Said every Native American ever.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

100% bullshit.
This is indeed the world in 2026, but that has not always been the world. It doesn't HAVE to be like this.

It used to be two people could sit down and talk about almost anything without it turning into politics.
Not everything is the fault of the libtards.
Not everything is the fault of the MAGA legions.

Your (and frankly, all of social media's) obsession with slavishly consuming the bullshit binary is unhealthy.

Of course subjects CAN have political relevance, but they don't have to. We can talk about local students struggling to pass basic performance benchmarks. My "blaming the fucking teachers' unions and their DEI woke agena" is no more productive than you saying "it's the fucking Great Orange Satan". Both are ways to AVOID substantive change by scaling the argument beyond what either of us can meaningfully change; they're both excuses for accomplishing nothing but getting a righteous frisson of rage and maybe a little extra hate.

There we go. I appreciate your contribution 100% proving my point.

Like throwing chum in the water to sharks. It doesn't matter the subject, it's always political, isn't it?

It doesn't surprise anyone, you can already see this forum is full of the usual suspects spouting their long-established stances.

"Oh no they're going to do it now" Really? That's the best you've got?

So you're going to pretend you don't know about Soviet weapons deployed in space basically as long as either of us has been alive?

Or are we pretending there's no Chinese space weapons program?

How naive are you, or just disingenuous?

There's a weird confluence here of the capability of basically everyone having access to more information than ever, and the most constant nonsense gaslighting at the same time.

One can - instantly, really - ask about something incredibly obscure like Fermat's last theorem and depending on how much one is willing to accept someone else's summary, their own comprehension, and appetite for falling down a rabbit hole of REALLY detailed explanation, context, history, personalities, and everything involved, one can - likewise instantly - get not only the basic information but pretty nearly any gradation of explanation that wanted. And I can even get that wherever I happen to be - a library, a classroom, but also a bus or sitting on the shitter.

Objectively, that's a COOL THING.
Really, it is an amazing accomplishment for humanity generally.

Simultaneously, though we have more or less constant gaslighting over even the most stupid/obvious of facts. In the US it's often political, whether from the president & his government, or the opposition. Every single thing now has political weight in which the moment it's presented, the side-weighting are applied and if it's my side I'm for it, if it's the other side I'm against it, and by god there will never be reconciliation on even the most basic of facts.

I'd ask how we got here, but I expect all I'd see are politically-weighted answers anyway.

My point is just to highlight the constant irony of the availability of infinite information coinciding with the apparently-collective abandonment of any fixed concept of reality.

I miss pc at power systems.
"Is it off?" was never a question.

Imagine having TDS since 2016.

The "reason" needs to be a warrant number, full stop.

Minnesota native laughs at +40c to -40c annual span.

I walk every morning a couple of miles outdoors, I wear a long sleeve shirt at 10c or below, a light jacket at 5, go from shorts to sweatpants at 0, a hat and real jacket at -5, and we don't walk below -15.

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

I prefer the Martian bear.