One of the cofounders of partizle.com, a Lemmy instance primarily for nerds and techies.

Into Python, travel, computers, craft beer, whatever

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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.



  • 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.













  • If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers.

    Well, if OpenAI knowingly used pirated work, that’s one thing. It seems pretty unlikely and certainly hasn’t been proven anywhere.

    Of course, they could have done so unknowingly. For example, if John C Pirate published the transcripts of every movie since 1980 on his website, and OpenAI merely crawled his website (in the same way Google does), it’s hard to make the case that they’re really at fault any more than Google would be.