You meet them online, but they’re a vocal minority. Especially when a smaller phone means a smaller battery and worse camera system, two of the consistently top priorities for consumers.

They are not conflicting. Yes oil production is higher but that’s mostly in response to OPEC producing less.

Overall fossil fuel use is in decline. Probably not enough decline to arrest the greenhouse effect, but that ship has already sailed.

I don’t even understand what the theory is. Plastic is plastic. What does it matter if it’s attached to the bottle?

Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

Yes, that’s true, but JavaScript has very few core APIs aside from basic DOM manipulation. Even things like comparing timezones requires a third party dependency, for example.

I wouldn’t say you need no dependencies in a Java project, but by all means check the average number of dependencies you get with Java or Python and compare it to almost any Node project.

You could probably sample projects on GitHub, look at the dependency graph, and compare.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

At least part of it is that JavaScript is not really a batteries included language like Python or Java to even PHP.

You can’t really do anything productive without relying on a third party library.

Yeah, that’s basically it.

But I think what’s getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn’t. That’s true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.

> If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say “unlicensed reproduction.”

The RIAA is indeed a litigious organization, and they tend to use their phalanx of lawyers to extract anyone who does anything creative or new into submission.

But sampling is generally considered fair use.

And if the algorithm you used actually listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, and fed existing patterns into a system that creates new patterns, well, you’d be doing the same thing anyone who goes from listening to music to writing music does. The first song ever written by humans was probably plagiarized from a bird.

It wouldn’t matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don’t think anyone’s really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.

The stronger argument is that LLM’s are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.

Her lawsuit doesn’t say that. It says,

when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works

That’s an absurd claim. ChatGPT has surely read hundreds, perhaps thousands of reviews of her book. It can summarize it just like I can summarize Othello, even though I’ve never seen the play.

I haven’t been able to reproduce that, and at least so far, I haven’t seen any very compelling screenshots of it that actually match. Usually it just generates text, but that text doesn’t actually match.

If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.”

You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.

It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.

A better comparison would probably be sampling. Sampling is fair use in most of the world, though there are mixed judgments. I think most reasonable people would consider the output of ChatGPT to be transformative use, which is considered fair use.

No, it isn’t. There are enumerated rights a copyright grants the holder a monopoly over. They are reproduction, derivative works, public performances, public displays, distribution, and digital transmission.

Commercial vs non-commercial has nothing to do with it, nor does field of endeavor. And aside from the granted monopoly, no other rights are granted. A copyright does not let you decide how your work is used once sold.

I don’t know where you guys get these ideas.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/

The published summary is open to fair use by web crawlers. That was settled in Perfect 10 v Amazon.

Derivative and transformative are quite different though.

I very much agree.