Skip Navigation

Posts
3
Comments
197
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • I once thought of a movie while coughing into a microphone. I opened the recorded cough with VLC and it played the movie.

  • Not always. As John Carmack said:

    The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

    Many people have created things entirely from their own mind, and then find that they're violating IP law.

    Even things like Calculus were invented simultaneously in different parts of the world. I mean, think about it, Calculus allows us to solve all kinds of problem that humankind had spent thousands of years thinking about and being unable to solve. Then, independently, in separate parts of the world 2 people invent / discover Calculus around the same time. If world wide IP law had existed, it might swoop in and tell one of them their thoughts were not legal.

  • And blackjack?

  • IP law is all about telling people what they can't create.

  • Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.

    Our government seems to be moving towards an "we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers" approach.

    Y'all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn't show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?

    I just can't stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we're focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.

    We do need to help kids with social media, but there's a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we're ignoring.

  • Birds aren't real according to sources that make claims that birds aren't real.

  • Karma.

    The young treat the old however they do. But then the young grow old and get treated the same.

  • It's been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).

    Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don't know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn't fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn't get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn't fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.

    Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can't fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They'll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they'll make a profit, because that's how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.

  • My Grandma uses Arch by the way

  • DNA

    Jump
  • Am.... Am I pasta?

  • It lists the foreign adversaries, they aren't just made up on a whim. Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia.

    Where is WhatsApp based?

  • A neat programming project would be to migrate YouTube videos to PeerTube for content creators. If a YouTuber decides to put their videos on PeerTube as well, it should be as easy as possible.

  • Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.

    If I'm a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I'm a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone's money and is essential to the entire nation, I'm paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.

    If I'm a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.

    (Although, creating a webpage was the hot thing last decade, now the hot thing is creating an AI.)

  • You've made the most substantive comments in this post. Especially quoting the law and this information about Facebook.

    For context, Facebook's revenue in 2019 was 70 billions dollars. So a 5 billion dollar fine isn't nothing. Everyone can judge these bans and fines for themselves and judge whether there's a double standard though.

    You seem upset because I said TikTok stores their data in Oracle, but that's what they said in 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/tech/tiktok-user-data-oracle/index.html But, as you say, it appears in 2018 they were storing their data in China, and presumably that continued up until mid-2022.

    I'm not a shill, but I am a cynic who believes the government is acting on behalf of their corporate friends (US media companies) rather than on general principles. I have no love for China. I wanted regulation that applied equally to all US companies. If you don't want to talk to me, fine, I'll discuss my opinion with others; even so, you've shared a lot of important and concrete information here, so thanks again.

  • They could even own a President. Unheard of! /s

  • I've also heard the data is physically stored and hosted by Oracle. So maybe China just copies it? The primary copy is in the US currently. Which doesn't really mean much.

    I wouldn't be surprised if Meta's data ended up in China too. But Congress isn't targeting them.

  • I see. You're right about the text of the law. Thanks for taking the time to post that.

    I would say it violates the 1st Amendment then. US Citizens have a right to say what they want, which includes saying what China wants if that is what the person wants.

    The courts will have to decide.

  • They can't actually ban TikTok by name, it's unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.

    The current law actually says "no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia", or something like that.

    There's a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I'm repeating myself now.

    Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn't that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).

    And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn't technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.

  • If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.

    But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they'll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the "owner" while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It's super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.

    This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.