Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
To you or me, yes. And I would say “oh they just don’t know what they’re missing” but they all have laptops and chromebooks but prefer to use their phones.
I'm a millenial and I'm touch typing. The idea of writing long texts on a phone or tablet feels ridiculous to me. I already get annoyed when I have to write an e-mail on my phone. Also, I find the mobile UX for text formatting, cut/copy/paste extremely frustrating.
Interesting.
I'm also in MA, and my daughters (like all their classmates) mostly use the chromebooks issued by their public high school. They strongly prefer their macbooks tho. Granted, we live in an affluent town. But I thought the chromebooks were a statewide thing.
I'm in San Jose and it's school-issued Chromebooks here, too, though many students have their own [superior] laptop they are able to use. In the case of my household, my son has a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and my daughter has a Pixelbook Go, I use a MacBook Pro M1 and my wife uses an old Pixelbook or an old iPad with a Magic Keyboard. Everyone's pretty much chained to their phones but recognize a real keyboard and bigger screen are beneficial for certain tasks (like writing, or Khan Academy, or even consuming media).
Have they ever tried to use a real computer for that? Can they afford a real computer? Would they prefer a bigger screen and a real keyboard over a tiny screen and an even smaller keyboard? Maybe they just don't have the experience of using a real computer to know how far superior it is to a tiny screen/keyboard?
Using a phone to write papers seems like an exercise in masochism, if better alternatives are available.
It's also possible that their peer group that does use laptops to write papers is doing far better in many ways.
Yes, this is a very affluent district. Everyone has a chromebook from school and most have a macbook from their parents. They prefer the phone.
(“Big computers are more of an old person millennial thing.”)
I made an account finally just because this no laptop thing was too shocking.
I get kids and teens have preferences. But what in the world is going on with the parents? Who cares if Timmy wants to write his paper on a phone. You tell him to sit down at a desk, focus, and write like a normal person.
You can always regress to your own quirks once youve proven yourself.
These days might be gone, with the availability of LLMs now. You only need to prompt a bit, then it is all copy and paste. I have no idea if the students are learning a whole lot this way, though.
Interesting. My great nieces have Lenovos (Windows) that they use for school work and light gaming. They'd like better gaming laptops, but don't have them.
The question was about people using crypto to buy things. The person above me was implying that because it's going up in value, people are using it that way. I replied to say that it's (mostly) just speculation. Which is a kind of use, but not the one being implied.
The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.
I used to order books in English from the US before shipping costs became prohibitive and the cost of shipping the book went to about twice to thrice the cost of the book itself. Is it fair use for me to download books from Anna's Archive now considering that books in English are not available in my region through other means (including the vast majority of ebooks)?
Rhetorical question, we all know that me reading books is not "transformative" so it won't be considered fair use for me to yoink them (transformative as in transforming more damage to the society at large into more money for the already rich).
In the U.S. at least (obviously not the same everywhere), fair use doesn’t necessarily require your work to be transformative. It’s one of several aspects that gets considered, albeit a fairly significant one in many cases. Downloading books/research articles/pirated works in general wouldn’t be fair use as the purpose of the act (obtaining a book to read) directly impacts the market for the work (selling books). There could still exceptions in some cases, mostly related to teaching I’d imagine.
What’s more interesting to me is if you can hire someone in the US to buy the book for you, cut the spine off with a bandsaw, and send you the scans and destroy the pages afterwards.
This is literally why a lot of people pirate content, yes. It’s pretty much always the only way to obtain the content, even if you are otherwise fine with paying for it.
Needing a copy of one book you're going to spend a week reading has a lot less overhead than needing a copy of every book that you're going to process with a computer in bulk.
So for example, if the bookstore has a nice 4k surveillance camera and you have access to it because you work there, sitting at home and using it to look at the cover art on all the books on display is something you'd expect to be sued over?
What do you mean by "negotiating"? They can buy the books in paperback form from Amazon. And for e-books available for sale without DRM, they get to skip the cutting and scanning part.
If the book is out of print, then tough luck. That's not a license to infringe on the publisher's copyright. If we're not ok with that, we have legislative means to change that. A judge shouldn't be rewriting law in that manner.
>They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually.
Yeah they do. What do you think the employees of a publishing house do? They make deals, work with authors, and accept/reject pitches. They 100% need to make sure every work is under a negotiated contract.
It's not the only reason fair use exists, but it's the thing that allows e.g. search engines to exist, and that seems pretty important.
> And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.
There are thousands of publishing houses and millions of self-published authors on top of that. Many books are also out of print or have unclear rights ownership.
No, it kinda isn't. Show me anything that supports this idea beyond your own immediate conjecture right now.
>It's not the only reason fair use exists, but it's the thing that allows e.g. search engines to exist, and that seems pretty important.
No, that's the transformative element of what a search engine provides. Search engines are not legal because they can't contact each licensor, they are legal because they are considered hugely transformative features.
>There are thousands of publishing houses and millions of self-published authors on top of that. Many books are also out of print or have unclear rights ownership.
Okay, and? How many customers does Microsoft bill on a monthly basis?
> Show me anything that supports this idea beyond your own immediate conjecture right now
It's inherent in the nature of the test. The most important fair use factor is the effect on the market for the work, so if the use would be uneconomical without fair use then the effect on the market is negligible because the alternative would be that the use doesn't happen rather than that the author gets paid for it.
> No, that's the transformative element of what a search engine provides. Search engines are not legal because they can't contact each licensor, they are legal because they are considered hugely transformative features.
To make a search engine you have to do two things. One is to download a copy of the whole internet, the other is to create a search index. I'm talking about the first one, you're talking about the second one.
> Okay, and? How many customers does Microsoft bill on a monthly basis?
Microsoft does this with an automated system. There is no single automated system where you can get every book ever written, and separately interfacing with all of the many systems needed in order to do it is the source of the overhead.
I think the notion that some sort of god-given right to "scale" can absolve you of laws is preposterous.
If your business model is not economically sustainable in the current legal landscape you operate in, the correct outcome is you go out of business.
There's lots and lots of potential businesses, infinite in fact, that fall into this understanding. They don't exist because they can't because we don't want them to, so you never see them. Which might give the impression of a right to scale, but no, it does not exist.
>It's inherent in the nature of the test. The most important fair use factor is the effect on the market for the work, so if the use would be uneconomical without fair use then the effect on the market is negligible because the alternative would be that the use doesn't happen rather than that the author gets paid for it.
No, that's not the most important factor. The transformative factor is the most important. Effect on market for the work doesn't even support your argument anyway. Your argument is about the cost of making the end product, which is totally distinct from the market effects on the copyright holder when the infringer makes and releases the infringing product.
>To make a search engine you have to do two things. One is to download a copy of the whole internet, the other is to create a search index. I'm talking about the first one, you're talking about the second one.
So? That doesn't make you right. Go read the opinions, dude. This isn't something that's actually up for debate. Search engines are fair uses because of their transformative effect, not because they are really expensive otherwise. Your argument doesn't even make sense. By that logic, anything that's expensive becomes a fair use. It's facially ridiculous. Them being expensive is neither sufficient nor necessary for them to be a fair use. Their transformative nature is both sufficient and necessary to be found a fair use. Full stop.
>Microsoft does this with an automated system. There is no single automated system where you can get every book ever written, and separately interfacing with all of the many systems needed in order to do it is the source of the overhead.
Okay, and? They don't need to get every single book ever written. The libraries they pirated do not consist of "every single book ever written". It's hard to take this argument in good faith because you're being so ridiculous.
> No, that's not the most important factor. The transformative factor is the most important.
It's a four factor test because all of the factors are relevant, but if the use has negligible effect on the market for the work then it's pretty hard to get anywhere with the others. For example, for cases like classroom use, even making verbatim copies of the entire work is often still fair use. Buying a separate copy for each student to use for only a few minutes would make that use uneconomical.
> Effect on market for the work doesn't even support your argument anyway. You're argument is about the cost of making the end product, which is totally distinct from the market effects on the copyright holder when the infringer makes and releases the infringing product.
We're talking about the temporary copies they make during training. Those aren't being distributed to anyone else.
> So? That doesn't make you right.
Making a copy of everything on the internet is a prerequisite to making a search engine. It's something you have to do as a step to making the index, which is the transformative step. Are you suggesting that doing the first step is illegal or what do you propose justifies it?
> By that logic, anything that's expensive becomes a fair use. It's facially ridiculous.
Anything with unreasonably high transaction costs. Why is that ridiculous? It doesn't exempt any of the normal stuff like an individual person buying an individual book.
> They don't need to get every single book ever written.
They need to get as many books as possible, with the platonic ideal being every book. Whether or not the ideal is feasible in practice, the question is whether it's socially beneficial to impose a situation with excessively high transaction costs in order to require something with only trivial benefit to authors (potentially selling one extra copy).
>It's a four factor test because all of the factors are relevant, but if the use has negligible effect on the market for the work then it's pretty hard to get anywhere with the others. For example, for cases like classroom use, even making verbatim copies of the entire work is often still fair use. Buying a separate copy for each student to use for only a few minutes would make that use uneconomical.
All four factors are not equally relevant which is something described in pretty much every single fair use opinion. Educational uses are educational uses and considered fair because of their educational purpose (purpose is one of the factors), again, not because it's expensive. Maybe next time try googling or using ChatGPT "fair use educational".
>We're talking about the temporary copies they make during training. Those aren't being distributed to anyone else.
It's your argument. Not mine. You do not understand the market harm factor and it has nothing to do with Anthropic's transaction costs. That's just fully outright absolutely incorrect application of law.
>Making a copy of everything on the internet is a prerequisite to making a search engine. It's something you have to do as a step to making the index, which is the transformative step. Are you suggesting that doing the first step is illegal or what do you propose justifies it?
The transformative step is why it's a fair use, not the "market harm" (which you misunderstand) or the made up argument that it's "too expensive". In fact, I said this like every single turn in our conversation so it's a bit perplexing to me that you can now ask me "do you mean that it being transformative is what makes it legal" when that was my exact argument three times.
>Anything with unreasonably high transaction costs. Why is that ridiculous? It doesn't exempt any of the normal stuff like an individual person buying an individual book.
It's ridiculous because of the example I gave. Things being expensive is not a defense to copyright infringement and copyright law has no obligation to make expensive business models work. Copyright has an obligation to make transformative business models work because of the overall good they provide to society. Describing it as a "transaction cost" just kicks the can down the road even further and doesn't deal with the substance, either. They could have gone to the major publishers and licensed books from them. They didn't. That's generally who they are being sued by. When they are being sued by copyright owners in the fringe examples you pointed to, they will become relevant then.
>They need to get as many books as possible, with the platonic ideal being every book. Whether or not the ideal is feasible in practice, the question is whether it's socially beneficial to impose a situation with excessively high transaction costs in order to require something with only trivial benefit to authors (potentially selling one extra copy).
Lol dude, it was your example, not mine. They do not need every single book. They aren't being sued over every single book anyway, so it's totally besides the point.
I love the guy, I love mynoise, but he needs to chill out. Nobody "did this to him". This is almost certainly, like 99.99% certainly, just normal internet noise and he's just never noticed before. All sites get this sort of thing.
That doesn't make it ok or less impactful. He's been running MyNoise for years and it sounds like if he had been attacked before, this one was much worse, prompting a blog post about it.
It's illegal to mention the solar system and football without mentioning one of the greatest pieces of science fiction on the two, Jon Bois' 17776 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776
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