Overzeetop

I think it doesn’t go far enough. Straight up, no one should be permitted to create or transmit the likeness of anyone [prior to, say, 20 years following their death] without their explicit, written permission. Make the fine $1,000,000 or 10% of the offender’s net worth, whichever is greater; same penalty and corporate revocation for any corporation involved. Everyone involved from the prompt writer to the work-for-hire people should be liable for the full penalty. I can’t think of a valid, non-entertainment (parody/humor), reason for non-consensual impersonation - and using it for humor or parody is a slippery slope to propaganda weaponization. There is no baby in this tub of bathwater.

Itemized invoice:

Fan $ 7
Design & overhead to incorporate fan into design $ 13
Value of increased performance, as judged by the accounting department $480

You sully the good name of Internet Pirates, sir or madam. I’ll have you know that online pirates have a code of conduct and there is no value in promulgating an anti-ai or anti-anti-ai stance within the community which merely wishes information to be free (as in beer) and readily accessible in all forms and all places.

You are correct that the pirates will always win, but they(we) have no beef with ai as a content generation source. ;-)

Its a joke - yes.

Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It’s harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.

Sad, but true. About the only way to control it would be to require online comments to be directly identifiable to the person. Even Republicans appear to be embarrassed - and attempt to expunge their vitriol - when their homophobic, misogynistic, and racist comments and activities online are publicized. And even that wouldn’t eliminate it, it would just push it back underground to further fester.

And we know how strict these big companies are about voluntary compliance to the GDPR. ;-) I’m glad at least someone is putting in rules against this fuckery but, sadly, once that data is sold to the first outside vendor (Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, etc.) it’s out there and lives on the internet forever, even if the big boys are brought to heel by the EU.

If you’ve ever had a contact allow a service to read their contacts, you are in their database. That then gets cross-referenced with the (relatively few) online store providers the first time you use that address - or the obfuscated emailname.store@* version that was meant to serialize or identify spammers but which the simplest script can undo. Now your shipping/billing address, phone, and partial purchase history can be linked with every social media company that weird chick who did upside down keg hits with you that one night decided to allow contact access. Or your aunt Gertrude.

And it’s not even that complicated. Are you in the contacts list of anyone who has ever used the internet? Google, yahoo, or microsoft definitely know who you are in their internal databases and can create a web of contacts and likely contacts just from a couple of emails. Heck, I remember when there were “contact synchronization” websites where you could transfer your contacts between gmail addresses, or to/from other mail services. It was free, so I can just about guarantee they’re selling all of your info, which has been checked and corroborated by however many of your contacts decided to use their services.

That “not having” Facebook or [insert nearly any other major information-based corporation] means that those companies don’t have your information and profile already completed in their database.

So…does it allow you to eventually download the files, or are you limited to simply streaming from the remote cache?

If you pay the one time fee or the subscription fee, the system unlocks all the paid features for all of the users on your account. Under your account you can have multiple users, each with their own viewing history (and restrictions, iirc). So if your users log into Plex on their devices using your account username and password - abbadon420 and Hunter1 - and then select their user profile, they will all have access to the features.

The one time fee unlocks forever (the lifetime of Plex, of course) and the subscription unlocks the features for the term of the subscription and then you revert back.

Meta, Microsoft, … Amazon

Yeah, that’s not a group I would associate with communal altruism.

some kind of libertarian

There is only one kind of libertarian - the worst kind. Modern libertarianism is just a cover story for fascist, racist beliefs and they are anathema to a functioning society. State governments in the US have been created in a lopsided image by corporations and religious zealots by gaming the election system to promote their financial well being (yes, religion is just another business these days). A true libertarian would find any kind of law like this to be government over-reach and an imposition on personal expression and enjoyment. “Vote with your feet” is a nice sentiment for the rich and well connected, but is impractical for most people in today’s society.

These politicians are knee-jerking to the religious right who want these things banned because it scares them. They will make up any excuse or lie to support their case. They will point to sex trafficking and slavery as the result of pornography, and will throw up foolish road blocks - like this law - as a purported way to save the children, but will never raise a finger or donate a penny to support sex trafficking victims or victims of abuse because they feel that those people deserve their fate for not following their religion.

I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.

We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.

I don’t even know why we want them to move. If they want to be hateful and angry - let them squabble amongst themselves. And let Reddit hire paid moderators if they want to manage it. It’s officially not our problem.

Put another way: Those who fall behind get left behind.

That’s financially untenable. Average cost to retrain on a new system is between 500-1000 hours to equivalent competency, per user, not including translation and recreation of new templates and automated processing routines - which are the backbone of modern engineering and architectural practices. At an average billing rate of $150/hr, that’s around $100,000 economic cost *per employee * just in lost time, plus actual training budget and software licenses.

Moving systems in established engineering businesses is wildly expensive and disruptive. I’ve worked through a couple in other offices, and had to navigate one or two in my own office. I would retire tomorrow rather than have to move my office to a new CAD system, and I don’t have nearly the legacy files of a larger firm.

It would have been a brilliant business move if it had worked. Shysters and cheats have been mixing in expired or substandard additives to food and drug products for all of history. As long as nobody dies, and you don’t get caught, it’s just free money in your pocket. I believe it was Heintz, around the turn of the 20th century, who lobbied strongly in favor of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in the US because he felt it would give him a competitive advantage over others by requiring the additives in food be safe. Crazy concept, right?

I’m with you. I make fun of people who walk off of cliffs while trying to get that perfect selfie. Individually, it’s very sad. But they were also excessively stupid.

Added to this is that the occupants of the sun are not, on any way, sympathetic individuals. They weren’t doing it to feed their family, or to flee oppression, or to advance scientific knowledge. They were people so rich they paid ten years of normal-people wages for a joyride to look at a ship that is the graveyard from a hundred year old tragedy. And the leader was a fake-it-till-you-make-it slimy, rich businessman who lied about his abilities and contacts and flaunted every regulation put in place to keep people safe.

I also make light of it because my job, as a licensed professional engineer, is to make sure the places people live and work are safe. Safe in a hurricane. Safe in an earthquake. Safe in a blizzard. Safe when they’re dancing with friends in a nightclub. I see people- businessmen with greater love for money i their pocket then their respect for the lives of others- try and skirt the regulations which are written in the blood of people from our past. I fucking hate people like Stockton Rush because he’s a danger to himself and others and he lies and uses his family’s amassed wealth to circumvent the very process which attempts to give everyone a fighting chance. I can be sad for the son who was rightfully scared to go, or for the explorer who may have been duped as to the crafts safety but I’m personally thrilled that Rush is no longer living on this earth and am sad that his death, in particular, may have been painless.

So, like today.

Can’t really say I disagree.

I used to be all over usenet. Starting about 10-12 years ago most of the indexers turned to shit; either that or takedowns have eviscerated the back catalog of content from providers. I’ve yet to find a good tracker that can find anything (that’s more than 12-24 hours old).