Because it is harmful to the creators that use the value of their work to make a living.
There already exists a choice in the marketplace: creators can attach a permissive license to their work if they want to. Some do, but many do not. Why do you suppose that is?
you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship
Yes, I believe creative works should be protected as that expression has value and in a digital world it is too simple to copy and deprive the original author of the value of their work. This applies equally to Disney and Tumblr artists.
I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it’s pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.
I’ll repeat what you said with emphasis:
AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does
The emphasized part is incorrect. It’s not the same, yet your argument seems to be that because (your claim) it is the same, then it’s no different from a human reading all of these books.
Regarding your last point, copyright law doesn’t just kick in because you try to pass something off as an original (by, for ex, marketing a book as being from a best selling author). It applies based on similarity whether you mention the original author or not.
AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does
This statement is the basis for your argument and it is simply not correct.
Training LLMs and similar AI models is much closer to a sophisticated lossy compression algorithm than it is to human learning. The processes are not at all similar given our current understanding of human learning.
AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?
The current Disney lawsuit against Midjourney is illustrative - literally, it includes numerous side-by-side comparisons - of how AI models are capable of recreating iconic copyrighted work that is indistinguishable from the original.
If a machine can replicate your writing style because it could identify certain patterns, words, sentence structure, etc then as long as it’s not pretending to create things attributed to you, there’s no issue.
An AI doesn’t create works on its own. A human instructs AI to do so. Attribution is also irrelevant. If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).
Even if it didn’t outright display the code you need to enter, my guess is this and similar implementations hide further vulnerabilities like: the numbers aren’t generated with a secure random number generator, or the validation call isn’t resistant to simple brute force quickly guessing every possible number, or the number is known client side for validation, etc.
Well that’s easy. The protests aren’t illegal. Therefore this amounts to nothing.
Fuck this dude.
If only this meant the removal of the annoying tiles for games that show up in the app above everything else (often using up the entire screen) even though I’ve never tapped on them once.
I don’t want your games Netflix. I barely want your shows.
Probably the best idea I guess as long as you can set the TV up without Internet.
I’m pretty happy with Chromecast currently for its simplicity. I meant to try and replace the TV firmware so it’s more or less a dumb TV that just displays its inputs without having ads and other gimmicks.
The TV I currently have is Android OS but the built in Chromecast is noticeably lower quality. Not sure if it’s an older version or what.
Regardless, IMO the displays themselves outlast their software support, and I prefer to just plug in whatever the latest device.
I’ll also mention Android OS on my TV takes a full minute to “boot” and that itself makes me want to yeet it out the window.
My TV is probably going to kick the bucket in a year or two at most. Filtering “non smart TVs” on a site like BestBuy shows only commercial display options at this point.
Are there any well maintained projects out there that are able to replace the firmware on newer smart TVs to get rid of these features? I really just want a dumb display with an input for a Chromecast with CEC support (or similar device if Google decides to enshittify that platform with screensaver ads too).
This is giving me 1998 MS Publisher vibes and I’m here for it.
“Prompt engineering” must be the easiest job to replace with AI. You can simply ask an LLM to generate and refine prompts.
That’s correct, it is just plain text and it can easily be spoofed. You should never perform an auth check of any kind with the user agent.
In the above examples, it wouldn’t really matter if someone spoofed the header as there generally isn’t a benefit to the malicious agent.
Where some sites get into trouble though is if they have an implicit auth check using user agents. An example could be a paywalled recipe site. They want the recipe to be indexed by Google. If I spoof my user agent to be Googlebot, I’ll get to view the recipe content they want indexed, bypassing the paywall.
But, an example of a more reasonable use for checking user agent strings for bots might be regional redirects. If a new user comes to my site, maybe I want to redirect to a localized version at a different URL based on their country. However, I probably don’t want to do that if the agent is a bot, since the bot might be indexing a given URL from anywhere. If someone spoofed their user agent and they aren’t redirected, no big deal.
User agents are useful for checking if the request was made by a (legitimate self-identifying) bot, such as Googlebot.
It could also be used in some specific scenarios where you control the client and want to easily identify your client traffic in request logs.
Or maybe you offer a download on your site and you want to reorder your list to highlight the most likely correct binary for the platform in the user agent.
There are plenty of reasonable uses for user agent that have nothing to do with feature detection.
Is fuckboy really a curse word?
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.