I watch dogs (primarily overnight--most for 3-7 days but some 1 day and some >7d) via Rover. I make around $1500/month (pre-1099) and after their ~20% cut (of which most people give back to me in tips).

I WFH so the largely passive income is nice. I wouldn't have found as many people w/o a platform to do the heavy lifting for me in finding new dogs.

I am not advocating that we need to have these sorts of things in the market, but it does make for nice extra cash. YMMV.

OTOH, one strain will always be more popular than the rest, so that will be the most profitable.

Not necessarily. Compare with apples, where many varieties thrive. Some of that is growing area, different apples do well in different environments. But consumer preference is a big part. Some people like sweet apples, some like tart, some like sour. They have varying degrees of crispness. Different recipes call for different varieties.

So it is at least possible. Single-strain monoculture is not the inevitable result of profit / efficiency over all else.

That's disgusting beige, the cowardly color of the Democractic Order of Planets.

I used to screen scrape jail registry records for county jails in my home area. Though the IDs weren't exactly sequential, doing groups of 50 would get hits for two of the local counties.

What I found was that, while the website UI wouldn't show juvenile records, you could access them directly w/the ID. Surfacing it to the county took a day or so to find the right person but they quickly closed that hole, but who knows how many records were handed out to malicious actors over the years before I found it.

The real debate is if governments have the right to "shape" consumer choices with policy, subsidies, and the force of law in the aggressive ways they've been doing using taxpayer money.

Of course govt has the right. It's in the Constitution, clear as day. What part of "regulate commerce between the states" don't you understand? Article 1 clause 8 section 3.

Should they? That's a legitimate question. You can have a policy debate about whether the govt should (I'm firmly on the yes side). But can they? Settled question since 1789. Find another horse to flog.

Their music is their property and it is protected by copyright (because that is the law against stealing for this kind of property).

You don't understand copyright at all. Let an attorney educate you:

First, bottom line - no one is taking anything from these musicians. They never had any such right in the first place. They're claiming that any song inspired by theirs that sounds kinda similar is infringement. It's not and never has been. Regardless of whether a person or a machine does it.

Copyright is a time-limited (if ~150 years can be called that) set of economic rights (Euros say moral rights too, but that's stupid). Copyright is not "it's my work, I have absolute control of it". Uses outside those economic rights are not governed by copyright. News reporting, educational use, libraries - copyright cannot be used to prevent these things, they are explicitly allowed. Fair use (US) / fair dealing (UK) gives conditions where use does not infringe on copyrights, notably considering how much of the work is used and whether it's done for profit and whether the use is transformational or verbatim. Example: news reporting on a copyrighted work is explicitly allowed, even when news is for profit and verbatim, as long as a limtied excerpt is used that's less than the entire work. That's simplified and with slight inaccuracies, but close enough for a non-legal audience.

The trouble with the artists' argument is that they're essentially complaining about learning. "That there AI learned mah werk and made more kinda like it. That ain't fair!". Except humans do the same thing all the time; that's how creation works. If you have a blackbox that takes existing music in one end and outputs similar music on the other end, that box could be filled with a person or with an AI. The artists are saying "It's infringement when the black box contains AI but not when it contains a person". Perhaps that's their policy wish, but that's not what the law says.

Nothing happens in a vaccuum ex nihilo. Every artist combines influences from previous works when making anything new. There's even a legal test for this: derivative work. If a new work copies too much from an existing work, then it's termed a derivative work and triggers copyright protection on the original work. Derivative works are deemed to borrow too much.

The flip side is, you can borrow a lot from previous works (every work does) and as long as you don't cross that derivative work line, then you're ok. Your work is considered new enough that it doesn't infringe on previous works. Doesn't matter whether it was made by a person or an AI. That's not part of the legal test.

The main factor is: are these new AI-generated songs too similar to prior songs that they constitute a derivative work? From the AI songs that I've seen, any sane person would almost surely say no. They do sound similar and take inspiration from the original, but do not cross the line. Except the music industry is so screwed up that they consider even a 5-second samples of a beat or riff to be infringement. Like when a hip hop song makes a totally new song with new music and new lyrics that incorporates a few seconds of a heavily modified version of a well-known riff from another song - music industry says that's infringement. See Supreme Court case Acuff v Campbell Rose where 2 Live Crew sampled a few beats from Pretty Woman - not infringement. Compare to any other creative industry - movies, literature, painting, etc - and music industry's views are asinine. No one outside the music industry takes musicians' views on copyright seriously.

Isn't that what DeepMind is?
Or are they looking for an investment scam, garbage producer, because that is what Open AI is,
GPT-4 is garbage, but it attracts a lot of investment.

"has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges" Well that's not good news at all.

"Who owns it?" is the wrong question. The right question is: who should own it?

IP rights are premised on a bargain. Creators get protection for a limited time. In exchange, the public eventually gets full rights when it falls into the public domain. Yes public domain has been a mockery since at least Eldred, if not before. The principle stands though: at some point, rights expire.

Who deserves protection here? What incentives do we want to promote? Who invested time / money / effort to achieve the result, and would granting or denying rights change the amount of those investments? That's the answer to who should own the copyright, if anyone.

At first blush, Microsoft has the most invested. They created the AI, trained it, hosted it, and made it available. The guy doing the copliot chat invested very little, just a normal conversation. But if MS gets the whole copyright, then no one would use their system.

Probably the best approach is private agreements. Human author owns the copyright - they had the idea and invested some time on it, however little. With more time, they could have done the same work as the AI to build their idea. But MS doesn't have to let authors use their platform. So MS can draft a Terms of Use Agreement that says any copyrighted works developed with use of their system owe an X% royalty to MS on any earnings from that copyright work. If MS doesn't care then X can be zero. But let MS decide the terms, and users can decide whether to use the tool or do the work themselves.

I'm an IP policy attorney. I do this for a living.

Why do you need a poll? Just publish slashdot traffic stats.

But that would show how much readership has fallen off a cliff...

There is no universally accepted definition for SUV, particularly across country boundaries. The only real differentiator seems to be available 4-wheel drive. Assuming the Ioniq 5 is the AWD versions and not the RWD ones, I guess it fits the most basic definition.

In my experience, PIPs are NEVER intended to be a tool to help you; they're intended to help the company find reasons to fire you.

Use the 90 days to find a new job; not try and pass the arbitrary/impossible to meet requirements.

Plus, once you've been put on a PIP, do you really want to continue working for a company that was literally trying to create documentation to fire you?

No; you don't.

My ex-wife stole ~$300K from me preparing for a divorce. It was up to me, the person who made the money, not the person who pfilered it, to prove she did so and it would have cost at least 1/3 of the money and the likelihood I could prove to the court it had been done, even though it was blatantly obvious what she did to be near 0.

The legal system is absolutely fucked and it needs to be changed.

And we had a great time mate.