Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

The candidate for rich people who resent poor people.

We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).

YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.

This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.

This is why we can’t relent, ever.

Sound like you’ve never gone hungry, or even suffered from precarity.

We are all monsters once we are desperate enough. Even you.

But then we, as a species, careen towards multiple great filters we are ill-prepared to navigate. We may be too savage to survive after all.

Wait, are you meaning to imply no one has ever suggested drivers should be allowed to run over protesters in then us? Bills submitted to red-state legislatures have made news.

Are you sure you want to try to take this hill?

The largest single project in the world is the US National Highway System, and yet, somehow, all our public transit and trans-national train services suck.

You must love your car so much.

Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don’t think Paramount Studios would buy anyone’s defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.

However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.

No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.

That’s part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in boosting their own profit gains.

Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art but from IP property of their own kin.

Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from the work of human creatives. But those artists mostly signed away their rights long ago to their publishing house masters. Since the ownership class controlled the presses, those contracts were far from fair.

Artists, today, routinely see their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and it’s embittering and soul-crushing. We’ve seen Hollywood accounting come into play throughout the last century. Famous actors are notoriously cheated out of residuals. (With the rise of the internet, and prior to that a few smart agents, we’ve seen a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)

The artists were screwed long before AI ever came around.

Instead this fight is about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin. But we’re already in squalor, anyway.

Can’t say you’re wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn’t yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren’t perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.

Well, it depends on whether you believe everyone is, to borrow from the US Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights.

Here in the States there’s actually a legal defense, Necessity . This is the same category under which self defense lies, that if a crime committed is necessary to preserve life and well being it may be justified or exculpable.

Usually the justifying life and limb cannot exceed the harm done by the crime. So in the case of cannibalism (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) one isn’t justified to kill someone else to preserve their own life, but if they happen to be dead already, it’s justified to eat their remains to live (as per the Donner Party incident – though in that case, they decided to eat their fallen after considerable deliberation)

It gets weird when, say, a mother breaks into a pharmacy and steals very expensive medicines in order to keep her kids alive because the price of the medications raises questions as to the value of a human life.

Now in the US, the courts are terribly corrupt, and thanks to prior incidents exculpation based on circumstances (e.g. Dan White’s twinkie defense) federal and state courts in the US are less likely to actually consider circumstances without some top lawyer guns making a big stink (usually hiring expert witnesses to painstakingly explain why those circumstances make a difference). So if you’re poor enough that you need to steal bread to live, you’re probably not going to benefit from a necessity defense, even when it should be valid.

Licenses are a wrongdoing against the state, and behaviors are licensed by the state allegedly in protection of the interests of the public. Licensed driving is to assure one is qualified to drive, so the wrongdoing against the community doesn’t happen until the driver is involved in an incident that brings harm to others (or to other public interests, such as the environment – driving into a lake would count).

But where this goes under necessity is that her occupation, and thus her survival may depend on her capacity to drive, and if the state is going to strip her of license, it has to take that into consideration, or deal with the consequences of motivating more crime.

Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I’d be interesting if little dogs – the robots – are used for couriers.) So it’s not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.

Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?

Because the automotive industry actively dismantled it in the early twentieth century and then lobbied ever since to redirect funding to highway maintenance? The largest single government project in existence in the US National Highway System.

Some people, when given a choice between cannibalism and dying of starvation will choose the former. The ones that do may choose to regret it, but they are alive to have the capacity to regret.

At the point that you are struggling to survive, any society that does not immediately render aid is no society at all (not to you), and is either an enemy, taking resources you need, or prey.

I find it unfathomable that people imagine that poor people and untermenschen should just resign themselves to dying off. It explains why the working class might resort to terror attacks to assert their right to exist.

Getting a job takes months on average. And the way our current system works, you have to lie about experience to get your first job, and then upgrade a couple of times to get a living wage with survival benefits. That takes years.

You have to eat and sleep today. If you have ongoing medical requirements, your healthcare can’t wait for a job.

This is like bullet deflectors to keep your gun from shooting holes in the propellor.

Yes, early WWI planes had them.

Does she need to work? Is commuting by public transit intolerably slower than driving a car?

It would justify the behavior.

Yes, but that model is late in the gravity game. We were toying with the two bodies experiment before heliocentrism, let alone higher-dimension curvature of space.

Eventually some pissed off engineer who knows a thing or two about color will create a conversion utility to allow GIMP to seamlessly work with CMYK.

That angry engineer might be you if you have friends who fill in the gaps within your own knowledge base.