Except that’s not even how most bus systems work because most of them are majority funded by taxes with fares originally meant to serve as a stopgap but then slowly converted into a profit engine (usually after privitization). Fares are a way to gatekeep a service which your taxes already pay for, which I would argue, is by itself a form of theft.

As an example check out the latest MTA report only 26% of funding comes from fares, and that ones a bit in the higher end from what I’ve seen (NYC public transit, picked as the example a it’s recently been in the news for issues with fare evasion)

All that aside, it’s also worth noting that fare increases are extremely unpopular and it’s not that easy to increase them without potential serious backlash (ie the mass protests in Chile a few years back that were in part set off by the fare hikes.)

This is a classic case of “tech journalism”… If you follow the sources the source of the data and it’s methodology uses the CBECI which the latest update lists a range of 75-384 TWh. (Note that the “2%” listed in the parent article is the global power consumption of the Bitcoin network compared to the US electrical network, aka a bad faith comparison). It explicitly states:

The upper-bound estimate corresponds to the absolute maximum power demand of the Bitcoin network. While useful for providing a quantifiable maximum, it is a purely hypothetical value that is non-viable for various reasons…

Which of course is the estimate that the journalists use for this peice.

There’s also a bunch of likely issues within the methodology as it’s estimate is largely based on the number of ASICs produced; the assumption that “mining nodes (‘miners’) are rational economic agents that only use profitable hardware.” and that any amount profit is sufficient to keep a mining operation ongoing; and many others. It actually does a pretty good job of disclosing a lot of the methodology flaws within the link above.

My goal is just to call out bad/lazy journalism and what I assume is oil/gas distractionary tactics. Electricity is ~38% of US energy consumption and even that maximum bound of 2% when comparing it to the global Bitcoin network is practically negligible when contextualized.

If you build a base on/near a bunch of ore nodes and dedicate it entirely to mining your pals will mine it for you and it respawns daily (passive ore generation ftw!!!)

Another factor was the PPP and other “totally not bailouts” that were part of the COVID relief spending.

Of the roughly $800 billion dollars from PPP which was provided as uncollateralized, low-interest loans 66-77% went directly to companies and ~92% of those loans were completely forgiven.. In other words an ~5-600M bailout predicated on keeping positions open long enough to maintain plausible deniability that is what the goal was.

So… Just like probation?

I can’t tell if sarcasm… If not why?

No, that’s the current legal precedent within the US.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft

The court opinion:

“The Court finds two of the four factors weigh in favor of fair use, and two weigh against it. The first and fourth factors (character of use and lack of market harm) weigh in favor of a fair use finding because of the established importance of search engines and the “transformative” nature of using reduced versions of images to organize and provide access to them. The second and third factors (creative nature of the work and amount or substantiality of copying) weigh against fair use.”

That “compression is transformative” principle has been pretty solidly enshrined as precedence at this point (IE Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.) however with no real guidelines as to what amount is required to be considered transformative

The major argument as to whether the sort of LLM training in the parent article still constitutes fair use or not depends on whether there exists “market harm” or the “substantiality of copying” is especially egregious (note that these are the two fronts that the NYT is taking.) There is precedence for copying of style not being fair use Dr. Seuss Enters., L.P. v. Penguin Books USA, Inc. which I suspect is why NYT is approaching it the way that they are…

Now, all that being said, my personal opinion is fuck the US legal system and fuck copyright. There is no solution to the core issues surrounding this topic that isn’t inherently contradictory and/or just a corporate power grab. However, the “techbro idiots” are “right” and you’re not, but it’s because they are idiots who are largely detached from any sort of material reality and see no problem with subjecting the rest of us to their insanity.

You should think a bit more about that “ladder” concept. In the same way that advocating for manumission doesn’t fix any of the issues with slavery a “path to the rights of the group above” doesn’t fix any of the issues with an apartheid state.

Unless you’re fine with a little genocide, any apartheid state is not a solution.

“All models are wrong, some are useful.”

It’s not, the underlying data is still just as biased. Taking a bunch of white people and saying they are “ethnically ambiguous” is just statistical blackface.

✓ Open source generative AI

✓ Disney model

✓ Federated

Mock away :D

1. That looks like a pretty standard utility tunnel. The video conveniently stops at the “blast door” which isn’t actually weird because electricity is hella dangerous. I would be willing to bet the most dangerous thing found behind that door is a surge arrestor.

2. The hostages being led inside the hospital isn’t great, but it looks to me like they needed medical attention. What would you prefer happen? If I were a hostage and needed medical attention I would much rather live in a world where the hospital cooperates with the “baddies” to provide that medical care and do the “recovery” later, wouldn’t you?

3. Those videos show living hostages. If the goal is to recover the hostages then why is the IDF only recovering bodies?

Based on that evidence you provided I would offer the counter-narrative that it appears that Hamas is trying their best to keep the hostages alive while the IDF prefers them martyred.

It’s not defeatist, it’s pushing back against the wishful thinking that “voting with your dollar” is effective and your responsibility ends there.

That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying the act of “not buying it” (even if it was a complete and total boycott) has no impact on the production due to the system of subsidies, futures, derivatives, etc. that is set up explicitly to make sure production continues. And therefore has no impact on land/water usage, suffering etc.

With the point being that it’s a good first step, but if your expectation is it will change anything without first changing the underlying system you will be very disappointed.

You are making the false assumption that your consumption is causative to the production of animal products which is, unfortunately and non-intuituvely, untrue. The only difference between vegan and non-vegan diets is whether animal products end up on your plate vs. in “cheese mountain” type stockpiles, exports, landfills, etc.

That being said, ‘commie’ is a terrible communicator if that’s what they’re trying to say. Going vegan does help to highlight some of the contradictions of capitalism and you’re on the right track as it should be advocated for. However, the ‘invisible hand of the free market’ does not translate veganism to any reduction in farmed animals, land or water use.

That’s the point…

Yep! It’s known as “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”.

No, I think you just misunderstand what the propogandist’s job is…

The academic name for the field is quite literally “machine learning”.

You are incorrect that these systems are unable to create/be creative, you are correct that creativity != consciousness (which is an extremely poorly defined concept to begin with …) and you are partially correct about how the underlying statistical models work. What you’re missing is that by defining a probabilistic model to objects you can “think”/“be creative” because these models dont need to see a “blue hexagonal strawberry” in order to think about what that may mean and imagine what it looks like.

I would recommend this paper for further reading into the topic and would like to point out you are again correct that existing AI systems are far from human levels on the proposed challenges, but inarguably able to “think”, “learn” and “creatively” solve those proposed problems.

The person you’re responding to isn’t trying to pick a fight they’re trying to help show you that you have bought whole cloth into a logical fallacy and are being extremely defensive about it to your own detriment.

That’s nothing to be embarrassed about, the “LLMs can’t be creative because nothing is original, so everything is a derivative work” is a dedicated propaganda effort to further expand copyright and capital consolidation.

It doesn’t aim to destroy extensions but point #1 within the problem statement:

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.