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Comment Re:Does the world need more starving artists? (Score 1) 16

I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

Comment Re:Blocks ..... (Score 1) 86

Reduction != None. Cities approve them because that even with any incentives offered they'll be raking in the cash, because the value of a datacentre is so high (even if you're in an area that only counts building + cooling + power interconnects + etc, but not the servers within, toward the property tax base)

You cannot simultaneously complain about consumer electricity prices and datacentres being bad neighbors due to having power plants on-site. Take your pick.

Datacentres buying power ALSO equals tax revenue, en masse, because electricity is taxed. And all of the jobs associated with providing that electricity.

A datacentre means a huge amount of income to the locality where it's at, plain and simple.

Comment Re:Coding AI vs "Many Eyes" (Score 0) 19

If you only say, "Many Eyes" then you haven't established what the actual quote is. (And probably don't remember, assuming good faith. Although that's a poor assumption on slashdot, neckbeards making points they know are easily refuted is par here)

If you say the rest of the sentence, then you find out it doesn't apply to the problem in this case; only to the solution having been effective once implemented. (ie, the packages were found and removed)

Being able to find and fix a known bug (obviously) isn't a shield against new bugs.

Comment Re: Many young and foolish realise they made a mis (Score 1) 134

There was an episode of Question Time (a QA session with politicians and the public), and a woman said, on national TV, that she voted for Brexit because of bendy bananas.

Bendy bananas is one of the oldest, most frequently debunked myths about the EU. The claim is there is a crazy EU law that costs retailers money, regulating the curvature of bananas. There are actually rules about bananas... But they were written by the UK. They became a de facto standard, and the EU adopted them FROM US.

The level of ignorance was headache inducing. People knew less than nothing about the EU - what they did know was mostly lies, negative knowledge.

Comment Re:If I ruled .. (Score 1) 134

I think what happened to the UK, socially and economically, should be enough to deter anyone else from making the same mistake.

We are about to find out if I'm right, as Switzerland votes on a population cap that would screw up their relationship with the EU. They are not in the EU, but they have adopted some of it, like freedom of movement.

Comment Re:I dont want to waste car charge cycles (Score 5, Interesting) 46

It all depends on what the warranty is. IIRC VW limit the number of lifetime kWh you can use for this, and then the car just refuses to do it anymore.

If you don't drive the car regularly it might actually help to cycle the battery a bit regularly. Also, not all cycles are equal - 70-60-70% is not the same as 100-90-100, and not 1/6th of 80-20-80.

It also depends how much you get paid for it. The battery will probably outlast the car anyway, so it might be worth doing to extract more value from your asset.

Comment Re:If I ruled .. (Score 1) 134

The official independent stats from the government, provided by the Office for Budget Responsibility, say that the UK is at least 4% worse off (in terms of GDP) than it otherwise would have been. Maybe 8% worse off.

While there have been a few economic indicators in the UK that performed okay against the rest of the EU at one time or another, the EU is made up of 27 member states, some of which are still coming up to Western European levels, and of course many of those indicators only really show that the very wealthy and big corporations have done well, not the average Brit. Inequality has been increasing in the UK.

Inequality is the biggest problem in the UK. Most of the problems blamed on immigrants are really down to inequality. Not just an unfair distribution of the tax burden, but things like foreign companies buying and asset stripping essential services. Themes Water is the poster child for that. Bought, loaded up with debt, billions and billions taken out of it in dividends and bonuses, and now it's pumping large amounts of shit into our rivers and demanding hefty bill increases to avoid bankruptcy. The government can't just let them fail because people need water to live.

It's not even new, it's just the latest in a long list of ways that we sold everything of value to foreign companies. North Sea oil should have been our sovereign wealth fund, that would have paid off the pension crisis and funded our healthcare, but instead most of the profit went into private hands.

Brexit only ensured that the EU's dislike of monopolies and plundering the economy didn't restrain them.

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