hendrik

I think that’s true. I’d somehow like to have different words available. Because I think it’s a big difference whether it’s Minecraft Hitler. Or the actual Nazis we have on the rise as of today. For example the richest man on earth “accidentally” doing the Nazi salute in front of a right-wing audience. And we know he also likes to share nazi propaganda on social media and supports authoritarianism. If we call all of them the same, we also normalize stuff… So yeah.

I roughly followed that back in the day and I think there isn’t much to these claims. He seems to sometimes have a bad taste and is a bit naive in some regards. But that’s not being a Nazi. And it’s been 7 or 8 years and he seems to have learned from that, or was there any more controversy? I don’t follow him, nor have I watched any videos for some time. And this video also doesn’t convince me to watch his content…

Edit: And I don’t want to apologize that behaviour. He definitely did these bad “jokes”, I just think he genuinely thought it was funny and he was some sort of clown. But that makes him an idiot, and not a nazi.

Hehe, I don’t know if they don’t want to understand it, or if it’s a lack of technical knowledge… But yes. In the digital realm, a copy and the original are identical in every way, no matter how you twist it. And you can’t even properly transfer any item it in the same sense as it applies to physical items. (Unless we’re talking about quantum computers or something like that…)

Sorry, this just isn’t correct. Yes, you can ask for almost anything and it’ll be alright and merely asking a question is completely legal.

The issue is, you then proceed to do a second step. And that is transferring the data. And that is a separate thing. You then initiate the actual transfer. Your computer actively does that. It keeps the transfer going and recieves the network packets. It literally copies them into RAM and then copies them again onto your harddrive. To make your local copy. The uploader merely reads it from their harddisk and hands it out, they do one copy operation less. Though they’re still the distributor.

I think any expert witness would testify in court, that your computer as the downloader does two copy operations, at least in the technical sense of the term. And that you’ve ultimately also initiated the transfer as the downloader due to how TCP/IP works.

The thumbdrive example is a bit construed. I think you might get away with that, though. Unless you plug it into your computer. Because then all the copying to RAM and harddrive etc starts again. But I think just pocketing it is posession (which doesn’t seem to be wrong), and not necessarily copying.

But like: how do other laws work where you live? Can you instruct someone to do something illegal and you’re fine? I can’t come up with anything normal, let’s say I hire someone to kidnap my child/wife to teach them a lesson. Or I hire a hitman to kill my arch enemy. Am I fine dong that? It’s a bit over the top. But where I live I can certainly get into trouble if I make people do something on my behalf. Which I’d argue doesn’t exactly happen here. It’s a bit more complicated… But your concept of law doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

Well, did the uploader push it onto my computer, or was it me who clicked on something and initiated the transfer? I’d say it’s the latter. So the downloader initiated the copying process… I mean if I steal an orange in the supermarket, we also don’t say it fell into my hands and somehow they’re guilty…

And additionally you might find other local laws like this: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/156.35
and generally, this is related to wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer… Which all seem to be crimes and something people get charged with if someone wants them convicted of a crime. See Aaron Swartz for example.

In Germany we definitely have this:

• https://www.juraforum.de/gesetze/urhg/53-vervielfaeltigungen-zum-privaten-und-sonstigen-eigenen-gebrauch

and we have Störerhaftung which can also get you in trouble even if you didn’t do it yourself.

In the USA it’d probably be something like https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
which says the copyright holder has exclusive rights (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies […]
Which is kind of what you do when downloading something. There will be a copy on your harddisk… And (1) does NOT limit this to redistribution, like (3)… I’m not sure how it turns out in practice. I don’t follow American court rulings that closely.

Damn leechers. And doubly so. First they steal the books, and then they don’t even give back to the pirates. And it’s not like Anna’s Archive or Libgen weren’t struggling already. So Meta is just harming everyone involved.

Heheh. Sure. If I’m not at home, my sex-toys are up another stranger’s bum. It made no sense for us to own anything anymore. My brain implant keeps me indifferent and drugged. Consuming and obedient… I’m happy.

Maybe try McDonald’s workers for further research, if it’s the constant and annoying beeping of machines. Or any Japanese store where you get 3 songs blaring at the same time from different aisles, then there’s some offering on a seperate stand, of course also blinking and begging for attention with additional sounds… I believe you can simulate 10 years of UK longterm exposure with a one day trip to Japan.

Couldn’t agree more. And a phone number is kind of important. I don’t want to hand that out to 50 random companies for “security”, tracking, and them to sell it to advertisers. Or lose it to hackers, which also happens regularly. And I really don’t like to pull down my pants for Discord (or whoever) to inspect my private parts.

Btw, the cross-post still leads to an error page for me.

My address is suchandsuch, come over and let’s enjoy a coffee together. Bleep, bloop…

Thanks anyways. I guess it’s just a hard problem to tackle. With freedom comes the freedom to abuse it. And yes, the internet has been designed to be very agnostic about what it’ll get used for. I think it’s a super impressive invention. And it’s very successful if we measure that by looking at how omnipresent it is now. And I’m even more impressed if I look at the age of the protocols and the design that powers the foundation of it, to this date. A lot of it has been adopted around 50 years ago. And the particular design choices scale so well, they pretty much still power an entirely different world 50 years later. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to do a substantially better job at something… But yeah, that doesn’t take away from other things and consequences. I’m often a fan of the analogy with tools. The internet is a tool, and very much like a hammer that can be used to help build a house, or tear it down… It’s not exactly the tool’s fault for what it gets used for. I’m now getting really out of line for this community, so I’ll try to make it short: I think abstraction is a very elemental design choice and what makes the internet great. The lower layers transport arbitrary stuff and that’s what allowed us to build phones, watch TV over it… Things nobody envisioned half a century ago. We’d completely cripple it in that regard, by removing that abstraction between the layers. And that’s what makes me think it can’t be the internet (as in the transport layers) where we bake ethics into. It has to happen at the top, where things get applied and the individual platforms and services reside.

I’m sorry, it’s way more complicated than that and more a topic for a long essay, and lots of it wouldn’t be very “casual” to read, as you said. I don’t think it’s a sad story, though. It’s just one taking place in the real world, where things are intertwined, have consequence and things often turn out in a way no-one anticipated. It’s just complex and the world is a varied place. And this is highly political. I agree.

Yeah, that just depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Depending on what kind of AI workload you have, you can scale it across 4 GPUs. Or it’ll become super slow if it needs to transfer a lot of data between these GPUs. And depending on what kinds of maths is involved, a Pascal generation GPU might be perfectly fine, or it’ll lack support for some of the operations involved. So yes, of course you can build that rig. Whether it’s going to be useful in your scenario is a different question. But I’d argue, if you need 96GB of VRAM for more than just the sake of it, you should be able to tell… I’ve seen people discuss these rigs with several P40 or similar, on Reddit and in some forums and Github discussions of the software involved. You might just have to do some research and find out if your AI inference framework and the model does well on specific hardware.

Sure. And that’s the case for most big tech companies. I think the fact is a bit unrelated to this topic, though. The government already knows everyone’s birthday… At least for their own citizens, they don’t really need to ask Alphabet to provide that to them.

Certainly the correct answer. I mean their whole business model includes exactly these kinds of “algorithms”. Knowing people’s age, amongst other factors, is what Google is about, and the reason for the majority of their income.

These restrictions are meant to forbid what other people can do. So you yourself can do anything with your content, no matter what’s in the license. It just means other people can’t use it in their projects if relates to making money. But I think something like CC BY-SA or BY-NC-SA is a solid choice. I’m always for freedom, so I’d drop the NC and allow my audience to do practically whatever they want… But it’s your creation and your choice.

I’d say it’s bound to be more difficult for Google, as every Youtube comment for example, sounds like being made by an 8 yo. Whereas Meta can just tell. You’re still on Facebook? Probably 50+… And on WhatsApp, the amount of boomer memes re-posted would be an immediate tell…

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/

Read that for a start. And maybe consider sharing your work under a nice license. You can also check out platforms like Jamendo, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive… And as far as I understand archive.org will even handle generating some torrents for you.

First of all: what’s “Kitten”?

And my own take is, it’s constantly evolving. And there are a lot if different use-cases out there. We might not have one specific, hypothetical solution. But similar things might exist. And it’s always also a question of supply and demand.

I’m always fine with niche solutions. Since I’m not even sure if my interests align with what’s popular with the masses.

But I think this is likely more a societal issue than a technical one. People want convenience, consume content passively. They want to be inside of filter bubbles and golden cages, with the occasional tickle of disagreeing on emotional things in the comments and siding with other users. What they don’t value is freedom, or privacy, or doing something productive that requires more than 30s of attention. So naturally, we get platforms that cater for that.

I also think the Fesiverse is a very nice attempt at laying a groundworks for more a more ethical and sustainable communications platform. But it’s far from perfect. And it struggles with a few of the same dynamics that are inevitable with social media.

I think the internet as is, is a solid choice. It’s been made to connect people (and their computers). And it’s initially been used for that. People put their stuff online because they had something to say, it required effort, so it was more quality content where the effort was justified somehow. Oftentimes it wasn’t with commercial interest, but for fun. And you could tell if something mattered to someone.

Subsequently, the internet got commercialized, the general public was onboarded. And now we have something that’s just about attention, manipulation, advertising and making money.

But the technical infrastructure is still basically the same. And we kind of still have net neutrality in a lot of places. Hosting got cheaper, the software and tools are abundant these days…

But yeah, demand is low, media literacy is low. People have become lazy and careless. And I don’t think there is a good way to change this with regular people, at least not in a grassroots way. I’d be easier to impose that from the top down, with regulation and education. But that’s where large and powerful companies are, and their motivation is in diametrical opposition to that. Plus we’re combatting human psychology here and the way our society works. It’s just a hard problem, so it comes to no surprise to me that we can’t solve it, all we can do is take small steps in the right direction.

And I just don’t understand some things. Like the Cloudflare thing. I’ve never used Cloudflare. My servers are completely fine without it. And I don’t even get a lot of load by the crawlers, and neither am I paying for the traffic or electricity used by that. All I ever have to do is pay attention to security, since I get a lot of brute-forcing attempts, spam etc. But that’s always been bombarding my servers. And there are lots of better ways to deal with it than tunnelling everything via one large and unappealing company…

To be honest, it’s already there. We have the small web, people keep blogging, writing into forums. We have Gemini if you want an entirely different protocol… You have to stay away from commercial websites and social media. But other than that, I don’t think we have to wait for anything to happen. It’s there. But with that said, people might need to re-learn how to use the internet. Since usage really has changed. You can’t expect to find it on social media while doomscrolling. The “back to the basics” is: You put in some effort to find nice blogs of interesting people. Install an RSS reader. Find a forum or a place like this one where you fit, and that’s filled with humans. That’s some effort. But that’s how people did it back in the days.