Probably LRO vs. Danuri

Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.

A lot of people behave pretty ghastly when it comes to money.

Flock is not a single police officer standing on a street corner. Flock is a network of continuous data collection from every perspective on every road and intersection. Flock is not a camera, it is an AI system that follows you precisely everywhere, it is a data dump without a court order. There is expectation that a police officer will NOT follow you everywhere without a court order just because he is paid from taxes and has nothing better to do, this is stalking.

Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.

Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.

The two mainstream options (both about half a year old now, we're due for something better) are Ace Step-1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium.

Ace Step has full vocals with its music. See here for examples. The downside in my opinion (judge for yourself) is that it has Suno's flaw of sounding too "clean", "mainstream" and "uncreative", except even moreso (Udio was always much better than Suno at this, albeit "less well behaved" - but Udio is out of the game now).

Stable Audio 3 doesn't do vocals, though it has other useful features, like inpainting (great for fixing glitches in recorded tracks for example). In my view, it sounds a lot better. It can also be used to create sound effects. License is a bit more restrictive, though, if you actually care about that, but generally won't affect the average user.

Both are trained on fully licensed data and both are open-weights. So even if the devs released a version that included some sort of watermarking in the future (or someone developed a fingerprinting algo for the existing versions), you could just finetune them to break that.

TL/DR, if you want open source and want to just churn out a full track: choose Ace Step 1.5.
If you want open source and want to do instrumental tracks or to supplement manual work (such as your own vocals) or do audio editing: chose Stable Audio 3.

That was my first thought too. (Assuming the article is correct - all kinds of stuff gets published that doesn't hold up in the longer run.)

Remember that time is also big. Suppose that there have been 1000 interstellar civilizations in our galaxy during the past 5 billion years, and that each one lasted a million years before collapsing. How many would be active right now?

Frankly, I don't consider it a paradox at all. We've explored approximately 0% of our galaxy and found nothing. That doesn't tell us much.

Doesn't he know he's supposed to play the fiddle while he destroys his country?

I'm skeptical about that second part.

As for trolls, I wonder if some anti-vax propaganda is being pushed by hostile foreign powers as a way of hurting us.

This has to be a troll. Nobody on Slashdot is actually this stupid.

I often wonder how all these people who believed that COVID vaccines were a plot to sterilize or murder humanity have justified to themselves the continued-unchanged existence of babies-in-specific and humans-in-general, respectively.

It's just a story about Meta and AI.

Oh, nevermind.

For extremists of all flavors, violence is always preferable to the voting booth.

Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.

If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.

There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks

I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.

"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.