DrScientist

7 ms·

1.
by DrScientist 6d ago
Eh? They didn't/aren't using their stockpiles to anywhere near the extent the US has! There reserves are much bigger - they have about a years supply - yet they used less in absolute terms than the US! What they did was aggre
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by DrScientist 6d ago
Using that lens then you could view the Iran war is simply a failed ( so far ) attempt to grab Iranian oil revenues, perhaps emboldened by the relatively quick success of the Venezuela adventure. The truth is probably much more multi-headed
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by DrScientist 6d ago
Blaming the current situation on the actions of China is beyond bizarre.
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by DrScientist 7d ago
The original posters premise was the way to make government dragnet surveillance banned was to do a public one. In general it's a good principle however I'm not sure in this case. I can see how a public flock, which is just a quer
5.
by DrScientist 7d ago
Sure. That's a problem with the whole AI space - it's eating itself at a incredibly rate. Ultimately if they add value and behave well they might carve out a market - but anything in the software space right now is a gamble.
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by DrScientist 8d ago
As far as I can see there is no clear pricing once you go beyond the free tier - it's contact sales. This is actually a classic enterprise software approach - as there are no fixed per unit production costs to cover, the pricing is ver
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by DrScientist 8d ago
Your Harry Potter case is a good illustration. The world Harry Potter universe clearly borrows heavily on past literature - whether that be tales of goblins and wizards or tales of boarding school. So much so ( and the fact that she is very
8.
by DrScientist 8d ago
I'm trying to distinguish the collection of information from the use . Collection is legal - however there is no point to collecting it if you can't actually use it for anything. For example: https://www.pbs.org/n
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by DrScientist 8d ago
Another area that's also existed for quite a while is the crowd-sourcing of the positions of mobile speed traps. Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.
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by DrScientist 8d ago
It's legal to film publically - what's not necessarily legal is what you then do with that. There are already precedents - for example it's legal to film ICE agents in public spaces, it's not necessarily legal to use inf
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by DrScientist 8d ago
Good point.
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by DrScientist 8d ago
By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement. Isn't the way to focus o
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by DrScientist 8d ago
> It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed. I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it. For example if I buy a physical book, I own it.
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by DrScientist 8d ago
The fact that the laws of the land are more accessible to people/entities with deep pockets is true across the board - it's not specifically a copyright issue. That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics o
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by DrScientist 8d ago
> As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, That's an argument for no laws at all. There are murders so why make it illegal..... The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space
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by DrScientist 8d ago
What happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow. Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication? Or because I refuse to pub
17.
by DrScientist 8d ago
In a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers. What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
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by DrScientist 15d ago
Hmm - childlessness ( note this is different from reduced family size ), almost doubled for women in China between 2010 and 2020, and over a similar period the female suicide rate has halved. How do you explain that? Sure having children is
19.
by DrScientist 16d ago
I think war caused by conflict for resources is a much more probably cause of societal collapse, and indeed extinction. Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that. Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate ch
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by DrScientist 16d ago
I was responding to 2 assertions, used to justify an argument, that clearly don't hold water. ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy'
21.
by DrScientist 16d ago
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not. Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population
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by DrScientist 16d ago
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here? You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constra
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by DrScientist 21d ago
> trackpad quality This
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by DrScientist 21d ago
And of course the 18 billion recent Meta settlement - agreed to potentially stop a law suit that could have unravelled the whole company.
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by DrScientist 23d ago
Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc. AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation. For example Apple mentioned perfor
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by DrScientist 23d ago
It's cheaper to be rich, and expensive to be poor.
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by DrScientist 24d ago
The latest and largest Uber fine - 825 million. https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966... Also, in the UK, lost their 5 year battle about whether drivers are self-employed or workers for Uber. ht
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by DrScientist 24d ago
How about an AI startup up that automatically finds companies whose stated business model is to flout existing laws, and then initiates legal proceedings. Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
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by DrScientist 24d ago
Indeed. Perhaps we will go from: framework X -> avoid writing boiler plate to AI -> avoid writing boiler plate And AI may generate the more explicit boiler plate more reliably directly, than the higher level framrwork with leaky abstr
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by DrScientist 28d ago
Read my post again. I accept that the US pays over the odds for drugs. I don't accept that's the driving force behind overall health care costs - as 2.78x cost for something that's only 10% of overall costs doesn't get y

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