Some of us remember the coed bathroom featured on the hit 90s show Ally McBeal. It seemed like a progressive but not so far fetched idea at the time. So WTF are we doing still arguing about this 25 years later? These bathroom nazis need to get a grip.

I had just given Putin tree fiddy the week before

I daresay this is the outcome he hoped for. Suddenly there are a bunch of open editorial author seats to fill. Taking bets on those seats being filled by people who don’t lean quite so far to the left.

And a significant loss in subscribers? That’s just the principled people fleeing who weren’t gonna buy his nonsense either way. The people who stick around are the ones who are okay with billionaire interference in their news source, and those are the people Bezos wants as subscribers.

Probably the closest thing you can get to in terms of a “privacy” credit card. Everything about a credit card is tied to you by their very nature. So it depends on what or who you want privacy from.

Someone else mentioned privacy.com which I also use - it’s good if you want to hide your transaction from the credit card company, or if you want to hide your identity from the merchant. But Privacy.com is more like a virtual debit card that connects to your bank account. Privacy.com still knows who you are.

I mean… It’s Las Vegas. You don’t go to Vegas expecting a vacation experience free from the perverse corruption of money.

The only difference is who pays you to do it 😁

Die Bart die

Rich people’s real estate investments would lose value if we suddenly didn’t need massive office buildings.

You know what? Okay! I’m in.

“Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to…”

When a university education becomes a fantasy story meme. At least if you’re attending MIT, you’re probably multiclassed into some kind of technomancer.

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These are some very pretty words that express ideas without much self-reflection on why the ideas might be bad.

I mean, I suppose you did say it yourself that you can’t trust the US government… but why would you trust ANY government? You know why I trust Google more than any government? I understand Google’s motivations ($$$). Put something into the hands of government and suddenly that thing is burdened by the desires of every politician and their special interest financiers.

“Place it in the hands of something like the UN” would mean some international body I assume. Comprised of and led by whom exactly? And also, who would fund the thing? You suggest nationalization, so… taxpayers? Sure, here’s your $99/year Degooglebase access fee tax I guess? And beyond just making sure there’s enough money to keep the lights on, we need to make sure there’s enough money to pay creators. After all, YouTube isn’t just a library. It’s an economy larger than some countries and there would be consequences to destabilizing that economy. People aren’t just posting content for the love of the shared experience.

Please don’t take what I’m saying here to be a defense of Google. Google is a shitty company for so many reasons. But advocating for nationalization of YouTube is just a horrifically bad idea in such manner as it was presented.

But - all is not lost. First: for the creators you enjoy - find ways to support them other than Google. Make it possible for them to continue when YouTube stops being lucrative enough.

Second: find, use, and advocate for the use of alternative services. There is no single site that is going to be able to replace YouTube. It simply isn’t going to happen unless PornHub wants to step up to the game and create their own SFW site YouTube-killer. They have the infrastructure and capacity to host and share absolutely massive amounts of video and have the business capabilities to accept income and pass it on to creators on a large scale. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

Best to look at things differently. Like the Fediverse and the internet itself, it might be better off if the platform were distributed.

Let’s not pretend like Google isn’t earning any money

You mean the always-on GPS-enabled internet-connected microphone and camera which is also likely Bluetooth and NFC beaconing and contains all of my most personal data including my name, contacts, unencrypted chats facilitated by major cell phone carriers, photos, emails, and other personal files which are also likely synced with a cloud service operated by major multi-national corporations, and also stores biometric data such as facial recognition, fingerprints, time spent sleeping, and even heart rate and number of steps taken assuming you have “fitness” features enabled?

With those last couple items, these massive companies that regularly share data with law enforcement are literally tracking your every step and nearly every beat of your heart.

Well don’t worry about that, I’ve got Express VPN.

Just getting back around to this.

My main reasoning is simply that authors and artists should be fairly credited and compensated for their work. If I create something and share it on the internet, I don’t necessarily want a company to make money on that thing, especially if they’re making money to my exclusion.

So while I belive that IP as we know it today is probably not be the best way to handle things, I still think creators should have some say over how their works are used and should receive some reasonable share when their works are used for profit. Without creators, those works wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Are there other jobs where it would be okay to take a person’s services without paying them? What would motivate people to continue providing those services?

Prompting for a source wouldn’t satisfy me until I could trust that the AI wasn’t hallucinating. After all, if GPT can make up facts about things like legal precedent or well documented events, why would I trust that its citations are legitimate?

And if the suggestion is that the person asking for the information double check the cited sources, maybe that’s reasonable to request, but it somewhat defeats the original purpose.

Bing might be doing things differently though, so you might be right in your assessment on that front. I haven’t played with their AI yet.

I tend to agree with your last point, especially because of the way the system has been bastardized over the years. What started out as well intentioned legislation to ensure that authors and artists maintain control over their work has become a contentious and litigious minefield that barely protects creators.

Curious about something, maybe you know since you work at a theater. I seem to remember hearing that a theater has to pay royalties each time they show a movie and that newer technology can track and report this automatically. Does the latest technology automatically track this as I recall? And if so, would playing a movie as a test count as a showing?

Your argument poses an interesting thought. Do machines have a right to fair use?

Humans can consume for the sake of enjoyment. Humans can consume without a specific purpose of compiling and delivering that information. Humans can do all this without having a specific goal of monetary gain. Software created by a for-profit privately held company is inherently created to consume data with the explicit purpose of generating monetary value. If that is the specific intent and design then all contributors should be compensated.

Then again, we can look no further than Google (the search engine, not the company) for an example that’s a closely related to the current situation. Google can host excerpts of data from billions of websites and serve that data up upon request without compensating those site owners in any way. I would argue that Google is different though because it literally cites every single source. A search result isn’t useful if we don’t know what site the result came from.

And my final thought - are works that AI generates is truly transformative? I can see arguments that go either way.

Let me ask you this: when have you ever seen ChatGPT cite its sources and give appropriate credit to the original author?

If I were to just read the NYT and make money by simply summarizing articles and posting those summaries on my own website without adding anything to it like my own commentary and without giving credit to the author, that would rightfully be considered plagiarism.

This is a really interesting conundrum though. I would argue that AI isn’t capable of original thought the way that humans are and therefore AI creators must provide due compensation to the authors and artists whose data they used.

AI is only giving back some amalgamation of words and concepts that it has been trained on. You might say that humans do the same, but that isn’t exactly true. The human brain is a funny thing. It can forget, it can misremember. It can manipulate. It can exaggerate. It can plan. It can have irrational or emotional responses. AI can’t really do those things on its own. It’s just mimicking human behavior at best.

Most importantly to me though, AI is not capable of spontaneous thought. It is only capable of providing information that it has been trained on and only when prompted.