681–690 of 761 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what about it?
The comment to which I replied said Uber was better than taxis. The article I referenced details why that might not be the case, when it comes to passenger safety.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.
500,000 x $20 = $10 million Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor. Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.
The cost of the books is negligible in comparison.
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
Otherwise, of course they would tell them to just pound sand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
for recent books, they could buy digital version of the books and use them for training, though.
I was wondering about this, but digital versions are typical DRM-encumbered and actually a license (not a true purchase) whose terms probably don't allow this. The court's decision was that training is fair use, but in practice, it seems many avenues are blocked. It reminds of the theoretically public beaches that are blocked off by privately owned land.
If you point a camera at an ebook reader with a little motor to tap the screen, "next" that's still easier than scanning physical books.
The reason why companies aren't using ebooks is because all the publishers and ebook companies make you click through a license stating that "this book for personal use" (paraphrased).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple jobs to choose from. California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster. Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, left to go independent and makes a living based on a combination of podcasting, writing books and freelance writing and he said how much harder the rules made it for him to do freelance writing because of the requirenments around hiring contractors. Trust me, Snell is far fr…
> California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster. You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not. > Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it. Indeed. That's why governments and regulators eventually stepped in. You can't in good conscience or good faith argue that Ube…
My argument is simply that the only “labor protections” the government should enforce on private enterprise is that a company can’t actively harm employees - OSHA protections, discrimination etc.
> And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.
It’s up to individuals to decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it. It’s not the responsibility of private industry to calculate what a “living wage” is for an individual. Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber. If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger. But does the government stop people from working two jobs that might add up to 20 hours? What should happen when the driver drives for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash?
The illegal practices at least in New York were around taxi medallion monopoly where taxi drivers were getting in hundreds of thousands in debt to own them for the right to drive.
As far as not everyone being Jason Snell, there were other freelance writers and contractors like truck drivers who had to leave California to save their business
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/i-had-leave-california-save-...
It even affected 1099 (as opposed to W2) tech workers who were contractors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…
i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.
Uber at least has fixed rates from what was displayed and there are logs of which driver was doing dodgy stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which EU country reacted against Uber's predatory pricing when it was actually happening? Ie. which EU government refused investor money flowing into their economy? The only examples I can find are a few cities, and some of those are in the US. No EU state did, unless I'm missing something. Sure now that it costs them money, they're reacting, making things worse for literally everyone: the taxi drivers, who've been v…
A couple EU countries bans on Uber seem to date back from 2015-2019, which is slow, but still fairly early as to worldwide adoption per https://dig.watch/trends/uber
After few years of operation, government realised it was serious and pressured Uber to stop taxi operations « Uber pop », until disruption in legislation got through.
I used Uber from first year it was here. As the service got popular with young adults and the people took notice and public debate began, the police was instructed to fine Ubers. Then the drivers asked us passengers to sit up front and pretend we were friends. (Not sure if the app had instructions related to this or not.) Once the legislation change was clear, they closed operation officially for the brief period, as stated in the article.
I just thought it was exciting at the time..
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
Anthropic did. That was the part of their operation that they didn't get in trouble for, but the news spun it as "Anthropic destroyed millions of books to make AI".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL
I got to meet him and person and tell him that his books (along with The Coming Technological Singularity) had a huge influence on my decision to go into ML. He seemed pleased. I just wish he had wrapped up the Fire Upon the Deep series.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, training an employee with the scans: fair use. Unless legislation changes, model training is pretty much analogous to that. Now of course if the employee in question - or the LLM - regurgitates a copyrighted piece verbatim, that is a violation and would be treated accordingly in either case.
Computers aren't people. And analogies aren't laws.