So no vetting at all presumably since you didn’t mention it? So how do you know that Dashlane is safer than a password scheme that might be guessed by someone after they’ve already compromised a couple of your passwords?

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.

Both su and sudo originally meant “superuser” because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to “switch user” because this functionality was added later.

It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU

The source code in this torrent is a clone of the git repo. I don’t know if there are missing branches but it should have the entirety of the master branch history at least.

I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it’s not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP’s copy). I can verify:

• that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies
• after that commit, OP’s copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant

So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github!

Clarifications:

• This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally
• I did not check branches other than master (yet?)
• I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo
• You don’t have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP… It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies.

I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.

First time I’ve heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

Aha I see what you’re saying. It’s possible that dr CD considered the second part to be crucial, but it doesn’t seem that people who listened to his message felt the same way, myself included. I probably speak for a lot of people when I say we hadn’t realized just how much these platforms are “subsidized” and how much damage that does to the entire market. So that part ended up being associated in our minds with the term enshittification.

“Enshitification” does not mean “I don’t like it”. It is specifically about platforms that start out looking too good to be true and turn to shit when the user base is locked in. The term is generally used for cases where the decline in quality was pre-planned and not due to external factors. Using the same term each time is, in my opinion, an appropriate way to point out just how common this pattern is.

If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I’m not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

If you don’t think that’s true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I’m “completely wrong” means nothing.

So help me out here, what am I missing?

You’re forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You’re just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

I’ll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

• You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
• The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino’s favor
• You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let’s see what the outcomes are:

• You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
• You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
• You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
• You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

So the expected outcome for you is:

$1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + … = -$0.1328…

So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can’t do this. That’s wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.

By the time you’re ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They’ve already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don’t know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.

Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.

I’m not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I’ve been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it’s definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.

I read through the article but it doesn’t seem to specify the nature of the book. How do we know it’s a “knock off”? It might very well be fanfiction. Copyright law aside, fanfiction can be original and is a valid artistic expression.

This is quite a nuanced issue. The author is claiming that the Rings of Power copied his ideas. Even if the author didn’t have the legal right to publish this book, he might have put original ideas into his work, and the Tolkien Estate should not automatically own these. The copyright owner “should” (within the current legal framework) be able to make you take down your derivative work, but they don’t own it. The article doesn’t specify why the original lawsuit was dismissed.

Want to release them in a repository some time, but they’re awfully hacky right now.

No, do it. And don’t forget to put a license on it. I’d rather have “hacky” answers to my question that I can improve on, rather than searching for how to do something and coming up with nothing.

Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.

Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.

just gimme the damn option.

That’s what they did initially. Unfortunately, keeping around an antiquated optional feature that no developer wants to work on isn’t free. It ends up being a hurdle for improving other stuff and at the same time it doesn’t work as well as the user would expect. There is more context here if you’re interested.

Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

That’s what I’m saying.

intentionally violate copyright

Why is it intentional? Some characters come up even in very generic prompts. I’ve been toying around with it and I’m finding it hard to come up with prompts containing “superhero” that don’t include superman in the outputs. Even asking explicitly for original characters doesn’t work.

For the most part it hasn’t happened.

And how do you measure that? You have a way for me to check if my prompt for “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance” is strikingly similar to some unknown person’s deviantart uploads, just like my prompt containing “original superhero” was to superman?

The status quo…

Irrelevant to the discussion. We’re talking about copyright law here, ie about what rights a creator has on their original work, not whether they decide to exercise them in regards to fan art.

until they get big enough

Right, so now that multi-billion dollar companies are taking in the work of everyone under the sun to build services threatening to replace many jobs, are they “big enough” for you? Am I allowed to discuss it now?

This is an argument-by-comparion.

It’s not an argument by comparison (or it is a terrible one) because you compared it to something that differs (or you avoided mentioning) all the crucial parts of the issue. The discussion around AI exists specifically because of how the data to train them is sourced, because of the specific mechanisms they implement to produce their output, and because of demonstrated cases of producing output that is very clearly a copy of copyrighted work. By leaving the crucial aspects unspecified, your are trying to paint my argument as being that we should ban every device of any nature that could produce output that might under any circumstances happen to infringe on someone’s copyright, which is much easier for you to argue against without having to touch on any of the real talking points. This is why this is a strawman argument.

You don’t own a copyright on a pattern

Wrong. In the context of training AI, I’m taking about any observable pattern in the input data, which does include some forms of patterns that are copyright-able, eg the general likeness of a character rather than a specific drawing of them.

your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful

My ideas on copyright are very progressive actually. But we’re not discussing my ideas, we’re discussing existing copyright law and whether the “transformation” argument used by AI companies is bullshit. We’re discussing if it’s giving them a huge and unearned break from the copyright system that abuses the rest of us for their benefit.

a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that’s never seen it.

Right, but then you would have to very strictly define Micky Mouse in your prompt. You would be the one providing this information, instead of it being part of the model. That would clearly not be an infringement on the model’s part!

But then you would have to also solve the copyright infringement of Superman, Obi-Wan, Pikachu, some random person’s deviantart image depicting “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance”, … . In the end, the only model that can claim without reasonable objection to have no tendency to illegally copy other peoples’ works is a model that is trained only on data with explicit permission.

If AI companies were predominantly advertising themselves as “we make your pictures of Micky mouse” you’d have a valid point.

Doesn’t matter what it’s advertised as. That picture is, you agree, unusable. But the site I linked to above is selling this service and it’s telling me I can use the images in any way I want. I’m not stupid enough to use Mickey Mouse commercially, but what happens when the output is extremely similar to a character I’ve never heard of? I’m going to use it assuming it is an AI-generated character, and the creator is very unlikely to find out unless my work ends up being very famous. The end result is that the copyright of everything not widely recognizable is practically meaningless if we accept this practice.

But at this point you’re basically arguing that it should be impossible to sell a magical machine that can draw anything you ask from it because it could be asked to draw copyright images.

Straw man. This is not a magical device that can “draw anything”, and it doesn’t just happen to be able to draw copyrighted images as a side-effect of being able to create every imaginable thing, as you try to make it sound. This is a mundane device whose sole function is to try to copy patterns from its input set, which unfortunately is pirated. If you want to prove me wrong, make your own model without a single image of Micky Mouse or a tag with his name, then try to get it to draw him like I did before. You will fail because this machine’s ability to draw him is dependent on being trained on images of him.

There are many ways this could be done ethically, like:

• build it on open datasets, or on datasets you own, instead of pirating
• don’t commercialize it
• allow non-commercial uses, like research or just messing around (which would be a real transformative use)

Seems like a petty technicality to me.

The “transformation” is the petty technicality in my opinion. Would it be transformative if I sold you a database of base64 encoded images? What about if they were encrypted?

Hell, you can hire me to paint based on prompts you give me. That’s the exact same service an AI provides, no? I’m going to study copyrighted materials to get better at my service. Surely if pictures -> AI model is transformative, then pictures -> knowledge in my brain is transformative as well. So you give me the prompt “Mickey Mouse” and I draw this. This is “custom art”. You think you can use that commercially? And if you realize that you can’t, why do you think I should be able to legally sell you this service?