Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 3 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • These folks are all giving great advice but also let us know when you’re ready to really fuck around and have fun with your Linux superpowers 😀

    You, in practically no time at all: “Nearly everything is working great! Now I want to make my desktop change it’s background to NASA’s picture of the day while also putting all my PC’s status monitors on there. Oh! And I want my PC to back itself up every hour over the network automatically with the ability to restore files I deleted last week. I’ve got KDE Connect on my phone and it’s awesome!”

    Then, later: “I bought a Raspberry Pi and I want to turn it into a home theater streaming system and emulation station.”

    …and later: “What docker images do you guys recommend? I want to setup some home automation. What do you guys think of Pi-hole?”

    “I’ve got four Raspberry Pis doing various things in my home and I’m thinking about getting Banana Pi board to be my router. OpenWRT or full Linux on it? What do you guys think?”

    …and even later: “I taught myself Python…” 🤣




  • The courts need to settle this: Do we treat AI models like a Xerox copier or an artist?

    If it’s a copier then it’s the user that’s responsible when it generates copyright-infringing content. Because they specifically requested it (via the prompt).

    If it’s an artist then we can hold the company accountable for copyright infringement. However, that would result in a whole shitton of downstream consequences that I don’t think Hollywood would be too happy about.

    Imagine a machine that can make anything… Like the TARDIS or Star Trek replicators. If someone walks up to the machine and says, “make me an Iron Man doll” would the machine be responsible for that copyright violation? How would it even know if it was violating someone’s copyright? You’d need a database of all copyrighted works that exist in order to perform such checks. It’s impossible.

    Even if you want OpenAI, Google, and other AI companies to pay for copyrighted works there needs to be some mechanism for them to check if something is copyrighted. In order to do that you’d need to keep a copy of everything that exists (since everything is copyrighted by default).

    Even if you train an AI model with 100% ethical sources and paid-for content it’s still very easy to force the model to output something that violates someone’s copyright. The end user can do it. It’s not even very difficult!

    We already had all these arguments in the 90s and early 2000s back when every sane person was fighting the music industry and Hollywood. They were trying to shut down literally all file sharing that exists (even personal file shares) and search engines with the same argument. If they succeeded it would’ve broken the entire Internet and we’d be back to using things like AOL.

    Let’s not go back there just because you don’t like AI.


  • From a copyright perspective, you don’t need to ask for permission to train an AI. It’s no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender. Since you’re not distributing anything when you do that you’re not violating anyone’s copyright.

    When the AI produces something though, that’s when it can run afoul of copyright. But only if it matches an existing copyrighted work close enough that a judge would say it’s a derivative work.

    You can’t copyright a style (writing, art, etc) but you can violate a copyright if you copy say, a mouse in the style of Mickey Mouse. So then the question—from a legal perspective—becomes: Do we treat AI like a Xerox copier or do we treat it like an artist?

    If we treat it like an artist the company that owns the AI will be responsible for copyright infringement whenever someone makes a derivative work by way of a prompt.

    If we treat it like a copier the person that wrote the prompt would be responsible (if they then distribute whatever was generated).








  • Forget small phones… I want bigger phones! Why do we keep making phones that appear to be made to appease people with small pockets‽

    Bigger screens are better! Give me a great big tri-fold phone with a week-long battery (as long as it’s under 10lbs it won’t be a problem!). Actually, fuck that: Where are our backpack phones? We used to have them in WW2 and now we have the technology to make them even better!

    I want the power to unfurl my monster phone to turn it into a portable 3-monitor gaming rig. Make it run regular Linux too so I can actually automate things and decide where I want to store my stuff (not in Google or Apple’s clouds!).