Take scraping. Companies like Clearview will tell you that scraping is legal under copyright law. They’ll tell you that training a model with scraped data is also not a copyright infringement. They’re right.

I love Cory’s writing, but while he does a masterful job of defending scraping, and makes a good argument that in most cases, it’s laws other than Copyright that should be the battleground, he does, kinda, trip over the main point.

That is that training models on creative works and then selling access to the derivative “creative” works that those models output very much falls within the domain of copyright - on either side of a grey line we usually call “fair use” that hasn’t been really tested in courts.

Lets take two absurd extremes to make the point. Say I train an LLM directly on Marvel movies, and then sell movies (or maybe movie scripts) that are almost identical to existing Marvel movies (maybe with a few key names and features altered). I don’t think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under “fair use.” However, if I used literature to train my LLM to be able to read, and used that to read street signs for my self-driving car, well, yeah, that might be something you could argue is “fair use” to sell. It’s not producing copy-cat literature.

I agree with Cory that scraping, per se, is absolutely fine, and even re-distributing the results in some ways that are in the public interest or fall under “fair use”, but it’s hard to justify the slop machines as not a copyright problem.

In the end, yeah, fuck both sides anyway. Copyright was extended too far and used for far too much, and the AI companies are absolute thieves. I have no illusions this type of court case will do anything more than shift wealth from one robber-barron to another, and won’t help artists and authors.

The luddites wooden shoes are not all that different from the folk that put zip bombs and other tarpits on their websites to break the crawlers.

With the degree of information, and capacity to profile individuals at scale and model complex systems, Google likely knew Trump would be in the white house long before anyone else. They fired up the bribery train early on.

We need to poison the models with more satire on the Internet.

They use to mock us with “Luddite” but the Technologists looked into that actual movement (rather than the caricature) and agreed, “yeah sure, like them”. That took the sting out of the pejorative, so they picked another mocked group to connect it with.

I have VPS’s in Quebec, running on mostly hydroelectric power, in a place without water supply concerns for locals, in a cooler climate. OVH in this case, but there are others. Can’t control what random websites are hosted on, but can avoid giving money to this crazyness.

Seconded. Used their service for many years.

There are already far more people in raw numbers on various federated/non-commercial/self-hosted/indie web stuff than there ever were on the early web- it just takes a little effort to find it.

It’s about the information vacuum. Now every service will get your ID or photo, giving them both age and a whole sort of other metrics to build a profile on you. And yes, Lemmy.ca doesn’t know that about me.

They literally blew billions of dollars and years of developer time just to screw the companies that won the argument of “open internet or Microsoft protocol” back in the day. Yes, petty.

This. Don’t ever delete the account because someone will scoop it up and impersonate you. Just set auto reply and log out. Check the terms, you may need to log in every 6 months though. Do that a couple of times at least.

Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!

It walks you through setting up SSH with keys and then git entirely via the command line. Maybe they plan on writing more?

They haven’t for a while. It’s just going to get more obvious.

More birds in orbit just hear more and more overlapping signals from the huge ground area they are over, and so share bandwidth. There’s a reason cell towers get lower and lower the more dense the population.

From orbit, whole regions are within a few degrees arc from the perspective of orbit. It’s not enough to overcome what is fundamentally a business hype problem. Starlink is wonderful tech for remote outposts, boats, disaster areas, emergency service workers, and things like that, but those customers would never pay enough to be profitable, so they have marketed it as general purpose internet, so it will get slower the more people sign up.

The limited bandwidth of practical microwaves shared by everyone in the footprint of a satellite, which is thousands of square kilometres. More satellites help, but since it hears the signals from every person on earth in its footprint, even if that person is connecting to a different satellite, there are limited gains when you reach the point where they have a lot of overlap - literally limited by geometry. Compare that with fiber, which allows for virtually unlimited unshared service bandwidth that can get faster as it’s built out and becomes more popular.

That bubble is starting to make funny noises and develop patterns on its surface. Wonder what’s next?

That’s a ridiculously low bar in 2025. What even is twisted pair DSL??

Your options are limited not by random angry dude on the Internet, but by deliberate and calculated lack of development conspired between legislators and telecoms. Starlink will hit the limits imposed by physics and geometry, and then will get worse and worse the more people sign up.