If we’re doing short stories, I have two recommendations:

• Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House.

404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.

The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

Spin up c/notquitetheonion?

Additionally, there’s the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone’s blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.

It’s trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.

Several of the [former] board members are affiliated with the movement. EA is concerned with existential risk, AI being perceived as a big one. OpenAI’s nonprofit was founded with the intent to perform research AI safely, and those members of the board still reflected that interest.

I’m glad to see for once the fines are proportional to revenue, and not a fixed amount. 6% hurts.

There is a theory based around how ocean tankers’ exhaust historically included sulfates, which can actually seed cloud formation.

Recent emissions regulations reduced this effect, so fewer clouds are being seeded over the ocean, and the oceans are absorbing more sunlight and heating more.

So we were basically painting large swaths of reflective clouds over the oceans, masking the heating. And now we’re seeing unencumbered heating effects.

Idk man, I believe you. I just think we should be mirroring titles closely is all.

Regardless, the article being pointed to makes a weaker claim than the Lemmy title. Bad practice in general, even if it’s known from other sources.

Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.

Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.

This is how the legal system typically works when a new law is introduced.

I don’t fault your interpretation. There is a reason Vonnegut uses the term “spiritual” throughout the book. At least for me, I would describe my understanding of the book to have required a spiritual/moral shift before I could really understand the image being painted.

I also read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater first of the two, so maybe that colored how I interpreted Player Piano. It is a more direct argument that humans need to be cared for, independent of their economic utility.

So when I read Player Piano, it didn’t strike me as an argument against automation (which, being an engineer myself, I am entirely for), but moreso as a warning that freedom from labor doesn’t alone make a perfect life. Especially in the mid-20th century context Vonnegut was writing in, it’s an argument against the “American” style of automation, wherein you displace people from their jobs and discard them entirely. They serve no further purpose to your economy, and since your society is tightly adjoined to the economy, they serve to purpose to society…

So it’s not really a book about automation, if if I said that in my first post. It’s a book about failings of American culture, which happens to be revealed through automation. It’s about the inconsistency of a society where one’s usefulness to others is determined solely by their labor, and where that labor is constantly sought to be devalued and eliminated, and what the end of that process looks like for humans who want to find meaning in their activities.

Two Vonnegut novels—God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano—fundamentally shifted the way I view the world.

The novels primarily discuss the economy, automation, and human wellfare. When I was young I defaulted to a laissez-faire economic mindset, and basically assumed automation and technology would always make our quality of lives improve. I was very much in the Ayn Rand club on economic and moral issues. These books were ultimately what made me reflect and consider the other “spiritual” (in the sense Vonnegut uses the term) aspects of human wellfare. Vonnegut was my introduction to humanist thought, and I owe the vast majority of my personal moral development to the influence of these two books.

I have seen you comment in several comment chains. Please just understand that there is risk even if by the letter of the law everything is legal. There are plenty of cases with copyright / fair use where very expensive and long lawsuits were made against parties who did nothing illegal.

LW mods are clearly not comfortable with the risk with their current situation. Respect that, and don’t expect them to take risks beyond their comfort on your behalf. If you want someone who is willing to serve you content at that level of risk, you can create an account with one of the other communities.

If an instance is merely blocked, does that mean all content produced by that instance, or by a Lemmy.World user using that instance, is strictly not stored on Lemmy.World servers?

Otherwise there might still be liability. Also, in the US you don’t even have to do anything illegal to be the target of a lawsuit—distancing from piracy is a practical defense against the cost of legal proceedings, even if it’s technically legal.

Amdahl’s isn’t the only scaling law in the books.

Gustafson’s scaling law looks at how the hypothetical maximum work a computer could perform scales with parallelism—idea being for certain tasks like simulations (or, to your point, even consumer devices to some extent) which can scale to fully utilize, this is a real improvement.

Amdahl’s takes a fixed program, considers what portion is parallelizable, and tells you the speed up from additional parallelism in your hardware.

One tells you how much a processor might do, the only tells you how fast a program might run. Neither is wrong, but both are incomplete picture of the colloquial “performance” of a modern device.

Amdahl’s is the one you find emphasized by a Comp Arch 101 course, because it corrects the intuitive error of assuming you can double the cores and get half the runtime. I only encountered Gustafson’s law in a high performance architecture course, and it really only holds for certain types of workloads.

ABSOLUTELY. I just recently capped off the Diff Eq, Signals, and Controls courses for my undergrad, and truly by the end you feel like a wizard. It’s crazy how much problem-solving/system modeling power there is in such a (relatively) simple, easy to apply, and beautifully elegant mathematical tool.

Also runs a podcast game show called Lateral which is pretty fun to listen to. Last I checked only highlights were uploaded to YouTube, and full episodes are on typical podcast services