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Comment National, too (Score 4, Interesting) 47

With any international intellectual property case, the real issue is getting quick enough action from foreign providers as the article quite astutely points out:

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump's 2017 travel ban from nations that didn't have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that's not thought to be beyond the court's jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there's an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don't have to worry about it.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 1) 59

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

Comment Re:Question (Score 2) 52

It is no more "theft" than you are.

I'll never get over how many people I watch online complain about how they'll never use AI because "it's theft", and then post photoshops they made with pictures they don't own, when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many artists I've seen complain about how AI is theft, and then paint something with "inspiration images" sitting in front of them while they paint, with their painting effectively being a blended composite of their inspiration images - when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many writers I've seen write the exact same derivative stuff that they also read, down to the same phrasings at times, just packaged in a new plot with new characters, and yeah, same story.

Even a person who isn't *directly* copying things that they're literally looking at is still the sum of their experiences. And it's rather hard to say that the breadth of human experience is broader than an LLM (whose "breadth of experiences" is "the whole world's outputs"), outside of the things that relate directly to having a body in a way which a blind / deaf / quadraplegic / whatnot person wouldn't grasp well.

And on that latter note, most people underestimate how well e.g. the congenitally blind actually grasp colours and the like. They're far better at reasoning about colours - similar to the sighted - than they are at knowing what colours things are. One study I read for example asked about polar bear fur. A good fraction of the congenitally blind subjects answered that they didn't know what colour it was. When asked to guess, about half of them answered that it was white so that it could blend into the snow, while the other half wrongly guessed black, but did so on the assumption that they'd want to soak up light to help stay warm. And actually in reality, both are true - to an outside observer, the exterior scattering of visible light without pigment makes them look white, but it's also designed to trap non-visible light up against black skin to absorb it for warmth. A sighted person, just seeing "white fur" and not knowing the latter property, might not have thought to even consider that.

To a LLM, our bodily experiences are akin to a blind person asked about colour: only knowing for sure things that they've learned about them directly, but still quite adept at reasoning about them.

Comment Re:Literary critics (Score 2) 52

What should be telling is that people started criticizing the metaphors only after concerns were raised that it was AI.

I do this experiment all the time (as it amuses me endlessly): when some people are hating on AI, I post some masterpiece panting or award-winning photo, suggest it's AI, and then watch them all explain why it's terrible, obviously-flawed, soulless crap. Sometimes I also do the reverse and post an AI image by comparison, say I prefer the "AI image" (actually real) to the "real image" (actually AI), and watch them go on about how the "real" (actually AI) image is so much better and shows so much more human creativity and emotion that AI could never have.

One person did this recently (posted a real Monet, said it was AI) and hundreds of such replies. The funniest part however was that someone took all their replies about the real Monet and fed them (along with the real Monet) into an AI model and had it improve the real Monet to match their criticisms ;)

Comment Re:It's okay, they'll shut it down soon. (Score 1) 59

You should all know by now that as soon as your company commits to this, Google will shut it down: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 1) 59

No, they don't have a free upgrade path for individual (or family) users. The key thing was the custom domain, which is only available with a paid account. When it was available, it wasn't that uncommon for a tech-savvy family to have their own custom domain backed by G-Suite. Now, there's no free option for this anymore.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Comment Re: amazing (Score 1) 113

The stock market is not gambling.

It absolutely is gambling. There may be a wealth of information provided; however, all parties are incentivized to lie. Is the board going to sell out to private equity? Is the next CEO going to be an utterly incompetent nepo baby? Is a hostile takeover going to happen? There is an infinite amount of information that the investor knows nothing about; therefore, it is ALL gambling.

"Buy index funds" Why? So Goldman Sachs can dump losing stocks into my portfolio?

It is gambling.

Comment Re:Why is this surprising?? (Score 1) 113

The Linux community still responds to Microsoft as it was 30 years ago.

As well they should. A parasite is still a parasite, regardless of its other behaviors.

Today, MS don't make the money on Windows, they make it on MS 365 and Azure. Which means they don't care if you use Windows or Linux, as long as you use their online service.

If you think it is about money rather than control, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you.

But seriously, there is no conspiracy here.

That is a possibility; however, they have proven over and over again that they do not care what the customer wants and only seek to enrich themselves and maintain the maximum amount of control, so it doesn't matter that there is no conspiracy here. Any gains they see absolutely will be used against the customer.

Look at their actual track record.

Indeed. They removed the ability to reorient the taskbar, an ability that has been around since Windows 95, merely because only a million people used it. You trust those people? Moron. Stop shilling for them.

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