Oracle being the first casualty of the AI bubble could hardly happen to a “nicer” company

https://archive.ph/WClqv

The one area I would sorta disagree is on updates, although only inasmuch as they’re needed for security fixes on things connected to the internet. But if it’s not connected? No, no updates needed unless I encounter a bug or they add a new feature I really want.

I remember it looking better than this screenshot shows

To tag along with this, I remember this becoming an issue 10 or 15 years ago and a lot of the big lyrics websites were forced to reach licensing agreements with the songwriting groups like ASCAP and BMI (they collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the writers). I think a couple sites tried going to court to claim fair use but lost pretty quickly. That’s pretty established law going back to the earliest days of music publishing. Just because they were publishing online instead of printing up songbooks doesn’t mean the laws change.

The article on The Verge has a quote from someone at Valve saying they expect that will be among the first ones the community creates for it.

As much work as the Verge article says they put into cooling, I’m not too worried about heat issues

Marrow was interested in “how public institutions decide what’s worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it”.

He said using artificial intelligence to create it was “part of the natural evolution of artistic tools”, adding he sketched the image before he used AI.

“AI is here to stay, to gatekeep its capability would be against the beliefs I hold dear about art,” he said.

[…]

The artist, who said similar stunts he had carried out at Bristol Museum and Tate Modern were not “approved, sanctioned, or acknowledged”, denied it was vandalism.

“The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

“I’m not asking permission, but I’m not causing harm either.”

It’s like the same “logic” AI companies use when they take copyrighted content without permission: claim you’re not causing harm so you don’t need permission. They don’t see the harm, so from their perspective it’s fine, even if the creator doesn’t want them taking their work.

Railing at the institution as being gatekeepers might reveal the flaw in their logic. People or institutions are entitled to decide what belongs in their collection and what does not. Random outsiders are not entitled to be a part of that collection. They can be invited in if the curators are interested in their work, but the curators are generally not required to add them just because they’ve made something. The artist can create their own collection and invite others to be a part of it, but they’re not entitled to be in anyone’s collection. They also can’t just go and take something from someone else’s collection without permission, and even taking a photo of someone else’s work and placing it in their collection would at the very least be bad form. The other artist is just as entitled to decide where they do or don’t want their work displayed.

With encryption and encryption backdoors I often use the illustration that I put a lock on the door of my house, not because I have something to hide, but because I have things valuable to me that I want to protect. Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn’t mean I give the police a key to my house or let them add their own lock to my door. I wouldn’t want to come home one day and discover a random policeman had let himself in and was making copies of all my documents and photos just to make sure I wasn’t doing something bad. I’d be even more upset if I came home and discovered a policeman from another country had let himself in because he’d gotten a copy of the same key, or a thief was doing the same because he’d gotten a copy of the key.

Building off that illustration, I might have a collection of art in my house. This guy is not entitled to come into my house and look at my art, nor is he entitled to come into my house and put a picture on an empty space on my wall just because he thinks it should be there. Railing against gatekeepers keeping his slop out to me seems as ridiculous as him being mad that I won’t open my door and let him put a picture on my wall. He might not be damaging my walls, but just forcing his way in against my wishes is something I would view as harmful.

Sneaked is the traditional form as the past tense of a regular verb, dating back to at least the 1500s, whereas snuck only appeared as an irregular form in the 1800s and it’s not clear why. It’s very unusual for a regular verb to become irregular. Snuck is more common in US English than British English, although sneaked and snuck appear in both variants. Sneaked would seem more correct especially for British English.

I’ve never written a game FAQ but when I’ve done documentation for other things on a computer I’ve found that I prefer recording myself doing the task and then writing the guide while going back through the video. It’s too easy to skip steps otherwise.

Interesting; I’ve read that more and more jurisdictions are ending the concept of common law marriage. The idea is it existed in a time when a legal marriage was harder to get. Nowadays in those areas a legal marriage is easy to get so the thought is if those people never legally married it’s because they didn’t want to, not because they couldn’t, so there’s no reason to have a marriage forced onto the couple.

I had an old one that was DE-9!

It’s always funny to me the ways they “went metric” but things like cans of beer are 473 mL (16 US fl oz) or iced tea is 341 mL (11.5 US fl oz).

It’s worse when it’s professionally. Yesterday I wrote and sent an email before lunch, except near the end of the day I saw I had an email in my Drafts folder and had never actually hit send.

Peanut butter, jelly, and mustard?

I really need to look into getting Civ 2 running. Maybe just set up an old VM for it. Civ 3 was probably my favorite, but there were a lot of concepts I didn’t understand until playing 3 and I’d be curious to see how I fare in 2 now. Plus I love that old aesthetic of games with a user interface like every other program on Windows.

I got a late appointment for my dog at the vet’s office. A tech walked out and was kind of freaking out that it was already dark at 5:30. She said she’d never experienced DST before. Turns out she’d moved here fairly recently from Puerto Rico and they don’t change time there.

You still have Kmart in Australia? They went bankrupt in the US. I have fond memories going there as a child in the ’80s and ’90s but it went downhill in the new millennium.

They realized how much revenue they were leaving on the table