....are books that they can buy by the meter, for pennies on the dollar, if that much. These are surplus books that publishers - the world's leading destroyers of books - would have to destroy anyway.

Trainers can't afford to buy actually rare, desirable books.

It's a shame that all of this data is locked up on private servers, but that's really more of a problem of the copyright system than anything else. Anyone who scanned these books would be banned from making it public.

The male/female ratio in China isn't that skewed, it's something like 106:100. A lot of it is probably the same thing you see in every other country, where both men and women lose social skills and have unrealistic standards of what kind of partner they are entitled to.

Right-wingers have been loudly cheering the inevitable economic downfall of California for years as its economy continues to grow. It must be so infuriating to them that Commiefornia just keeps getting richer.

"After 9 years as a US citizen, he could run for the US Senate. He would be 76 (or 74) years old.In short, it looks highly unlikely that he could (or even would) run for the US Senate."

Yeah, he would be way too young for our Senate.

I feel bad for entry-level folks -- though continually surprised how many of them outsource so much of their thinking to AI themselves. It seems like most college students cheat with AI, making them less useful as entry-level employees.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

Nope. If you want to watch Stranger Things on Netflix, you select (or find) Stranger Things and that's it.

The OSA only requests that streamers prioritize Canadian content so if you're trying to determine if you want to show a film from the NFB (National Film Board) or some classic US film, the Canadian version is preferred. The other aspect is that a certain amount of Canadian income is spent on Canadian productions (about 20%). Which streamers like Netflix already greatly exceed since they film in Canada. (Those productions do count as "Canadian" I believe, so Netflix can promote its own series as "Canadian" content).

Of course, if you want to sell service in Quebec, you have to obey their laws too. (Many companies simply don't - there are many Canadian companies who simply do not ship to Quebec to avoid those laws, and many American companies often do "Canada (excluding Quebec)". That stuff is legal to do and is a business decision by the companies that want to go into Quebec. Nothing bars Netflix from not serving Quebec if they want to avoid French content rules.

Which doesnt âoefixâ the underlying issue - the browser is leaking data about you against your knowledge and permission.

That sounds like a flaw in the browser. That should probably be fixed.

Most browsers have fixed it. Firefox, for example, uses software libraries that implement high precision math so every Firefox user ends up looking the same because the fingerprint you get comes back the same.

Safari does something different, and it adds random noise to the audio waveform so the same browser will continually report a different fingerprint every time it's run.

I believe Chromium simply blocks the script

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.

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.

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.

Oh, shoot, I forgot my "Claude-isms" ;)

I mean, Leopold was literally fired from OpenAI after one year.

(Though I would hardly call Altman "a genius". He's a rather sociopathic VC guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time)

I'm holding out for so many things.

New fabs are finally being built but they take like 3-5 years, so that's not going to solve anything any time soon :P

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.

Before Silicon Valley, a lot of tech was done in the East. It's why some of the biggest "tech" companies were based on the east - Kodak, for example. But other ones like IBM were based on the East Coast. And many early computer companies were started in the East.

The westward migration created Silicon Valley as companies like Fairchild and such created companies in the orange groves of California.