so does Freddie DeBoer.
Thank you for adding a moment of joy to my afternoon.
Reading DeBoer's article and comment section is wonderful. It's just so funny to watch the party of "If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi, you have 10 Nazis" morph seamlessly into, "Look, just because a man has a big Nazi tattoo on his chest doesn't mean he's a bad guy, you know?".
To be fair to the commenters, about a third to a half of commenters are saying variations of, 'screw the electoral dynamics, I'm not voting for a guy with a Nazi tattoo'.
Basically, yes. A kind of:
'We acknowledge that our system is a reconstituted blend of totally-not-copyrighted material, and as such we acknowledge that we should not be able to re-claim copyright on the output of that material. You can use our systems to do useful things and make SaaS but not to create XYZ products in competition with humans.'
Obviously this would be a big step down but being a commodity server is better than being bankrupted.
I don't think there's a high chance of this - I agree with you that the most likely scenario is that human input from a sophisticated prompter is deemed sufficient to gain copyright.
That said, I know a LOT of young people who are upset about AI and there's a chance that just explodes at some point.
Corvos
1d ago
SEE?? That's how confusing it is! What geniuses they were, amirite?
...and not at all evidence I don't go to Starbucks very much and got this from Freakonomics two decades ago.
Corvos
1d ago
Dark Souls isn’t that bad. There’s a few rules:
- Have a big shield, keep it in front of your face at all times.
- If you can’t succeed, grind a bit and get a better sword/armour/shield. Dark Souls has an adjustable difficulty curve - you can get as strong as you want before taking on a challenge.
- Explore everywhere.
- Go slow at first, then once you know the map a bit you can run past everyone. They don’t chase you far.
- Don’t leave the bonfire without levelling up if you have souls. If you need 1200 souls to level and you have 900, grind or use items rather than risk them all. Much more relaxing that way.
Corvos
1d ago
The linked article doesn't quite imply it, more that he mellowed as he aged:
Personally, I always return to the Miami episode, which aired three years before Bourdain’s death, where he gets lunch with Iggy Pop.
In an interview about the episode, Bourdain says of Iggy: “His music was incredibly important to me from early on. Responsible for—in many ways—many of the things that went wrong in my life.”
But when he gets to Miami, Bourdain finds a healthy Pop. At lunch, they share one glass of white wine each. Iggy orders the shrimp.
You get the sense that Bourdain has come to this interview as a pilgrim comes to their guru on top of a mountain. The duo sits near a window with Venetian blinds. The sun is shining.
“As far as looking after my health,” Bourdain starts, grinning, “your music early on was a negative example.”
“I hear you,” Iggy Pop looks down and smiles.
“And looking at my own life and career, I’m pretty much known for traveling around the world and recklessly drinking and eating to excess.” He’s incredibly animated as he speaks. “What does it say about us that we are now sitting in a healthy restaurant—I just came from the gym—and we’re in Florida?”
Iggy Pop takes a minute to answer, like he’s been searching himself with this same question. But he’s not tortured about it. His eyes are clear and blue and he looks directly at Bourdain.
“Listen, if you just flame out, you’re in such voluminous and undistinguished company. And then all your works will flame out quicker with you.”
Eerily, the YouTube clip freezes at this moment. You never see Bourdain’s reaction to his hero’s proclamation.
But if you keep watching the episode, there are a few clues about how Bourdain may have felt.
As Iggy keeps talking about simple pleasures, Bourdain’s adam’s apple jumps. His eyes dart around as he asks his hero, “You’re the template for the rockstar. Other rock stars look to you to figure out ‘How should I behave?’ [...] Given that, what thrills you?”
Iggy smiles. “The nicest stuff right now, it’s really embarrassing,” he says, completely serene yet almost sheepish. “It’s being loved and actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me.”
And is it just me—or does Bourdain’s face fall?
Corvos
1d ago
A lot of the more eccentric socioeconomic paths fizzle as you get older. The old careers have dealt with the problem of people aging up, if even their solutions aren’t always well-suited to the modern world. It’s recognised that there are a bunch of 50/60 year old bankers around who aren’t hotshots and people have some idea what to do with them.
If you do something newer and weirder, like NFT transaction consultancy, then when NFTs fall out of fashion you have to pull a new career together for yourself while all the traditional ones are already full of the people working their way up the old fashioned way.
Corvos
2d ago
That would be broadly my suspicion as well, with the caveat that the government and AI lobbyists may decide that the wind is blowing the wrong way and that some concessions on copyright may be needed to forestall serious rebellion/challenges to the training of AI as a whole.
Corvos
2d ago
I don't know how well that will stand up to legal challenge. It's very rare to just give a prompt and get back a complex output. There's a lot of design, iteration, and thought.
Corvos
2d ago
assuming that that's a lie and obviously it must be about instituting some replacement hierarchy to the one currently in place.
Point of order: regardless of what is intended, it observably does institute a replacement hierarchy.
Corvos
2d ago
Despite time periods that had heavy shame towards gay men, we have found no way to prevent them having pretty large amounts of sex with each other. Even in places where being gay can get you executed, it still happens, just more hidden. That's why you raise costs on smoking but make condoms free for example.
While I see what you're getting at, this seems to introduce the same perverse incentives as two-tier policing in the UK.
It's essentially saying: if you're meek and sensitive to your burden on society and respond rationally to incentives, the state should bring the hammer down every time you are inconvenient. If you're blindly stubborn, aggressive, and refuse to change what you're doing however much suffering it causes, then society should smile and figure out how to tolerate you and put loads of resources behind supporting you.
Corvos
2d ago
You're not wrong, but like all renamings and reformattings it was done to evade accumulated expectations about what an "expansion pack" should be. Like when Starbucks used "tall" instead of "large" for their coffees, or the shift to Nespresso pods.
It's not quite so simple. The white working class had immense power in the 50s-90s, especially culturally (albeit often mediated through establishment figures). That's why the Doctor Who reboot centered around a white working-class chav who failed school with no A-levels and worked as a shop assistant, and why reality TV had such cachet at that time. You can see that cultural power dying as worship of the white working class died out around the late 2000s: the next-but-one companion three years later was also a working class chav, but this was treated as a bad thing she had to rise above; then you had a succession of companions who were clearly upper-middle class and then 'working class' characters who were upper-middle-class with a London multicultural accent and mostly DEI in one area or another.
Working class power showed most clearly in the trade unions, but also in the ruinous taxes and the ruthless destruction of generational wealth.
My mother failed to get into the best UK university because the working-class academic at her interview heard her upper-class accent and literally refused to say a single word to her until she gave up and left; my father was spat on for having the same accent. There's a reason it's hard to get the upper classes to feel they have more in common with Dennis from the estate than the nice young Indian man who does their accounting (Digwa). Lots of bad memories.
Corvos
4d ago
Right, but I wouldn’t want somebody to pump and dump my cousins, and it’s not because I harbour creepy incestuous love for them. It’s because it’s not nice. And I would have broadly the same sentiment towards my male cousins.
Corvos
4d ago
I think your thesis is really overstating this, or is extrapolating from a group that is not normal. ‘Wanting your daughter to have sex in the context of healthy relationships with men you approve of’ is not maximally permissive or sex positive but it’s very far from thinking she’s 6yo and that you’ll be cucked if she ever has sex. It’s a parody of fatherly psychology.
Corvos
4d ago
The US used anti-colonialist Third-Worldism to appeal to the third world in the Cold War. Part of this was making very clear that the old imperial powers were being dealt with. See for example the incident of the Suez Canal when Eisenhower threatened to crash the UK economy if we didn't withdraw. Increasingly craven displays of acceptance were the only way to retain any world influence at all, and nobody with influence foresaw (or wanted to foresee) how far things would go.
The same broad impetus was behind many Civil Rights decisions in the US as well: the US government was well-aware that overt Jim Crow style racism against blacks in America was being used to entice resource-owning African countries under the USSR's welcoming skirts.
Corvos
4d ago
are you only interested in her because she's
green andmalleable and can be moulded to what you want
I do note that the gender-reversed version of this - wives should get a husband who's not yet set in his ways and wives can and should mould their husbands - is lindy and entirely uncontroversial. Sure, there's no move to bang 16 year old boys but this seems like another case of things that used to be expected for both sexes now being abandoned on one side for the sake of female freedom whilst the male version tightens if anything.
Corvos
4d ago
It seems a valid observation of the kind of dynamics this will inevitably introduce.
Yes, but I don't mean men marrying down in the sense that "she's pretty and sweet but lower class and thick as mince". I mean that my female cousins (who tbh are pretty and vivacious but with exceptions not up to much) married smart, handsome, capable men that everyone loves having round. Our general attitude to them is, "Go to it, my son, hope she's treating you right".
By contrast my male cousins are conventionally successful but married/dated girls with fairly dubious personalities who nobody likes - one is a self-absorbed compulsive-organiser who doesn't like my cousin spending time with us and acts like everyone around her is a gaggle of Sunday school children who have to be constantly shepherded in case they wander off. The other was indifferent bordering on hostile, rude, and so absorbed in a vocation that she had no time for my cousin and saw him a few times a week while getting him to effectively sub her angel-of-mercy-but-no-pay job.
I suspect this state of affairs arose at least partly because my aunts are very no-nonsense and probably told their daughters exactly what they what they ought to look for and how to get it, whereas I can't imagine my uncles ever having that conversation with their sons (and my own parents have been pretty useless on the topic as well).
The cuck framing just doesn't make sense at all to me, culturally. If anything, we reared and then sacrificed my female cousins in order to bring fun, useful men into the family in the traditional manner. (I jest of course, my cousins are fine and happy.)
Corvos
4d ago
I just don’t relate to this at all. Admittedly I don’t have daughters, but I’ve watched all my cousins getting married and everyone loves the husbands and thinks it’s great to have a new smart, capable chap in the family.
If anything the wives and girlfriends have had a much worse reception, though I think this is because the girls in my family have mostly made good marriages and the guys have mostly made fairly dubious marriages, rather than reflecting any meaningful gender element.
Corvos
5d ago
I want to see this conversation happen in a supermarket car park, with both parties in full regalia and at top volume...
Academia is the same way. All the vocational / ‘luxury’ careers are, I think.
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