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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship

    Yes, I believe creative works should be protected as that expression has value and in a digital world it is too simple to copy and deprive the original author of the value of their work. This applies equally to Disney and Tumblr artists.

    I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it’s pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.


  • I’ll repeat what you said with emphasis:

    AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does

    The emphasized part is incorrect. It’s not the same, yet your argument seems to be that because (your claim) it is the same, then it’s no different from a human reading all of these books.

    Regarding your last point, copyright law doesn’t just kick in because you try to pass something off as an original (by, for ex, marketing a book as being from a best selling author). It applies based on similarity whether you mention the original author or not.


  • AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does

    This statement is the basis for your argument and it is simply not correct.

    Training LLMs and similar AI models is much closer to a sophisticated lossy compression algorithm than it is to human learning. The processes are not at all similar given our current understanding of human learning.

    AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?

    The current Disney lawsuit against Midjourney is illustrative - literally, it includes numerous side-by-side comparisons - of how AI models are capable of recreating iconic copyrighted work that is indistinguishable from the original.

    If a machine can replicate your writing style because it could identify certain patterns, words, sentence structure, etc then as long as it’s not pretending to create things attributed to you, there’s no issue.

    An AI doesn’t create works on its own. A human instructs AI to do so. Attribution is also irrelevant. If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).


  • Even if it didn’t outright display the code you need to enter, my guess is this and similar implementations hide further vulnerabilities like: the numbers aren’t generated with a secure random number generator, or the validation call isn’t resistant to simple brute force quickly guessing every possible number, or the number is known client side for validation, etc.



  • Tesla believes it is better at reporting crash data than its competitors, and so the discrepancy in numbers makes them look bad.

    It’s almost as though leaving safety and associated reporting requirements in the hands of private business doesn’t work out for consumers. If only there was some public institution that would hold all vehicle manufacturers accountable and enforce reporting requirements. I cannot possibly imagine how that would work though. /s





  • I searched for the actual question text and found:

    Q19a. The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country.

    The split was 14% completely agreed and 20% mostly agreed.

    I’m not as surprised by the results as the headline would have suggested because of the use of the word illegally. It biases the question negatively.

    The 20% who mostly agreed may have agreed with some negative connotation surrounding illegal immigration while ignoring the racism of “poisoning the blood.” In other words, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who feels strongly about securing the border, I could understand how those respondents would lean towards agree simply because of the use of the word “illegal.”

    To further support this interpretation: In the same survey, more than 40% of respondents favor or strongly favor building a wall along the US-Mexico border.

    Maybe I’m just optimistic that only around an eighth of the country is completely crazy and that is just a less clickbaity title.




  • The TV I currently have is Android OS but the built in Chromecast is noticeably lower quality. Not sure if it’s an older version or what.

    Regardless, IMO the displays themselves outlast their software support, and I prefer to just plug in whatever the latest device.

    I’ll also mention Android OS on my TV takes a full minute to “boot” and that itself makes me want to yeet it out the window.


  • My TV is probably going to kick the bucket in a year or two at most. Filtering “non smart TVs” on a site like BestBuy shows only commercial display options at this point.

    Are there any well maintained projects out there that are able to replace the firmware on newer smart TVs to get rid of these features? I really just want a dumb display with an input for a Chromecast with CEC support (or similar device if Google decides to enshittify that platform with screensaver ads too).




  • That’s correct, it is just plain text and it can easily be spoofed. You should never perform an auth check of any kind with the user agent.

    In the above examples, it wouldn’t really matter if someone spoofed the header as there generally isn’t a benefit to the malicious agent.

    Where some sites get into trouble though is if they have an implicit auth check using user agents. An example could be a paywalled recipe site. They want the recipe to be indexed by Google. If I spoof my user agent to be Googlebot, I’ll get to view the recipe content they want indexed, bypassing the paywall.

    But, an example of a more reasonable use for checking user agent strings for bots might be regional redirects. If a new user comes to my site, maybe I want to redirect to a localized version at a different URL based on their country. However, I probably don’t want to do that if the agent is a bot, since the bot might be indexing a given URL from anywhere. If someone spoofed their user agent and they aren’t redirected, no big deal.


  • User agents are useful for checking if the request was made by a (legitimate self-identifying) bot, such as Googlebot.

    It could also be used in some specific scenarios where you control the client and want to easily identify your client traffic in request logs.

    Or maybe you offer a download on your site and you want to reorder your list to highlight the most likely correct binary for the platform in the user agent.

    There are plenty of reasonable uses for user agent that have nothing to do with feature detection.