As somebody who has had to deal with a lot of bureaucracy recently, I sure hope some organisations revise their insistance on sending you a paper document to physically sign and send back to them.

If it's not ramping up already, it seems pretty inevitable that businesses will need to turn to smuggled goods to stay competitive once they suspect (or know) others are doing it. While that will mean government revenues from the imports will largely evaporate, at least it'll mean Trump can say prices haven't gone up. But bribery, corruption, and related things like turf wars will likely explode.

Sure, I was being flippant. But the fact remains that a Titanic amount of money and computing is being used just to make (partly) derivative, if pretty, pictures.

Doesn't seem exactly profound, nor does it even seem to have any particularly compelling ROI. But I'm probably missing something...

Creating Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art seems unbelievably anticlimactic for the most hyped tech this century.

It's also patently obvious that artists are trained on other people's art. I play in a band, we write our own stuff. Our influences, and who we sound like are the subject of polite conversation, not vitriolic arguments and accusations of "theft".

Well, they create money by giving loans ("inside money creation"). That money is destroyed when it's paid back, so I think in terms of GDP it's neutral?

This is an interesting paper on BTL house prices in particular:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bankofengland.co.u...

There's a pretty depressing diagram illustrating the relationship BTL has on the wider economy in "6: How do pressures on the BTL sector matter for financial stability?" that shows pretty much any attempt to use policy to lower prices will amplify economic downturns. We're hooked on housing, essentially.

I thought Google passkeys mean that Google doesn't hold the key? Or is it that not everyone is using passkeys for Google services yet?

I think it's the scale/capacity of the computer to produce derivative works they're mainly objecting too. Otherwise, as you rightly imply, preventing the copying of style, approach or some other inspiration would kill art stone dead. Or at least mean that the only artists that could survive were those using AI to screen their works against prior art so that they could not be accused of "theft".

One thing I agree with them on is that you should not be allowed to prompt using artists names. That seems unnecessary.

On the "no ads" thing, I can reccommend this https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpi-hole.net%2F which I also access via https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pivpn.io%2F when I'm out of the house sometimes.

Reaching for the barbells. Probiotic kitchen swimming in kefir and kimchi. Hope I'm doing this right...

I was about to ask how on god's earth could anyone say ... but then I saw you switched from Drupal.

Yes. I can see now perfectly well why you like WP so much. I too would fucking love it in that case.

Two doctors, and then a High Court judge have to decide before anyone in the UK will be allowed to kill themselves. It's hardly going to be a wave of dying.

Just wanted to leave that subject title here.

My father worked as a "sensitivity reviewer" for a UK government records office in his retirement after he left the diplomatic service. The stuff he was releasing was from mostly 50 years years ago when it was statutorily made public as long as it didn't deal with anyone alive (or members of the royal family - thanks Tony Blair!). He said he'd heard that there was a "black hole" coming down the line from the period in 90's when departments moved to email and digital storage. People in about 2010 trying to get stuff off early archives of those for internal purposes and FOI requests were reporting they were often unable to do so.

Maybe that's a good thing, I dunno. But for anyone wanting to know what was being said about, for example, Pergau Dam in internal communications between Whitehall and the Foreign Office - they might have a hard time.