vharuck

I find that I care more when copyright violations cause actual harm to the copyright owner. Let's say there's an American kid who can't speak Japanese but wants to keep up with a weekly manga. He downloads a bootleg translation and shares it among his friend group. That is a copyright violation, but meh. If he hadn't gone the illegal route, he'd more likely just not read it at all. There's very little chance he'd pay for a subscription and learn Japanese.

Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.

When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.

I vaguely remember a saying I read here once:

A tech lover has a home full of smart appliances and systems. A tech expert has a computer, a modem, a printer, and a revolver lying next to the printer in case it makes a sound they don't recognize.

And some people keep them as pets.

I can personally vouch for them being great pets. They're active during the day, hunt prey, don't need much food or water, and tend to "hide" in silk cases they build along the top of their terrariums so you can always see them. They like to get water from inside flowers, and probably can differentiate between many colors, so adding bright flowers not only makes things prettier, it provides a watering hole and possible hunting advantage over color-blind insects trying to hide.

Of course, if you don't want to set up a terrarium and personally sentence crickets to death, just look at the screens in your windows. Odds are, a jumping spider is already living there and will stay as long as you let it. They're territorial.

Math is a terrible example. Euclid's "Elements" was a core book in Western math education for millennia, and it uses drawn geometric proofs. The proofs are then described in Greek, but the rigorous definitions are the pictures. A lot of mathematical fields can be reasoned about and explored by imagining shapes and objects. The end results today are written in notation because this is a standard language that helps clarify ideas.

I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated.

That's why we have a system where representatives of districts do research, debate, and hash out those details while the public who votes for them is able to contact them.

I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.

That's odd to say after admitting you don't know what the regulation would look like. Especially after seeing the "easily reversible" tariffs from this White House, which changed erratically and had exceptions for people who sweet talked the president.

My wife and I set up sleep shifts during the first two months. I would sleep from 9 PM to 3 AM, then we'd spend an hour all together, then she'd sleep from 4 AM to 10 AM. During a person's sleep time, they were not to be disturbed except for an emergency. We'd also sleep anytime the baby was napping.

It kept us sane. Just knowing that we would each get hours of uninterrupted sleep was great.

I'm glad to hear the teenage drummer I used to see when googling myself has gone pro. He's doing pretty well, too, if these models can be trusted.

If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.

While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.

This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.

Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.

Take the National Basketball Players Association as an example. They represent NBA players and collectively bargained for a minimum wage, benefits, and processes to address grievances with management. NBA players aren't all paid the same, and they don't have identical terms in their contracts. The union sets the floor.

They joined Republicans in limiting presidential power after Watergate. Granted, these limitations usually come after gross abuses. But these are gross abuses, and there's no reason to think they won't get grosser.

I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.

Why would they ever fix the system. Some number of people will just pay it and those people are pure profit. Heck, fixing the system costs money.

The system is run by employees of whatever agency handles taxes. Neither the employees nor the agency keep a portion of the taxes. If they do not have the money or will to fix it, people are supposed to pressure their representatives to give them the money and mandate.

If this truly came down to an intent to squeeze more money out of people than they owed, that would almost always come from the law's wording. Again, pressure the representatives.

The only times an agency would squeeze money is when it's funded in large part by fines or fees, or if an employee is committing fraud and pocketing some of the money.

I use ad blockers on my personal computer and phone to avoid tracking. My work computer doesn't have a blocker, but I only visit "professional" sites and major blog aggregators on it, so those ads aren't egregious. Ad blockers wouldn't have become a thing of it weren't for ads causing terrible layout, poor performance, and annoying interruptions when playing sound. Not every website does it, but the ones that do have poisoned the well.

No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹:

For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

100 years ago, horror stories featured wizard-like scientists using electricity to perform magic. A few decades after that, it was nuclear fission. Then quantum mechanics decades after that.

Magical thinking will always live in the new.

Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.

I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."

I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?

Did both the president and vice president attend past dinners? I thought protocol was to rarely have them in the same location, in case of something like this.

A lot of Ukiyo-e wood prints have small details that mean a lot to locals. I enjoy learning about them on the NHK's English channel.

In this case, the boats are fast (each has a bunch of crewmen) and were used to catch valuable fish. And the boats on the right have two people not at work (barely discernable in TFA's recreation). Those people were on break, getting ready to replace tired oarsmen. That way, the boat could be moving at all times.

I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.

I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.

Sure it serves their immediate purposes but what are the long term consequences of this? Do these people realize that every time they sell a piece of their soul to increase their personal wealth it destroys a piece of their society? Do they care?

It makes me wonder, at what amount of wealth does it stop being "F%ck you" money and start being a ranking on the scoreboard?

Gift link to NY Times article by the authors of the act:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/section-702-surve...

People need to be careful about buying into the shorthand lingo with LLMs. They do not learn like we do. At the lowest level, they predict which tokens follow a body of tokens. This lets them emulate knowledge in a very useful way. This is similar to a time series model of user activity: the time series model does not keep tabs on users to see when they are active, it has not read studies about user behavior, it just reflects a mathematical relationship between points of data.

For an LLM and this "vague" domain expertise, even if none of the LLM's training material includes certain nuggets of wisdom, if the material includes enough cases of problems and the solutions offered by domain experts, we should expect the model to find a decent relationship between them. That the LLM has never ingested an explicit documentation of the reasoning is irrelevant, because it does not perform reasoning.

They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!

I agree with the gist of your points, but not much with these two:

followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off.

These will be rare boutique affairs. Based on how mass production and cheap shipping played out, most people value price over quality. The economy will rearrange itself around those savings, making boutique products and services expensive.

mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit.

We have this today. And that's not a "same as it ever was" dismissal. Today, there are a lot of terminally online people posting the equivalent of propaganda (and actual propaganda). Social media pushes hot takes in audiences' faces, a portion of them reshare it, and it spreads exponentially. The only limitation to propaganda today is how much time the audience spends staring at the "correct" content provider.

if you value say "economy" more than "time", you spend a lot of time to save a few cents, but if you reverse that stack order your spend extra cents to avoid spending the time. If the person you're dating has a very different stack than you do, it will be a source of problems going forward and doesn't suggest you'll have a successful marriage.

This exact difference exists between my wife and I. For example, when her car needed a replacement part, she enlisted her dad in an effort to find the cheapest part on eBay, attempt to replace it themselves, and then shop around for the cheapest mechanic to install the part they bought. When my car needed a part replaced, I took it to the dealership where I bought it. I figured they'd have the part on hand and know how to do it right. They would overcharge, but not a criminal amount.

We've come to an understanding: I like to use money to reduce stress. She likes to save money because it gives her a feeling of accomplishment. Not very different from hobbies.

Men are also often the primary breadwinners in families, so they feel the need to take a higher paying job. In families where the husband's job pays well, the wife's career can be decided by personal fulfillment. Teachers are respected (but not paid well), nurses are respected and can earn a good amount, and social work is a very self-fulfilling role (I don't think society holds them in esteem more than other professionals).

If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more. That's the simplicity of capitalism and free markets. We bend ourselves into knots trying to find clever and (maybe) cheaper solutions to thorny problems.

In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.

If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.

I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?

What dissenting voices are being imprisoned?

There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.

ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.

If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.

Even if we accept that this would've been enough for a complete shift in how women give birth within France, how does that spread across the world?

France was renowned as being at the frontier of medicine. At least, according to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum (which I'd recommend visiting for anyone in the area). People around the world looked to it for cutting edge techniques.

We're fine, the trick is to remember to GET OFF THE INTERNET and remember that reality isn't the same as the Internet.

I can understand how somebody could hold onto this comfort: it used to be (mostly) true. Political "scandals" were usually either truly bad but localized (e.g. a politician caught and kicked out for bribery) or performative furor (e.g. a lapel pin).

It's different now. Those times were our "pro wrestling" era: earnest professionals who put in the work but also put on a show to keep the fans. No matter how dirty the script got, everyone made sure the lights stayed on. Now we're in the "teenage street gang" era. The "show" is actually how they see the world, participants literally delight in physical pain, and citizens on the sidelines are only terrorized.

How anyone could think things would be fine after what the childhood vaccine panel tried to do is beyond me. Or Noem withholding relief funds. Or blanket tariffs without any further plan for improving our industries. Those acts have huge negative effects across the population. The vast majority of citizens have been needlessly harmed by those choices.