economy by trillions, and is what allows more dollars to be printed without affecting inflation. Once countries stop selling or paying for oil in dollars, that's when the currency will crash and burn for real.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 163

Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 248

That's what I use AI for as well: a first step. The biggest difference AI and regular sources, is that the latter give you a lot of clues regarding the accuracy of the information. The source, the website, the way the information is written, context like article titles, all of these give some hint about how well the author understands the material, and if their answer is even relevant to your question. The AI however will always appear authoritative, even if they are obviously wrong, and with important context stripped out. Sometimes you get an answer that looks plausible, but is invalid, or about a different version of the gadget you are asking about.

AI has been great for generating artwork, logos, sounds and so on, for small personal projects. And I've use AI deepfake voice generation to provide voice-over for game mods (some of the voice actors have given modders explicit permission to use their voice like that). It lets me do stuff that was completely out of my reach just a few years ago, or things for which I have zero talent.

Comment Re:Violation of civil liberties (Score 1) 15

I don't believe the government has the right to ban me from harming myself in their eyes.

If you signed a contract stating that you agreed either to forgo any treatments for health issues arising from your choice to smoke or agreed to pay for all such treatments out of your own pocket, then fine. But, and especially if you live in a country with socialized medicine, then everyone else is paying for your treatment. So to minimize everyone's expenses for your completely avoidable health issues, the government is doing what it's doing. And they haven't stopped you from harming yourself. They just put images and words on the package.

Comment Re:Their tech doesn't work (Score 4, Insightful) 110

Humans drive into stationary emergency vehicles all the time. Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be a bit better than humans. In the end it'll come down to insurance companies*, and they'll just look at the numbers. There will be a point where insurers will charge you extra if you have a steering wheel and pedals fitted.

*) in sane legal systems, where a robotaxi manufacturer can't just be sued for millions just because someone died; the plaintiff would have to show gross negligence. For the rest: liability would lie with the robotaxi operator or owner, through their insurance. Just as is the case now.

Comment Re:Told you (Score 3, Interesting) 363

Instead of the clunky ICE drivetrain with an electric motor bolted on, I'd rather have that in reverse: a fully electric drive train (with a full size battery), combined with a small petrol generator that can be enabled to extend the vehicle's range. The advantages: much simpler construction, the engine can be kept small and light, and always runs at the optimum RPM, saving gas. There are a few cars with range extenders already, and when enabled they can almost double the range of the car, but sadly most offerings only have a shitty little EV battery that doesn't have much range to begin with.

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