While there may be some highly technical reasons why it's not considered cutting-edge, I find it more than acceptable for all major sites and general browsing activities. I divide my Internet usage between three browsers (on desktop), and have yet to find a major drawback or showstopper that would entice me to abandon it. Its only disadvantage (for me) is that Chrome has many more nifty extensions.

As for mobile performance, it also seems generally fine as well. I still think that there's some value in supporting a product that gives us an alternative to the Google hegemon.

My thoughts exactly

Realistically, how is that going to stop anyone outside of the US to train their LLMs on the very same content they're clamoring about?

This is just a performative exercise, for an audience that arguably expects it. (even though it really has no purpose whatsoever, and will accomplish exactly nothing)

Copyright did good when it was all about physical goods and distribution. It started showing signs of being dysfunctional at the dawn of the digital age, and its lobby's staunch effort to not adapt to new realities started to create stress points. When AI's disruptive effects started to get noticed, it was already too late. I'm not saying I'm jumping up and down about it, but it's the new reality, and there's ain't a doggone thing any of these megacorps (copyright cartels) and their lawyers wielding IP laws as an adversarial tool are going to be able to do about it.

The going was good while it lasted. Far from being overjoyed about it, thinking about our many friends in the creative professions who depend on this income for their livelihood. But I just don't see it going backwards. The sum total of published human knowledge, encapsulated and distilled, now available at our fingertips.

Time to start leveraging these new tools, however primitive they are today, they will soon get much better. This is the nature of reality: it keeps shifting and evolving, most times out of our control.

Armchair economists on Slashdot (especially the 'murican ones) won't really be the ones to consider the externalities you've mentioned such as the amount of CO2 emissions this will contribute to helping curb in the long term, and the savings thus realized because such gains may not be measured in mere monetary profits.

A sizeable portion of them having just voted a climate denialist president into office for another four years, and their yardstick of success arguably being quarterly stock dividends, I'm unconvinced that they'd appreciate the long-term benefits of such measures since this doesn't align with their short-term worldview. (like the current price of eggs today, even though not being proactive may in the long run raise their prices up way more down the road).

While I'm most certainly not a big fan of Chinese policies in general, this particular initiative doesn't appear to be one I'd spend time moaning and complaining about. When managing the lives of 1 billion+ people, such a rail buildout actually seems like a pretty safe investment into the country's stability and future. And while I'm pretty sure there's waste with unneeded station stops where powerful political interests jockey for favors, that wastefulness remains different from building out the network itself. As for the US, its short-term mindset seems destined to only perpetuate a slow but constant decline due to the unwillingness many elected officials exhibit of bringing themselves to reach consensus on critical planning of infrastructure issues, (or because they're more interested in just gorging themselves with public funds while never delivering anything of substance).

Seems like so long ago... Summer 1984, and joining after copying a few lines of a terminal emulation program authored by Dennis Brothers, typing it by hand and turning it into an executable file.... in order to download my first Compuserve client.

My user ID was 75056,3611 and joining the CIS groups to be able to discuss things, send email messages and learn tech remains one of my most amazing life experiences. It truly felt like we had entered the future.

Yes, for those who have never used it, AI generation seems like a monolithic, all-or-nothing pushbutton proposition. And indeed, the law in question applies to songs entirely created with AI, which was what was mostly being created by people using some of the first wave of software available a few years ago.

The current reality however - for those who actually use AI agents in a creative manner today - is that these generative features can be used in a much more granular manner, for creating very specific parts of a piece of music, one instrument at a time. As such, it's merely just another other tool in the enormous list of plugins that are available to electronic musicians. And that use most certainly cannot be detected.

As for those who moan unfairness on grounds of AI having been trained on existing music, it's difficult indeed to quantify what this represents. Especially given that the major record labels who complain the loudest are all rumored to be working on similar AI products of their own; the only difference being that they're using their own catalogs and probably without asking anyone permissions, because they own the recordings.

I'm quite sure that no past artists had clauses in their contracts forbidding use of their songs for training LLMs, so at the end of the day I am unconvinced that any of these artists will receive payments for this. In that sense, and not that they've ever acted differently.... it's always been about how much grift they can get away with. They can scream bloody murder all day when they think they are missing on monetizing something, but will probably act the same exact way towards those whose music they own.

If someone objects to their music being heard by others (humans or bots), or to being indexed, just don't publish it on the Internet. Can't have your cake and ear it too...

As for this Indian composer, I assume that he's got enough clout to not suffer any pushback from those who automatically seethe and get mad at innovation. He's got enough experience making music that he'll know how to use these tools in a creative manner, putting all the naysayers to shame.

Thanks for sparing me the keystrokes, I was gonna say the exact same thing.

As usual, they always tried their hardest to stop anything that makes things go forward and that they don't control. Anyway, it'll soon turn into a tidal wave of generative music, and there will be little they can do about it.

As the world changes, this and many other petty battles occurring daily are an unmistakable sign that the current abuse and overreach of copyright laws is going to get smothered by successive tidal waves of AI-generated content, the size of which are going to make it difficult if not downright impossible to enforce such claims anymore.

But the nuance will be that most of this content will not be sold by gatekeepers like Adobe or other stock photo libraries, it'll probably all be free. And because it will be free, there will be nothing to sue or nobody to go after.

We can all harbor vastly different opinions on whether the use of AI will be beneficial for the creative arts, but one of its positive effects appears to be the end of the many frivolous perversions of copyright laws by IP grifters that we're currently witnessing.

While Sony (the parent company) has established themselves as a respected world-class manufacturer of consumer and professional electronics, the jury is still out as to whether their acquisition of CBS Inc was a wise one. Because it put them in the IP asset management business, which used to be very good, but now appears fairly questionable for the long term.

The hidden subtext is that all three of the major label conglomerates are far from stupid, they can smell which way the wind is blowing and have quietly invested into some AI projects of their own, and probably doing the same exact thing everyone else is doing with training. And let's face it: I'm quite sure they realize that if you don't want someone to hear your music - then don't put it on the Internet.

The quaint idea of a songwriter being inspired by a riff they heard being totally fine but a machine-learning model doing the same being illegal isn't something that's ever going to be proven in court in any sort of conclusive or enforceable manner. The gig is up lads, all the public huffing and puffing in the world isn't going to change this butthurt desperation that's transpiring. The only thing it'll accomplish is to generate lots and lots of billable hours for attorneys on retainer for their services and keep a few people with C-suite jobs safe for a bit longer.

Let's keep in mind that these sort of arguably pointless announcements generally get made just so that stockholders can't sue for gross negligence or mismanagement. Also in order for some boomer board members to feel validated by obsolete ways of thinking that fly in the face of the inevitable realities already unfolding.

The fact that they're put their fastest and most capable CPU in a device running iOS before anything more substantial is yet another sign that Apple isn't really caring much about laptops or desktops anymore. Not to speculate too much, but for about five years many of us have theorized that the writing was on the wall and that OS-X and iOS will eventually soon be merged.... somehow. Clunky file system and all the simplified rest included.

Even the announcement where they're hinting that with the addition of a Magic Keyboard it'll feel like a MacBook Air is prepping the ground for getting users gently accustomed to the idea that laptops are a thing of yesteryear. Classic Apple, really.

As for me personally, these premonitions slowly becoming reality were what made me move away from the platform some years ago, because of still depending on large screens, lots of RAM and compatibility with some older peripherals which can sometimes cost more than the computers themselves. Exactly the things Apple charges an insane premium for, where they seem to be expecting customers to constantly refresh all of their gear and who cares if it creates more landfill waste in the process....

Given the ever-increasing percentage of toxic content, conspiracy theories, grievance-filled rants, unfounded assertions (later retracted, once the damage is done) and ultra-partisan trolling attacks on X of late, I'm struggling to imagine a reason to pay just to have access to an AI whose LLM has been trained on such garbage data.

But maybe the idea is actually genius, having a prejudice-enhanced agent on steroids that greatly helps in pandering with the negative tribal stereotypes and alternate facts straight into the un-woke users' idpol biases, and only returning results they are likely to be pleased with.

Just throw accuracy and fairness right out of the windows, why even pretend anymore? If so, this would make it as if all the likes of Elon Musk are capable of doing is steering us down a road with very dark future outcomes of divisiveness and amplified prejudices; It all makes sense for the sake of preying on the user base's insecurities and growing unwillingness to embrace diversity or the inevitability of a multicultural society in the near future.

Maybe G.R.O.K. stands for Great Replacement-Oriented Knowledge ?

The de-shittified version of W10 LTSC with no telemetry, no Cortona, no Microsoft Store, no Edge, no bloat, nothing pre-installed has been so responsive and so very reliable, I'm not quite sure there'll be a reason to change until the EOL later this year.

From a bean counter perspective, it's obvious that Windows 11 is full of dream opportunities to spam users and treat them to unkillable advertising. Hopefully there'll be a de-shittified 'Lite', privacy-oriented version of 11 at some stage?

Not yet sure that these 'AI PC' machines are gonna be all that, but given that this is the path they've chosen to take I have my doubts it'll get better from a UX standpoint.

Maybe this will finally be Linux's golden moment to gain a large amount of market share? [chuckle]

In any industry, the incumbent will do whatever is required to protect their advantage against any new players in the field, especially from those who know how to make truly powerful new tools do their bidding. These kinds of petition attempts are akin to children pointlessly clamoring for the rising oceanic tides to stop destroying the beautiful sandcastles they've spent hours building on the beach.

In our rapidly-changing modern world fraught with uncertainty and disruptive innovation, it all seems very quaint and unlikely to get any results.

Vote with your wallet and support something else (like many of us already did), instead of wasting time and energy on crybaby fanboi lawsuits.

Wondering whether to file this under: [Waste of Time] or [Jilted Lovers]