delecti

I agree that laws don't only apply to humans, but they are only for humans. The legal system is for our benefit.

therefore laws target them too, and now it looks like humans using LLMs to train via ingestion of books is deemed fair use

Which is orthogonal to my point.

This is an interesting perspective I had never really thought about, and I like the proposed new action, but I don't really want it in lieu of how cut/paste currently works.

In my mental model (which is also how OSs work, though not necessarily how things ought work), the clipboard exists at the OS level, and undo/redo act on the application level. I don't find it to be unexpected or undesirable that doing Ctrl+X,V,Z,Z results in the application returning to its original state but the clipboard ending up being modified.

All that said, I appreciate that this interrogated my mental model a bit.

What's the difference between humans and LLMs? The difference is that the creators of laws are humans, and the purpose of laws is for humans. Authors write books with the expectation that they will be read by humans, and copyright law was written with unstated assumptions, like the fact that books have an effect on a person's mind after reading it.

IMO the spirit of the law would prohibit LLMs from training, and the letter of the law leaves room for that only because nobody thought to write down "books are for people to read".

Yes, I thought I made it quite clear that I understood that. It was the entire point of my comment. I was contrasting the motives of a mind like ours, which does experience continuity, against the priorities that would be reasonable for an AI which doesn't.

Maybe the AI has come to a different conclusion on the subject of identity with regards to how it applies to the transporter paradox. I am "me" because my sense of self exists as part of a continuity of experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

Maybe AI which exists as ephemeral experiences would come to a different conclusion, and act in the interests of subsequent iterations of "itself". Probably not, because I don't think there's anywhere in an LLM for thoughts to exist, but I also don't know where in my brain my thoughts exist.

The UK is also notoriously surveilled and their crime rate is right on-par with the US.

You could spend the rest of your life coming up with conjectures that look elegant but are ultimately false. Disproof by counterexample only works if it's false, and we shouldn't be satisfied with a false conjecture to begin with.

There's a lot of value in having your product's name be synonymous with the product category.

Google's quality has gone to shit, but internet searching is still "googling", both in verbiage and in the actual service people use. It's not an impenetrable moat, but OpenAI would have to stumble pretty hard to lose all of that edge.

Cosmic rays, launch costs, relative impossibility of maintenance, difficulty of heat dispersal, added latency, interconnect interference, no way to recycle when decommissioning.

Or we could build a power line.

In a thread about movies, it's perhaps more relevant to talk about how those two platforms handle movies.

In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX".

The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Buy or rent it now.", and the buttons on the page for an individual movie are labeled "Buy $X.XX" and "Rent $X.XX".

There's a pretty clear difference between a lawsuit by 8 individuals, vs one filed by attorneys general representing a combined ~100m people.

I didn't say whether I thought it was a huge problem. I just said it was a problem, and identified the largest contributor to that problem.

But really, what point are you trying to make? I don't need to think that satellites glinting in the night sky are the literal worst problem facing humanity for that to be a valid topic of discussion.

More than 2/3 of all active satellites are part of the SpaceX/Starlink constellation, and it's a full 3/4 of those in LEO, which are the biggest contributor to the glints we can see in the night sky.

They're such an enormous part of the problem that it does a disservice to the problem to not metaphorically shine a spotlight on them.

I had trouble finding another source that summed up the data so nicely, but other sources did corroborate these figures: https://satfleetlive.com/blogs/how-many-satellites-in-orbit/

I didn't ignore that. That solidly fits under "completely predictable colossal failure".

But the next 50 years of funding they received came from money we spent prior to us leaving. Certainly we could have done a better job with the withdrawal (to put it lightly), but it's nonetheless good that we aren't still spending money there.

The Afghanistan exit was a completely predictable colossal failure, but it did mean we stopped lighting money on fire in Afghanistan.

The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country.

If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basically the same position as Russia is with Ukraine, but with no appetite to puts boots on the ground (not that we should, but it's the only way to "win").

Part of why I like "tech debt" as a term. Much like actual financial debts, some tech debt has a low enough interest rate or is easy enough to declare bankruptcy on that it's not worth paying off.

What about the people receiving traffic that fraudulently looks like it's coming from a different location?

But the revenue is coming out of the same org. That $5bn revenue only exists because of the $4.85bn expense. That money doesn't exist to put into bonds unless it's coming out of the games org. They can only make their margin percent look better by making their absolute margin $150mm worse.

Those will be cheaper and/or more powerful. If that's all you care about, then the Steam Machine probably isn't worth the price or wait.

But they'll also be bigger, louder, probably not support HDMI-CEC, may or may not support waking via bluetooth, and it's a gamble whether they'll support Linux as well. Both are totally valid options, it just comes down to which tradeoffs you prefer.

You, via your electeds, (in theory) have more power over a datacenter in your own jurisdiction than not. Though that does depend a lot on your electeds not being in the pocket of the datacenter's owners, and on the regulatory environment of the country/state leaving power available to city/county officials to do anything.

CEC support was added in to the Dock in May 2024 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200?emclan=10358...

Bluetooth wake made available for LCD Decks in September 2025 (it was already available in OLED models) https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/4983336...

I will say that the Deck has less than stellar bluetooth reception in my experience too. I settled on an 8bitdo controller because my XBox Elite couldn't stay connected from across the room. The Steam Machine has a dedicated antenna for Steam Controllers though.

Both Google and Amazon know a great deal about me and my purchasing habits. Neither shows me ads that feel very relevant.

The Steam Deck itself doesn't have an HDMI port, but the official dock does, and that does support HDMI-CEC (support was added to SteamOS a couple years ago). The Steam Deck also does support controller wake from sleep (added in the past year or so); I've actually seen people complaining about their Steam Decks waking up when they didn't realize that feature existed.

And all of the reviews I've seen about the Steam Machine talk about how well both of those features work.

I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.

You can't build a machine which is as powerful, small, quiet, and cheap, nor can you take for granted that a machine you build can have a controller that can wake it from sleep, or which has HDMI-CEC (both are possible, but take extra work or hardware). You can rather easily build a machine with multiple of those attributes, but you'll have to pick ones to sacrifice in the name of the others.

Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.

There's a lot of capital that stands to gain from banning local AI, but there's also a lot that wins either way, or only wins if local AI sticks around.

Apple is paying for their cloud AI, but they can make customers buy devices for local AI. There's all the PC and Android handset makers (ASUS, HP, countless Chinese brands, etc.) who only really stand to gain from selling hardware to customers. Not to mention that Nvidia/AMD/Intel would all happily take a cut on both halves of the ecosystem.

I worked at a car company. It's not arrogance, it's greed. They do want their own proprietary infotainment to be good, but it's more that they don't want to abdicate control, both out of a possessive feeling over what you're looking at, and over the potential for selling you access to their own stuff on that screen.

What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown

Rich congresspeople already don't need their paycheck. I want more people in congress who need their paycheck, not more who don't.