maybe don't "pour your soul" into hardware that is controlled by cutt-throat corporations?

What did he expect to happen? Sony thanking him for his work?

How old is he?

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

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)

So just to be clear here, are you saying that if I follow a person around as he goes about his day in the public sphere, then I am "actively stalking and harassing" and that is not to be allowed, but that if I set up an array of cameras which films that person as he goes about his day in the public sphere, then I am "passively filming" and that is entirely okay?

"You do realize journalists have no rights beyond what a normal citizen has?"

Likewise, you do realize that Flock and Axon have no rights beyond what normal citizens have?

Be honest, was your comment generated by AI? Because it reads exactly as if it were.

Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

That said, and with all due respect for Matt's past accomplishments in forging a community and a company to support it, I think Automattic (and so Matt) made a terrible choice around 2015 by deciding to use Slack for internal and even external communications instead of just using WordPress with the 02/Oxygen plugin previously used.

I wrote about that at length when I was applying for a job at Automattic circa 2015.The gist of that concern is on the main page of my website and says:
        "And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS. :-( We always have many principles to choose from, and it can indeed be hard sometimes to get the priorities right. As Scott Berkun (who left Automattic after a year to go back to writing full-time) wrote, even in a metrics-driver organization like Automattic, there is no metric for picking metrics or deciding how to weigh a variety of metrics (beyond perhaps survival itself).
        Here is a version of Twirlip I started as a proof-of-concept Thunderbird Server webapp to handle email, chat, and other real-time communications as another step towards a social semantic desktop. It is the beginning of the embodiment of the "ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto". But if you are looking for something good now that is FOSS, check out Mattermost, Matrix.org, Mailpile, Kolab, and similar things."

An archive page of that job application and Slack comments from back then is here, includign with the section on transcending polling in WordPress:
"Automattic JavaScript Engineer application by Paul D. Fernhout"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
      "But there is an alternative to trying to shoehorn WebSocket-related changes into the WordPress core PHP somehow. Such an update notification service to reduce polling could instead be hosted at WordPress.com in parallel to a WordPress server for a fee for those who don't want to run Node.js (or whatever) locally to supply that service. ... Such a WordPress feature to reduce polling needs might then be used to add near-real-time chat to WordPress. This might reduce the otherwise increasing desire for Automatticians to use Slack to communicate with each other about WordPress. That is a movement that seems problematical to me concerning WordPress's future. It would also be like Automattic moving to Pusher instead of improving WordPress to be low-latency and near-real-time. Even if Slack (by all reports) is a great product (as proprietary products go) that can monitor and log and search all of your communications stored on their servers, in theory using Slack widely within Automattic makes Automattic's internal communications available to the same proprietary competitor (if even just rogue employees) for business intelligence purposes. It also seems strange to me for Automattic to cede the area of near-real-time communications to a proprietary company without at least trying (really hard) to come up with an alternative built into WordPress, especially because such things have already been shown to be workable. I feel Automattic could (and should) be innovating in this area to help the WordPress community move in new directions. ..."

A fundamental issue is that people at Automattic at the time saw WordPress' competitors as things like Wix, not things like Slack. I was reminded of when in the 1990s ParcPlace (a Smalltallk vendor) thought Digittalk (another Smalltalk vendor) was their main competitor and disastrously bought them while ignoring that Visual Basic and Delphi and similar products were really their big competitors (which I had warned someone in sales there about about). WordPress could have become the premier chat platform for companies (including using ideas for a near-real-time message updates relay server leveraging technology someone at Automattic has written). But instead Automattic and the WordPress community it shepherds moved to Slack. Just a very sad way to see a great FOSS community focused on communications destroy itself by embracing proprietary software. And it seems like Matt played a big part in that short-sighted decision somehow (maybe having friends who worked at and.or funded Slack judging from some of his bloig posts long ago)?

Here is a more general essay I wrote in 2016 on why not to use Slack for free software development (in part trying to explain to Richard Stallman of the FSF why Slack was such a threat to the free software movement):
"Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development"
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons...
====
Contents
* Introduction and summary
* What is Slack? (A proprietary centralized communications hub web service )
* Free alternatives exist to the proprietary Slack
* Automattic/WordPress is sending the wrong message about free communications software
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* A democratic government is a special case of a free and open source community
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
* What if Slack went free/libre and open source?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The cost of changing later can be high
* Matrix.org is a better way forward
* Would I ever use Slack? Sadly, yes. :-(
====

Tangentially, I also tried to get Automattic/WordPress to use Mithril instead of React back when React has problematical licensing relating to patents... In the end though Automattic and Matt had enough clout to get Facebook to change the React licensing terms (even though I still feel Mithril has a better conceptual design with better developer ergonomics than React).
https://github.com/Automattic/...

Anyway, I'll never know if WordPress and Automattic might have gone in very different directions if I had gone to work there -- or if I just would have become frustrated and bitter from still seeing it all play out the way it did despite my best efforts there (given social momentum and power structures)?

For example, it took five years to get this memory exhaustion and crashing bug I reported in WordPress fixed for when you edit a long page too many times (which I discovered while writing that job application). That is a bug which may have cost the entire WordPress community many millions of dollars a year paying for bigger servers with more memory than they really needed to avoid the problem, compared to if the bug had been fixed sooner:
"High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions"
https://core.trac.wordpress.or...

P.S. Sad anniversary of September 11 today and the destruction of technology used for social advancement in Chili in 1973 (as another example of politics and personality disrupting humane tech progress as with WordPress):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Project Cybersyn was a Chilean economic project developed from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), with the purpose of constructing a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that linked to a single mainframe computer. ... The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer (1926-2002), and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories. ... Project Cybersyn ended following Allende's removal and death during the coup detat of 11 September 1973. After the coup, the Chilean military abandoned Cybersyn and destroyed the operations room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "According to historian Sebastian Hurtado Torres, there is no documentary evidence to support that the United States government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces from September 11, 1973 itself. However, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and intervened in the conditions prior to the Chilean coup of 1973. Historian Peter Winn found "extensive evidence" of United States complicity in events that helped in part to create the conditions that led to the coup. However, given the local political polarization and the performance of the Popular Unity government, there is no academic consensus on whether this intervention--which primarily took the form of financial support for the media, political parties, and opposition organizations--played a decisive role in the events of September 11, 1973."

I saw a video by a photographer and he points out that the quality of photos is not the reason to buy a dedicated camera. After all, you can buy a $2000 Ricoh that only takes black and white photos now; the iPhone will, in most circumstances, take 'better' photos, or at least more true-to-life photos.

But a dedicated camera focuses your attention. If you carry your camera, you're concerned with photography. You're not distracted by texts or whatever. And so your photography is likely to be better--you're paying attention to the task in a way that you rarely will with your phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The android officers are ordered by Central Command to cease pursuit, on the grounds that the expense of his capture exceeds their allocated budget for THX."

So maybe there is hope for humanity after all in token budget limits? :-)

Another source of hope is humans and Ais learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.