I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service because various corporate sites are geoblocking countries for various b2b and other small scale portals. I see this pretty regularly.

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service for some peace of mind in sketchy internet cafes etc. It ensures you are using a known DNS provider, all your non-encrypted traffic is opaque, and you can use 'nearby' endpoints so aren't running packets around the globe.

Another significant use for VPNs is to route around censorship blocks. And log-less VPN services can be used to drop leaks to journalists and stuff... assuming you trust the vpn service.

Some people just want to confound potential tracking and profiling by their local ISP... in exchange for potential tracking and profiling by their VPN service... but maybe they know the ISP is selling their data, and they trust their VPN isn't.

Your computer, email app, pdf viewer, printer, scanner, and mobile phone, are all non-human and naturually can't have a valid I-9 ...therefore under federal law also cannot 'be used' to work in hiring or staffing? Is that your position here?

AI probably cannot legally make hiring decisions, but as a tool to process, summarize, grade,rank, or perform social media correlation or other pre-background-check type stuff ... it probably can be used by a human just like any other tool.

That said, It probably shouldn't be used for that for a lot of good reasons, but all that is entirely unrelated to whether it can have a valid I-9.

If there's 10s of millions of people in china looking to cheat on their exams using llama models... i figure the "market" will make suitable models happen pretty quickly.

You realize of course that Exams are also highly tuned for one specific thing, like "20th Century English Literature", "Linear Algebra", "Criminlology: Overview of the Prison System", and "Axiomatic Meta-logic".

Eigenvalues are all but guaranteed to show up in the the 2nd exam, and all but guaranteed not to be mentioned in the other three.

PS That last one is highly recommended, but its a little dense.

It doesn't interfere with the "TrueDepth" Face ID stuff because it IS the TrueDepth Face ID stuff.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.apple.com%2Fen-u...

You called it an "IR emitter"... but its an IR camera.

This camera is also used for "attention awareness features" (and for this, yes it is constantly taking pictures.)

Is it quite the situation the GP suggested... no, of course not.
But yeah, it is pretty constantly taking IR photos of you when those features are on.

It's likely not doing anything with them beyond the functionality apple claims... but it is taking them, and it could be doing something more with them.

I am if the AI generated slop can only exist because the LLM owner ripped off the human creators to train the LLM.

More like the same way Napster and Limewire worked, where we all just picked the songs we want and copied them for free digitally over the internet, rather than paying for a CD to be manufactured and shipped around. Napster was just the market deciding ... right?

Except it was massive copyright infringment. Sure the CD distribution model might have been outdated in the face of a more efficient digital model, but that doesn't mean just copying all the work you wanted for free was a good solution.

The LLMs right now are like Napster -- they took all that copyright work for free and are exploiting it for profit. That's plainly wrong.

We need to get to a spotify/apple music world, where the LLM systems respects copyrights. Artists decide if their content may be used as training material or not, and they get paid for it if they do.

I actually do agree with you here. But I think youtube is a pretty shitty platform, that promotes *mostly* shitty content. Because the engagement and incentive model of ad supported systems is pernicious. We can do better. But that's a separate conversation.

Separately LLMs training on their own AI slop causes problems and LLMs can easily produce content at a rate that can overwhelm human output ; so even without a creative apocalypse caused by people not wanting to create; there may be a practical one if ai slop drowns everything else under a flood of shit.

Humans are special.

Agreed. The contents of your mind are beyond the reach of copyright.
But the contents of your computer memory and hard drives are not.
Memorize it all you want, but copies on your computer are legally different.

Well, yes, people ARE forbidden from doing exactly that.

For example, if you want to recite lord of the rings to a paying audience? you need license for that. Translate it to Klingon and distribute copies?... you need a license for that too.

Sure you can show off to friends in a bar or around the kitchen table all you like privately. That's all fair use. But try to commercialize it and distribute it, broadcast it, or perform it? Yes, people also need a license for that.

AI companies by and large are for profit enterprises copying data that doesn't belong to them and exploiting it for commercial gain by training LLMs on it. LLMs aren't people. It takes input, it runs an algorithm, it generates output. For it to have a model of LotR in there, either the model is getting passed in the prompt the user gave it (it's not) or its getting in there via the training on the copy of LotR and everything else that was fed in (yep this one). So copies were made to train, and some sort of derivative copies are persisted inside the model data too... which then are commercially exploited.

And even if it did work exactly same way as a human brain worked it still wouldn't matter, because its still a computer, and memory and storage, and those things are all treated by copyright law differently from a human mind.

Copyright has always existed to carve out a monopoly for human creators; because we as a society have recognized that the humans at the top of the creativity chain are valuable and need to be preserved.

LLMs aren't going to replace artists, but letting people use them to generate content by training them on the work the artists creates the same problem in the end as the original printing press.

The printing press didn't displace authors. LLMs can't either. But if you let the people who own the LLMs just rip off all the authors, its the same problem you'd have if you let the people who owned the printing press do it.

Copyright isn't born of a desire to prevent the use of technology, whether it is the printing press or its an LLM. It's borne of a desire to ensure that human creators don't get completely ripped off by the people who own that technology.

In order to train an LLM, a copy is fed into the LLM (even if it isn't stored in the LLM, numerous copies are made for the purpose of trianing during training). The purpose of that copy is to enrich the owners of the LLM, which is a commercial purposel. Under what license was that copy made?

Those ephemeral copies are copies. There's lots of (stupid and awful) legal precedents around this stuff. Console hackers and software modders get slapped with this stuff all the time. e.g. lawsuits that succeed with arguments like "By modding the software you violated the EULA, and therefore, while the copy on the CDROM remains legal, the copy you made to your disk drive, and the copy you made in ram is not licensed, and therefor in violation of copyrights"

And then there is the imprint that these training works make on the LLMs... sure they aren't copies. But they're possibly derivative works, again created for commercial purposes... and again... where is the license for that? Just ask chatGPT how lord of the rings starts, and then ask it what happens next... and it'll take you through the whole thing. Not in Tolkien's words (although it can mimic that too if you want)... clearly the LLM has a complete and detailed model of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Is that model not derivative work? It could clearly and easily create an obvious plagiarized work from what it IS storing, where the only prompting required is that it be asked to produce it. (And the only reason it won't is because its been told not to (aka guardrails).

Oh... and don't say 'but its the same thing as a human'. It doesn't matter. Human's are special. A human can only infringe by what we produce as "output". The contents of our minds can't infringe copyright simply by existing no matter how perfectly we've memorized Lord of the Rings. An LLM is just a computer with storage, and its storage/memory contents absolutely can be subject to copyright simply by existing.

They didn't make cars illegal, but they've regulated them from her to hell and back, precisely because moving something that big and heavy that fast among the general public causes all kinds of problems if it were not.

From seatbelts, and airbags, to requiring operators to have training and permits, and limiting where they can be used, and what direction they can go, and where they can turn, and limiting how fast they can be used, etc, etc, etc.

Is your car example meant to imply that are in favor of regulating AI just as comprehensively and aggressively as cars?

" I was there back in the day of analog long distance, and I can assure you that reliability was nowhere near that."

For your home landline?

Or for the dedicated line you were contracted directly with Bell with to provide point-to-point connectivity for critical communications infrastructure?

They weren't offering lots of 9's on your consumer land line, but that didn't mean they weren't offering it.

Coitus interruptus

If amazon pays the tarrifs they can deduct them from their taxes.

If they pass along the tarrifs then the consumer can deduct them

So
1. They have to do this if they are not deducting them

2. And there is no net revenue to the us government on any tax deductible tarrif collected