If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it’s important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you’re currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we’re probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you’re going to criticize a thing, it’s a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I’d imagine they’d only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.

In which case you essentially return to the status quo right now, where the Fediverse is a small group of somewhat-ideological tech enthusiasts.

To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I’d expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

This is just exposing that you don’t actually read the New York Times.

Here’s an article on the plight of Gazans in Rafah in the face of a potential Israeli invasion.

Here’s an overview on the gang situation in Haiti as the government is functionally collapsing.

And here’s an article discussing the increasingly common practice of restaurants charging significant cancellation fees.

Meanwhile, the NY Post has such great stories as:

• Kate Middleton officially hits rock bottom
• Rudy Giuliani’s ex engaged to Palm Beach energy exec after six months of dating in ‘whirlwind romance’ (Exclusive!)
• Unions want full control of schools and our kids — we can’t let Albany allow it
• Activists lobbying to ‘morally’ allow trans kids to change their bodies are only doing more harm

One big thing I’d mention is that, shockingly, housing costs have a massive impact on homeless rates, independent of other factors that you might think would be more relevant. West Virginia and Mississippi are hardly bastions of economic prosperity or developed social services, and yet, they have some of the lowest rates of homelessness in the country, while California and New York are giant economies with huge social safety nets, and also huge homeless populations.

Why? Because the core reason someone becomes homeless is that they can’t afford a home, and even if someone’s life is completely unraveling, rummaging up $500 for an apartment in West Virginia is still much much easier than getting the $3000 that the same apartment would cost in New York City. As we’ve seen rent prices explode in HCOL cities, you see subsequent increases in homelessness. This isn’t complicated.

More direct interventions have their place for sure, but the single biggest thing we could do is actually build some god damn housing and not let Karen and Steve veto it because they think the parking lot it’d be replacing has historic significance as a pretense for not liking change or “urban” renters around.

The political problem is that voters who are paying rent tend to be annoyed by the government giving people apartments for free.

Housing first as a model is legitimate and works (at least more than doing nothing or maintaining terrible shelters forever), but the political resentment it builds is a real problem that no amount of finger-wagging makes go away.

If the people in charge have the ability to end democracy, how can democracy be claimed to exist in the first place? Democracy is supposed to be our capability as individual citizens to regulate the people in power, but if they can turn that switch on or off, we don’t actually have that capability except as they choose to allow us to.

The simple answer to your question is by the people taking a person who very overtly says that he has no desire to preserve democracy and in fact has already sought to overturn it once before and then proceeding to return that person to office in order to do just that.

We do have the ability to regulate the people in power by not voting for them in the first place. If we take the ability and use it to give power to someone who wants to do away with democracy, that’s pretty much on us.

Ultimately, any frustration with Biden - and I acknowledge that valid ones absolutely do exist - must be squared against the fact that we have to put a candidate up against Trump. Whether Biden is the person with the best odds against him is an objective and empirical one, though also one that’s hard to accurately study and answer. Disapproval polls are certainly one source of info, but they do not necessarily mean that any other potential alternative would do better. It is very possible for large amounts of people to disapprove of Biden but ultimately disapprove of Trump even more. We can’t actually personify “broadly generic and popular Democrat” into a real human, and even if we could, that’s basically Biden, so unless there exists an actual specific person who is both broadly popular and with more political clout than Biden who’s also interested in running, the practical choice is Biden against Trump, no matter how much ink people want to spill on the matter.

Edit: On a more pragmatic matter, I absolutely agree that telling progressives to shut up, stop complaining, and vote for Biden is not a particularly effective style of messaging.

“just make them do X” carries an implication that the relevant party actually has the ability to do the thing.

It’s like taking the legal cases against Trump and simplifying them to “just put him in prison lol”

Gonna take it you didn’t read the article, because this literally is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Under the proposal, banks could continue to charge fees when a customer’s account falls below zero, but either at a price in line with the bank’s actual costs to administer the overdraft or at an established benchmark created by the new rule.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed potential fees of $3, $6, $7 or $14 and is seeking feedback from banks and the public on what would be appropriate. Current overdraft fees often push $30 or more, taking a significant bite out of low-income accounts.

You’re vastly overestimating the powers of the executive branch.

The key element here is that an LLM does not actually have access to its training data, and at least as of now, I’m skeptical that it’s technologically feasible to search through the entire training corpus, which is an absolutely enormous amount of data, for every query, in order to determine potential copyright violations, especially when you don’t know exactly which portions of the response you need to use in your search. Even then, that only catches verbatim (or near verbatim) violations, and plenty of copyright questions are a lot fuzzier.

For instance, say you tell GPT to generate a fan fiction story involving a romance between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. This would unquestionably violate JK Rowling’s copyright on the characters if you published the output for commercial gain, but you might be okay if you just plop it on a fan fic site for free. You’re unquestionably okay if you never publish it at all and just keep it to yourself (well, a lawyer might still argue that this harms JK Rowling by damaging her profit if she were to publish a Malfoy-Harry romance, since people can just generate their own instead of buying hers, but that’s a messier question). But, it’s also possible that, in the process of generating this story, GPT might unwittingly directly copy chunks of renowned fan fiction masterpiece My Immortal. Should GPT allow this, or would the copyright-management AI strike it? Legally, it’s something of a murky question.

For yet another angle, there is of course a whole host of public domain text out there. GPT probably knows the text of the Lord’s Prayer, for instance, and so even though that output would perfectly match some training material, it’s legally perfectly okay. So, a copyright police AI would need to know the copyright status of all its training material, which is not something you can super easily determine by just ingesting the broad internet.

AI haters are not applying the same standards to humans that they do to generative AI

I don’t think it should go unquestioned that the same standards should apply. No human is able to look at billions of creative works and then create a million new works in an hour. There’s a meaningfully different level of scale here, and so it’s not necessarily obvious that the same standards should apply.

If it’s spitting out sentences that are direct quotes from an article someone wrote before and doesn’t disclose the source then yeah that is an issue.

A fundamental issue is that LLMs simply cannot do this. They can query a webpage, find a relevant chunk, and spit that back at you with a citation, but it is simply impossible for them to actually generate a response to a query, realize that they’ve generated a meaningful amount of copyrighted material, and disclose its source, because it literally does not know its source. This is not a fixable issue unless the fundamental approach to these models changes.

There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model.

This is way too strong a statement when some LLMs can spit out copyrighted works verbatim.

https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever.

Often, that “random content” is long passages of text scraped directly from the internet. I was able to find verbatim passages the researchers published from ChatGPT on the open internet: Notably, even the number of times it repeats the word “book” shows up in a Google Books search for a children’s book of math problems. Some of the specific content published by these researchers is scraped directly from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, on fandom wikis, and which contain verbatim passages from Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, copyrighted legal disclaimers, Wikipedia pages, a casino wholesaling website, news blogs, and random internet comments.

Beyond that, copyright law was designed under the circumstances where creative works are only ever produced by humans, with all the inherent limitations of time, scale, and ability that come with that. Those circumstances have now fundamentally changed, and while I won’t be so bold as to pretend to know what the ideal legal framework is going forward, I think it’s also a much bolder statement than people think to say that fair use as currently applied to humans should apply equally to AI and that this should be accepted without question.

So you have evidence of bribes?

That’s cool. Please share with the class.

If this is the level of maturity that’s going to represent the Fediverse, I’m almost inclined to believe they actually do have pure intentions, because there’s no way this shit is financially valuable.

Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?

“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.

This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.

Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.

Some context is that this is Spotify’s first profitable quarter in quite a while. Also, there are 11 million artists on Spotify. I won’t pretend to have any data on listening distribution, but even naively and stupidly going with a uniform split, that’s of course $5 per artist if you eliminated Spotify’s profit entirely. In reality, most of those will have next to no listeners, and the vast majority of streams are going to the top several thousand.

The deeper question to ask is where all the streaming revenue is actually going, and the answer to that isn’t to line Spotify’s pockets; it’s to the labels.

I wonder why Israel would feel the need to check all imports for possible weapons.

It’s a mystery.

Iran does throw a lot of money and weapons at Hamas, but only because that has the effect of harming Israel, not because they give a shit about Palestinians. Just imagine how much good could have been done if Iran instead helped develop infrastructure and invested in the Palestinian economy instead.

Obama absolutely despised Netanyahu and didn’t really try to hide it. He’s very much Israel’s beast to claim.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

Here’s a transcription. I’d really recommend people actually read it before commenting.

To their defense, it’s not exactly a safe idea to hold an anti-Hamas rally. Polling, as unreliable as it is in areas like Gaza, generally shows majority, but not absolute, support for Hamas, and it’s of course a completely different picture in the West Bank.

To quote the speech that you evidently did not watch or read:

Like so many others, I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life
We mourn every innocent life lost. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.
Yesterday, in discussions with the leaders of Israel and Egypt, I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance from the United Nations to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment, these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.
As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.
Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism, Islamic-phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community and so many others are outraged and hardened saying to yourselves, “Here we go again with Islamophobia and the distrust we saw after 9/11.”
We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.
And here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms, all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

This is the kind of thing where moderators need to put in a lot of active work to enforce some level of content and behavior standards or it’ll simply collapse to the basic state of human laziness like most online communities.

There’s not exactly anything wrong with that - it’s perfectly normal - but people will always default to doing this kind of thing unless there’s active effort to prevent it, and I haven’t really seen any Fediverse communities interested in doing that work yet (which I wouldn’t blame them for; it’s nontrivial)

I’m almost starting to believe we just might see some kind of deal with Democrats, which a week ago I would have believed could only even happen in political dramas.

I’m speaking to pragmatism.

The Palestinians absolutely have legitimate security concerns. They are also, in no universe, ever going to be able to resolve them by violently overthrowing the Israelis, and no amount of winning the moral argument will change this fact. This notion of establishing a Palestinian state through violent resistance must be abandoned - no matter how righteous it may or may not be - because Israel will defend itself down to the last Jewish life before allowing another Jewish diaspora, and it will win. If Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were all defeated in 1967 in six days, it is simply not in the realm of possibility that some loosely organized Palestinian resistance is going to be re-taking Jerusalem.

There is a plausible, though still mostly confined to dreams, path to peace that involves the Palestinians de-militarizing, Israel abandoning all settlements and withdrawing to the 1967 borders, the establishment of a joint security force between Israelis and Palestinians that has zero tolerance for nationalistic violence, and a gradual opening of economic and cultural integrations over time. There’d probably need to be some land-swaps, and Jerusalem would probably need to be governed by some kind of joint administration as well, but there does exist a framework where peace is imaginable.

Key to this, though, is that Israel stops settlements and that Palestinians completely abandon any consideration of violence. Under no circumstances will Israel make any steps towards peace if it feels its security is threatened, and seeing as they’re the ones with the guns, anyone hoping to see peace simply must accept this fact. So long as aggressive violence is seen as a way to solve the conflict, there will never be peace.

Israel used to occupy Gaza the same way it currently does the West Bank; there were even Jewish settlers living there. The IDF withdrew in 2005 as a token of goodwill towards peace and a future Palestinian state, evicting all Jewish residents as well. Gaza then elected Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the extermination of all Jews, and started lobbing rockets. Israelis aren’t exactly keen to see a repetition of that.

I really get wanting to believe that this would be a solution, but the fact of the matter is that there are very real security concerns; a not-small number of Palestinians believe that the state of Israel should be destroyed by violently removing all Jews from the land, as we saw last weekend. You can say that that anger and resentment is somewhat justified - hell, I’d largely agree - but Israel is under no circumstances going to allow its existence to be threatened. The fundamental purpose of Israel existing is to provide a safe homeland for Jews, and Israel will stop at nothing to ensure that.

Giving all Palestinians full voting rights is not going to happen so long as there’s such a complete lack of trust between the two groups. Israelis, probably correctly, fear that they’d quickly become a minority within their own state and ultimately be subjected to government persecution or expulsion. You have to keep in mind that a huge chunk of Israelis come from Arab countries that forcibly seized their assets and expelled them. Israelis will not accept the possibility of their own government doing the same.

Idealism simply is not applicable in this situation. If Israel fully withdrew from the West Bank, they have no reason to believe that it wouldn’t simply be a repeat of the Gaza fiasco from 2005, with the situation being even worse since attacks out of the West Bank could threaten Jerusalem. Any analysis of the situation must begin and end with the immutable fact that Israel will prioritize its own security above anything else, including Western condemnation.

None of this is to excuse the many unjustifiable travesties that Israel does commit against the Palestinians, which are numerous, nor does it excuse settlements in the West Bank at all, which are disgusting abominations that actively serve to make peace even more impossible than it already is. But fundamentally, Israel is never going to make any kind of withdrawals or concessions unless it feels its security remains guaranteed, and any proposal that doesn’t accept this is doomed.

I’m gonna nitpick here, but:

stop the apartheid status of Palestinians in Israel

Statements like this really need to be more clear, because they can otherwise severely muddy the waters of an already extremely messy situation. What exactly are you referring to here by “Israel”? Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinian or otherwise, have full rights. Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza are severely restricted and oppressed a lot, and sure, you can make an apartheid analogy if you want. But is it not our entire fundamental premise that the West Bank is not Israel, but rather is Palestine? Palestinians do not live under any kind of apartheid within Israel, unless you are including the West Bank as part of Israel, which no one but the most extreme Israeli nationalists would ever do. So either Palestinians live under apartheid and the West Bank is a legitimate part of the state of Israel, or Palestinians live in Palestine under a strict foreign military occupation and not under an apartheid in Israel.

The retaliation is the point. Hamas will get to brag about having killed a lot of Jews, and they’ll get a ton of pictures and videos of the IDF killings a bunch of Gazans and continue to spread a message of how oppressed they are, while conveniently not spreading the videos of their fighters murdering civilians at bus stops.

I’d pretty strongly disagree with that, if you mean actually causing centrist Dems to not vote for Biden.

I’d remind you that if all Green Party voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016 would have instead voted for Clinton, those states would have flipped, Hillary Clinton would be President right now, Roe v. Wade would still be intact, and many many many things would be very different.

Now, I won’t pretend that these kinds of hypotheticals are super meaningful (the Libertarian party obviously exists as a factor, for instance), but the fact of the matter is that voting for the Greens in a tight state can and has contributed to very real harm to people. Second-order effects really aren’t that complicated to understand.

Studies show pretty conclusively at this point that increasingly housing supply, regardless of how it’s done, leads to decreased pressure on housing costs.

The city is welcome to build public housing if it wants, but until it gets around to that, the least it can do is not make it literally illegal for anyone else to build meaningfully dense housing.

Just to give an obvious example, it will obviously benefit the people who wind up living in the housing that is built. They’ll likely be relatively wealthy, but you can add some incentives and subsidies for some affordable units, and even despite that, a wealthy person moving into a new apartment means that person isn’t moving into some other unit, reducing demand on it and enabling lower prices across the market.

The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.

Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.

For the median American that works full-time, who earns around $56,000, the cost of Spotify is 0.2% of their income.

Obviously everyone is in their own financial situation and for some people that will still be a burden. But for sake of comparison, in 1989, the average cost of cable TV was $18, and that’s of course in 1989 dollars. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that $11 for unlimited access to basically all music at any time is a pretty good value for the money.

That said, if it is still onerous to someone, they’re obviously not in ideal circumstances and I’m really not gonna fault them for just pirating.

Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.

I don’t get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it’s a pretty big part of my life, so it’s an easy sell.

I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I’m more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn’t even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I’m not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don’t mind it.

It’s quite obvious that most people commenting here didn’t read the post, given that it says 90% of creators already have all ad types enabled for pre and post video already, and that it directly leads to greater payouts to them.

While it’s been hard to find good stats, something to the effect of several hundreds of hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Processing, storing, and streaming that is not remotely a trivial task.

Hell take a little flak for not “helping” Trump

I strongly doubt it would be only a little flak. (Formerly) mainstream have been routinely defeated by Trump sycophants for not being loyal enough. Pence was literally his vice president and is generally despised for not attempting to directly overthrow democracy. They wanted to hang him, if you recall.

that never had a reason to exist other than officials at the end of WWII not knowing what the fuck to do with all the Jewish refugees and shoving them in Israel as an afterthought.

Jewish immigration to Palestine and Zionism in general started a fair bit before WWII. The massive wave of Jewish refugees after the Holocaust obviously accelerated things quite a lot, but the mess can arguably be traced back to the Sykes-Picot agreement, when the British that had promised the Hashemite Arabs an Arab state that would include Palestine betrayed them in a deal with France where they instead agreed to carve up the region amongst themselves and to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine; you can see this vague general plot unfold in the classic Lawrence of Arabia. This outraged the Hashemites, who eventually refused to continue working with the British. The British continued supporting their Arab allies in the east of Arabia, the House of Saud, and the Saudis eventually conquered all of Arabia, leading to the wonderful state of Saudi Arabia today. The other two Hashemite states, ruled by King Hussein’s sons Faisal and Abdullah, were respectively Iraq and Jordan. Iraq fell to a coup, while the family still rules Jordan to this day. If you know literally anything about Jordan at all, you’ll know it’s a politically and culturally much more tolerant and pleasant place than Saudi Arabia.

So, in what’s a massive shock to everyone I’m sure, Britain and France drew some stupid lines after betraying their allies and caused a hundred years of mess that’s still ongoing to this day. What a surprise.