Skimming through the giant wall of gibberish the crux seems to be about feeling depressed after a series of one night stands that the author apparently thought would be longer term relationships.

I would suggest that if this has become a regular occurrence for the author it suggests there’s a problem with their approach to dating. Maybe don’t go looking for long term relationships at bars and clubs, or hookup focused “dating” apps.

Yep and that’s fair, but it’s still really critical that those of us that can migrate do so. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Developers won’t feel pressured to support Linux if there’s no sizable user base, but the user base won’t grow until developers provide support for Linux. He even mentions that in that video. There’s a reason I’m only this year planning on switching my primary desktop from Windows to Linux and it’s because of how good Proton has gotten. I’ve already checked every game in my Steam library and while it’s not 100% of the library that runs, everything that doesn’t is something I don’t care about.

Nah, Linux still only accounts for about 2% of all users on Steam (active per month) so it has a long way to go still, but at least it’s heading in the right direction. If you count only English speaking Steam users that number climbs to over 5%. If Linux can get to and reliably maintain 10% that’s probably good enough to make it a first class target for even AAA releases, but it’s not there yet. The fact that so many games run fine under Linux these days is almost entirely down to the effort Valve has sunk into Proton making it relatively easy for devs to check Steamdeck support off without needing to really put much work in at all.

Going to guess his pain points are the fingerprint reader and possibly wifi/blutooth chipset. There are some of those supported but that’s still the spottiest in terms of driver support under Linux. Maybe also webcam but generally those work fine these days.

We don’t need everyone to migrate, just enough that companies and developers feel obligated to support Linux. We’re slowly getting there. Valve throwing their weight behind Linux for gaming was a massive win for Linux. Another important factor is the rise of the mobile first generations and the fact that at its core Android is Linux based. It’s not completely trivial to port an Android app to Linux but it’s at least no worse than porting it to Windows.

Microsoft may still have a stranglehold on corporate desktops, but they’ve long since lost the battle for servers and their hold on the home desktop is slipping a little more each day. Losing a significant chunk of gamers to Linux would be a massive blow to MS because it has been one of the few really unassailable markets for them historically.

I’m hoping to make the switch next month. Building out a new gaming system and going to try going all in on Linux again. Long ago I was a full time Linux user, but with the rise of Steam and the spotty support of wine I couldn’t justify staying with it. Now that Proton is good enough to cover 90%+ of my games library I’m returning to where I started.

In the early days of the internet that was actually the correct way to do things. Websites were supposed to be hosted at the www subdomain, while other content was supposed to go to places like ftp.whatever.com. Technically they should redirect thisstupidcompany.com to www.thisstupidcompany.com not the other way around. All that said though that concept has kind of fallen by the wayside as it became increasingly apparent that most hosts exist primarily to host websites with other uses as secondary so it became the norm to just assume the www when navigating to the root domain.

supposedly simple enough for the average person to use

That is in fact the result every time that claim is made about any product. That was the pitch for COBOL, so simple your business analysts can write it, no need for expensive programmers. That was the pitch for business rules engines. That was the pitch for dozens of drag and drop GUI based programming “languages”. Lastly that’s the pitch for any number of specialized tools that let you “script” them like WordPress.

Not once in the hundreds of times those claims have been made have they ever been true. Every last time the only thing you end up with is a horrible programming language/framework that still requires programmer’s but makes the experience of working with it miserable for them.

Short answer is maybe. Long answer is it depends on which state you live in. So called At Will states effectively have no labor laws (well, there’s things like minimum wage, wage theft protections, worker safety, etc. but nothing around employment). In an At Will state you can be fired without notice and without any reason. In theory this is balanced by being able to quit at any time and without giving notice, but people aren’t exactly clamoring for the right to quit jobs without notice.

It varies somewhat from country to country, but at least in the US there is ample case law that says it’s legal. The relevant ruling is typically based on the work being transformative and therefore a fair use for a derivative work. This is E.G. how Google can get away with creating thumbnails of websites to show on their search pages without needing to worry about copyright of anything contained on that website.

This article proved absolutely nothing except that you can use generative AI to create images that would most likely be ruled to violate copyright. Once again though, the model and training weights do not violate copyright, they’re a protected derivative work. The generated image on the other hand very likely does violate copyright.

Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.

Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright. People keep wanting them to be against copyright, but that’s just not how copyright works. There either needs to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case, but those changes would need to be very carefully tailored. It would be way too easy to make something that’s either overly broad and applies to a bunch of situations it wasn’t intended to, or way too narrow allowing for easy circumventing.

In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.

While that might appease some people, it wouldn’t appease everyone. There are a lot of workers in the creative fields that are feeling incredibly threatened by generative AI right now. Some of these fears are certainly overblown, but it’s also true corporations are going to be as shitty as possible and so some regulation is probably in order. That said, once again, copyright just doesn’t seem to be the right tool for the job here.

Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.

Edge is good compared to IE which was a dumpster fire, and arguably about as bad as Chrome. Both are privacy nightmares and desire nothing more than to harvest your data for ad companies. I trust Google a hair more than I do Microsoft. I don’t use Chrome. That should tell you something.

Not sure where they’re getting the bit about copyright disallowing derived works as that’s just not true. You can get permission to create a derived work, but you don’t need permission to create a derived work so long as the final result does not substantially consist of the original work.

Unfortunately what constitutes “substantially” is somewhat vague. Various rulings have been made around that point, but I believe a common figure used is 30%. By that metric any given image represents substantially less than 30% of any AI model so the model itself is a perfectly legal derived work with its own copyright separate from the various works that were combined to create it.

Ultimately though the issue here is that the wrong tool is being used, copyright just doesn’t cover this case, it’s just what people are most familiar with (not to mention most people are very poorly educated about it) so that’s what everyone reaches for by default.

With generative AI what we have is a tool that can be used to trivially produce works that are substantially similar to existing copyrighted works. In this regard it’s less like a photocopier, and more like Photoshop, but with the critical difference that no particular talent is necessary to create the reproduction. Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.

Right, you’re basically making the same points as me, although technically the model itself is a copyrighted work. Part of the problem we’re running into these days is that copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret, all date from a time when the difference between those things was fairly intuitive. With our modern digital world with things like 3D printers and the ease with which you can rapidly change the formats and encodings of arbitrary pieces of data the lines all start to blur together.

If you have a 3D scan of a statue of pikachu what rights are involved there? What if you print it? What if you use that model to generate a PNG? What if you print that PNG? What if you encode the model file using base64 and embed it in the middle of a gif of Rick Astley?

Corporations have already utterly fucked all our IP laws, it might be time to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate the whole thing, because what we have now often feels like it has more cracks than actual substance.

Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.

Except it isn’t a perfect copy. It’s very similar, but not exact. Additionally for every example you can find where it spits out a nearly identical image you can also find one where it produces nothing like it. Even more complicated you can get images generated that very closely match other copyrighted works, but which the model was never trained on. Does that mean copying the model violates the copyright of a work that it literally couldn’t have included in its data?

You’re making a lot of assumptions and arguments that copyright covers things that it very much does not cover or at a minimum that it hasn’t (yet) been ruled to cover.

Legally, as things currently stand, an AI model trained on a copyrighted work is not a copy of that work as far as copyright is concerned. That’s today’s legal reality. That might change in the future, but that’s far from certain, and is a far more nuanced and complicated problem than you’re making it out to be.

Any legal decision that ruled an AI model is a copy of all the works used to train it would also likely have very far reaching and complicated ramifications. That’s why this needs to be argued out in court, but until then what midjourney is doing is perfectly legal.

The AI model is not a copy of the set of data used to train it, it’s a derivative work. As such copyright as it currently stands does not apply. It’s possible, likely even, that copyright will be modified in some way soon to account for this, but the situation today says nope, not copyright infringement.

WB and Disney would lose, at least without an amendment to copyright law. That in fact just happened in one court case. It was ruled that using a copyrighted work to train AI does not violate that works copyright.

Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.

If the training data is obviously copyright infringement, then the data must be retrained in a more appropriate manner.

This is the crux of the issue, it isn’t obviously copyright infringement. Currently copyright is completely silent on the matter one way or another.

The thing that makes this particularly interesting is that the traditional copyright maximalists, the ones responsible for ballooning copyright durations from its original reasonable limit of 14 years (plus one renewal) to its current absurd duration of 95 years, also stand to benefit greatly from generative works. Instead of the usual full court press we tend to see from the major corporations around anything copyright related we’re instead seeing them take a rather hands off approach.