What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material.

Sure, but that’s not what LLMs are doing. They’re breaking down works to reproduce portions of it in answers. Learning is about concepts, LLMs don’t understand concepts, they just compare inputs with training data to provide synthesized answers.

The process a human goes through is distinctly different from the process current AI goes through. The process an AI goes through is closer to a journalist copy-pasting quotations into their article, which falls under fair use. The difference is that AI will synthesize quotations from multiple (many) sources, whereas a journalist will generally just do one at a time, but it’s still the same process.

I just played Pony Island last night, and I might go through and get the tickets, we’ll see.

I also installed a few games as well, so I’ll probably play a couple of them:

• Hell Pie
• Yakuza 3
• Lair of the Clockwork God
• Euro Truck Simulator

And then I have a few that I’m partially done with that might get some attention. I’m taking next week off for a family trip, so I don’t have to be as responsible about getting to bed at a reasonable time this weekend. :)

If I can work through enough of them, I’ll allow myself to buy some more this Steam sale. I have way too many games, so I’m trying to finish (with a loose definition for finish) more than I buy. So far I haven’t bought many at all this year (maybe 2?).

And this is why I hate those laws that are intended to protect kids. Yeah, it would be nice if kids couldn’t see stuff they shouldn’t, but it’s even better if my PII isn’t stolen. I’d rather my kids accidentally see porn once in a while than for their identity to be stolen.

By quality I meant resolution, I don’t need 4k, but I do need specific shows my wife and kids like.

I have a NAS set up with some movies and whatnot, so I’ve talked to my wife about setting up a budget to purchase content we want and then cancelling our streaming services. So we’d be limited to what’s available on DVD/Blu-Ray, but most of what my wife and kids watch are still available there.

The cost isn’t the issue, I really hate ads and I’m worried ad-free tiers will go away (or become unreasonably expensive).

I disagree that it needs to be explicit. The current law is the fair use doctrine, which generally has more to do with the intended use than specific amounts of the text/media. The point is that humans should know where that limit is and when they’ve crossed it, with motive being a huge part of it.

I think machines and algorithms should have to abide by a much narrower understanding of “fair use” because they don’t have motive or the ability to Intuit when they’ve crossed the line. So scraping copyrighted works to produce an LLM should probably generally be illegal, imo.

That said, our current copyright system is busted and desperately needs reform. We should be limiting copyright to 14 years (as in the original copyright act of 1790), with an option to explicitly extend for another 14 years. That way LLMs can scrape comment published >28 years ago with no concerns, and most content produced >14 years (esp. forums and social media where copyright extension is incredibly unlikely). That would be reasonable IMO and sidestep most of the issues people have with LLMs.

On the deep discounts page is The Hex. I haven’t played it, but it’s by the same dev as Pony Island and Inscryption, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I’m going to get it. They’re all on a great sale right now.

I just played through Pony Island and really enjoyed it. It doesn’t have much replayability, but it’s a unique experience that I think most will enjoy. If you like Doki Doki Literature Club, Undertale or Inscryption (last is the same dev), you’ll like this.

I’m going to be picking up The Hex because I’ve liked the dev’s other two games.

If you have been claiming games on EGS, it was free there are some point.

It got so bad that my wishlist was broken. I could feel the pain through the Internet as others threw money at Valve.

Let me know if it works and I’ll follow. I don’t need quality, I just need something for my kids to watch occasionally.

Consider PiHole as a whole home network first line of defense.

I didn’t have any respect for him before, and now I guess I have disrespect.

And that’s exactly what that page discusses. It links three options you can try:

• Mountain Duck
• Expandrive
• Rclone - Github repo

The first two are paid, the last is FOSS, and it claims each can mount Backblaze B2 as a Windows drive. I haven’t tried any of them, so YMMV.

That depends on how similar your resulting algorithm is to the sources you were “inspired” by. You’re probably fine if you’re not copying verbatim and your code just ends up looking similar because that’s how solutions are generally structured, but there absolutely are limits there.

If you’re trying to rewrite something into another license, you’ll need to be a lot more careful.

I complain all the time. But that’s not the subject of this post…

IP Man. Great movies.

I’m not going to be monitoring Chinese code projects. They don’t seem to care much about copyright, so they’ll probably just yoink the code into proprietary projects and not care about the licenses.

What am I going to do, sue someone in China? And decompile everything that comes from China to check if my code was likely in it? That’s ridiculous. If it’s domestic, I probably have a chance, but not if it’s in another country, and especially not one like China that doesn’t seem to care about copyright.

Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It’s $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you’d pay ~$2/month. So I think they’re pretty competitive, but I’m not familiar with Google Drive’s terms. They’re certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive’s policies around that (how much you download from their service).

I’m pretty sure I do understand the issue. Here are some facts (and an article to back it up):

1. putting memory closer to the CPU improves performance due to less latency - from 96GB/s -> 200 (M1) or 400 (M1 Max) GB/s
2. customers can’t easily solder on more RAM
3. Apple’s RAM upgrades are way more expensive than socketed options on the market

And here’s my interpretation/guesses:

1. marketing sees 1 & 2, and sees an opportunity to do more of 3
2. marketing probably asked engineering what the bare minimum is, and they probably said 8GB (assuming web browsing and whatnot only), though 16GB is preferable (that’s what I’d answer)
3. marketing sets the minimum @ 8GB, banking on most users who need more than the basics to buy more, or for users to buy another laptop sooner when they realize they ran out of RAM (getting after-sale RAM upgrades is expensive)

So:

• using soldered RAM is an engineering decision due to improved performance (double socketed RAM w/ Intel on M1, quadruple on M1 Max)
• limiting RAM to 8GB is a marketing decision
• if you don’t have enough RAM, that doesn’t mean the RAM isn’t performing well, it means you don’t have enough RAM

Using socketed RAM won’t fix performance issues related to running out of RAM, that issue is the same regardless. Only adding RAM will fix those performance issues, and Apple could just as easily make “special” RAM so you can’t buy socketed RAM on the regular market anyway (e.g. they’d need a different memory standard anyway due to Unified Memory).

I have hated Apple’s memory pricing for decades now, it has always been way more expensive to add RAM to an Apple device at order time vs PC competitors (I still add my own RAM to laptops, but it’s usually way cheaper through HP, Lenovo, etc than Apple at build-time). I’m not defending them here, I’m merely saying that the decision to use soldered RAM makes a lot of engineering sense, especially with the new Unified Memory architecture they’re using in the M-series devices.

The built-in Digital Wellbeing & Parental controls works. I have it on my Android 11 device, haven’t tested on anything newer (it’s not on my Graphene OS device based on the most recent Android though).

Settings > Digital Wellbeing & Parental controls > Dashboard > click the timer icon next to an app and set a limit

If you want something outside of the Google ecosystem (e.g. you’re running GrapheneOS), the following should work (untested):

• Open TimeLimit - seems it supports multi-user, which is nice
• usageDirect - display only, no way to set limits AFAICT

There are probably others, that was just a cursory check.