381–390 of 418 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> USian American. Please avoid the childish term "USian" unless you're going to commit to calling people from South Africa "SAian" too.
To be fair, "american" could refer to anything made in the American continent (North, Central and South America)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett... My…
Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse. The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over. The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially expl…
My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.
Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.
> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.
Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resource…
"Entities with more resources" are not necessarily bad, as you seem to assume. In reality, they're not aligned with eachother. This is just as true for nation states as it is for individuals. When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship…
The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929. Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929. Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves. This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corpor…
The 3/5 of slave population vote were given to the slaveholders. It was not proportional, it was giving structural advantage to pro-slavery side of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Entities with more resources" are not necessarily bad, as you seem to assume. In reality, they're not aligned with eachother. This is just as true for nation states as it is for individuals. When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship…
You're not describing a world of freedom and opportunity. You're describing a world where anyone with money can do whatever they want without consequences. The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.
The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols. Ideas will clash, leaving only what people think is good in common. And that is the definition of the common good.
Do you have any better ideas? Or do you think that you possess the superior definition of "good" such that public discourse to search for it is unnecessary?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not describing a world of freedom and opportunity. You're describing a world where anyone with money can do whatever they want without consequences. The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.
The world I'm describing is one where anyone, rich and poor, can say whatever they want without being silenced or persecuted, without fear. People with more resources will have the means to make themselves louder in public as they do now, but unlike the situation we have right now, they will not be able to monitor other people's private conversations, nor can they censor and compell other people's speech. That's a wo…
> The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols
This does not match reality. Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion. If you think they cancel each other out you're living in a fantasy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, just because 99% of cryptocurrencies are a scam doesn't mean that crypto as a whole is a scam.
Ok. Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world? I can think of nothing.
The nice thing about the Internet is that a person, great or small, can voice their grandiose and yet myopic views of a problem and their absurd solutions to it...freely.
I miss when the Internet was mostly a collection of myopic views from naive people.
There's a strong overlap between technopositivists who view the world through a very narrow lens of the problems they are trying to solve and libertarians who also have a very narrow view based on problems they are trying to solve(taxation, fettered liberty, gov waste, etc). I don't want to say it's autism, but they both seem to stem from a very low-dimensional understanding of the world. I get it, having been in bot…
Yet your comment has a naive dismissal of anarchism as ‘teenage politics’ which betray a lack of understanding the rich history and meaning behind anarchism, which is common these days. Dismissing it wholesale is like dismissing physics because you think string theory is silly.