Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused.
The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
While we're at it, let's think the rest of the way through, and consider the marginal effect that additional transportation cost has on price and therefore both the supply and demand side, shall we?
To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.
In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]
If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.
And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.
I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.
Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.
There is a clear difference between "I don't want to look at the pipeline" and "pipelines have an established track record of cutting corners and avoiding regulation wherever possible which leads to leaks and spills, leaks and spills cause irreparable damage to the environment including the environment in the middle of our community, and the company is attempting to exploit our already historically exploited community"
Article says room and board, plus cost of transportation, are covered. So that $13/hr goes quite a bit further than it would if a chunk of it was going towards paying for food and rent. (And if you were paying for the cost of the plane flight, then nobody would take the job). Can't calculate the equivalent compensation without knowing where the author lives normally, but it might (VERY rough guess) be the equivalent of $20 to $25 per hour.
Can probably ignore rent savings. In the article the author says she missed her husband, kids, and dog so she still had some of the same costs going on back home.
And Wikipedia says she earned a Ph.D. in 2004 and lives in NYC [1]
The "compose" key on Linux is one of my favorite things about the Linux keyboard system. You can pick which key is your "compose" key, choosing from about a dozen options. Then just as you describe, you type it in sequence (though on Linux, compose then c then s produces š, because compose then c is the shorthand for the "caron" diacritic: compose, c, g is ǧ, compose, c, h is ȟ, and so on).
Because most websites won't have two separate fields for "ZIP code" and "postal code". Even if they knew that ZIP Code is a trademark (I didn't until you mentioned it), they would (wisely) know that putting in two fields would just confuse most people. So they put in one field. Many sites label it as "ZIP code / postal code", but some just label it as "ZIP code". But the intent is clear: put in the multi-digit string that identifies your address, whether your country calls it a ZIP code or a postal code.
I've seen so many LLM-generated articles by this point that obviously had no human editing done beforehand — just prompt and slap it onto the Web — that it makes me wonder every time. If I read this article, will I actually learn only truth? Or are there some key parts of this article that are actually false because the LLM hallucinated them, and the human involved didn't bother to double-check the article before publishing it?
If someone was just using the LLM for style, that's fine. But if they were using it for content, I just can't trust that it's accurate. And the time cost for me to read the article just isn't worth it if there's a chance it's wrong in important ways, so when I see obvious signs of LLM use, I just skip and move on.
Now, if someone acknowledged their LLM use up front and said "only used for style, facts have been verified by a human" or whatever, then I'd have enough confidence in the article to spend the time to read it. But unacknowledged LLM use? Too great a risk of uncorrected hallucinations, in my experience, so I'll skip it.
"Just use Postgres" (which defaults to UTF-8 encoding unless specifically configured to use something else) is looking like better and better advice every day.
Doesn't help those tied to legacy systems that would require a huge, expensive effort to upgrade, though. Sorry, folks. There's a better system, you know it's a better system, and you can't use it because switching is too expensive? I've been there (not databases, in my case) and it truly sucks.
That's the kind of thing that people like to hand out to people walking by. Many people, if handed a booklet they didn't actually want to read, will just toss it on the ground.
As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.
If you choose to accept a book because you are too uncomfortable to say the word "no" then you should accept that it is your responsibility to dispose of the book appropriately.
Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
Best thing, if you accepted the book but realize within a few steps (maybe immediately) that you didn't actually want it, would be to walk back to the person handing it out and say "Changed my mind, don't actually want it, why don't you give it to someone else?" I know some people who hand out religious tracts or other such materials, and every one of them that I know personally would accept the item back with good grace. They'd rather give it to someone who will actually read it.
And if they're the kind of person who won't take it back with good grace? Place it on the ground right next to them, and walk away. Make it their responsibility to deal with it. (If you don't want to go out of your way to find a trash can: some public spaces make them easy to find, but others not so much).
I didn’t say that I chose to accept the book and then threw it away. I said that I said no and the other person proceeded to drag out the interaction in a way that made everyone there uncomfortable.
Very glad someone actually read the decision and understood it, despite how much reporting on this has been poor. This was not a case about "can AI-generated art be copyrighted?", despite all the reporting misleading people. (Including me, until somebody finally pointed me at the actual decision — https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=24e0581c-2c28... — and I could read it for myself). The judge literally quoted that case where a monkey picked up a photographer's camera and triggered it, saying that only humans can hold copyright: not animals, and not tools. And he also specifically said that he was not addressing "how much input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an ‘author’ of a generated work".
So it's not the case, contrary to what many people (including me!) have said before, that the decision was "works produced by AI tools cannot be copyrighted". Rather, it's "you cannot assert that the AI tool itself is the author, you must assert that a human is the author". And the amount of work put into the prompt will definitely matter.
In other words, if you just prompt “draw a picture of a cat” then it’s possible you didn’t put enough work into the image to count as the author. But if you have a specific picture in mind that you want to create, and you prompt “draw a picture of a two-year-old cat with orange fur and orange eyes, in a sitting position, looking out of the window of a train. The interior of the train is lit with dim orange lighting. Outside, it is night and there is a full moon visible through the train window,” and then you refine that prompt until the AI produces an image close enough to what you had in your mind’s eye, then that image is clearly your own creation: the AI tool was just the tool you used to take the idea in your head and turn it into an image that other people could look at. Whether you use a paintbrush, a digital-art creation tool like Krita, or a digital-art creation tool like Midjourney, as long as you came up with the concept and did the necessary work to make the tool produce the image, then you're the author and you can assert copyright. (Note that this paragraph is my own opinion, not the judge's ruling, but I think it's a pretty defensible opinion: "draw a picture of a cat" might not be specific enough to assert that you created the resulting image, but "draw this very specific picture that I have in mind" is specific enough).
Thanks for the link to the actual decision; the lawyer's summary included a link to download a PDF of the decision, but a direct link is useful to have.
... Actually, on double-checking, the lawyer's summary I linked to lets you download a PDF of the original judge's decision (written by Judge Beryl A. Howell). The link you provided is to the appelate court, affirming the original decision (appelate court opinion written by Circuit Judge Millett). So both links are useful.
As for your "Where did they say this?", that sentence (the amount of work will matter) is my summary. The original decision said the following (page 13 of the PDF of Howell's decision):
> The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an “author” of a generated work... This case, however, is not nearly so complex.
And then there's this from the appelate court decision, on pages 18-19 (italics in original):
> First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence. See Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence, 88 Fed. Reg. 16,190, 16,192 (March 16, 2023) (Whether a work made with artificial intelligence is registerable depends “on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.”).
So although those words ("the amount of work put into the prompt will definitely matter") do not appear in either decision, the meaning is clear. Whether a work can be copyrighted will depend on unnamed circumstances including how the AI tool was used. The conclusion I draw from that is that "how the tool was used" is going to include "how much detail was specified", i.e. "draw a cat" doesn't make you the author, but "draw this very specific picture of a cat that I have in mind" will. That's my opinion, as I pointed out in the next paragraph — but now you know which parts of the decision(s) I based that opinion on.
> Whether a work can be copyrighted will depend on unnamed circumstances including how the AI tool was used. The conclusion I draw from that is that "how the tool was used" is going to include "how much detail was specified"
The Copyright Office's guidance the court cited said it would not.
If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks
human authorship and the Office will not register it 26 For example, when an AI technology
receives solely a prompt 27 from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical
works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed
by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the
generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative
control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these
prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the
prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are
implemented in its output.[1]
And the Copyright Office rejected a claim 624 iterations of experiment and refining was authorship.[2]
Another court could change this.
> That's my opinion, as I pointed out in the next paragraph
You said the next paragraph was your opinion in the next paragraph.
Right. It’s the right decision (for now) that only humans hold copyright.
There’s a whole other mess of fair rights and attribution but in this case, the ruling actually makes the path clearer for an author of such a piece to get it copyrighted. Ironic. But that’s how case law is supposed to be.
When I started my career it was in graphic design in the late 90s and photoshop was all the rage. There was a similar discussion as you pointed out around copyright and photo-manipulation technique. Who owns the photo? Who owns the piece? Then concept arts “kit bash” with reference photos to paint quickly… again who owns the refs? Who owns the piece? Deviantart had to struggle to figure out how to respect both.
I didn’t have to read too far to understand exactly where the court was going with this and where he could have just turned around with another filing and been gold.
Same here, though I settled on 32GB of swap because I have a 4TB SSD (caught a good sale on a Samsung EVO SSD at Newegg). But whenever I run `top`, I constantly see:
MiB Swap: 32768.0 total, 32768.0 free, 0.0 used.
I could safely get away with 4GB of swap, and see no difference.
> You beat [GPU] scalpers by going to Micro Center. They’ll only sell them in store and they check ID to make sure you don’t buy them more than once every 30 days.
That didn't even occur to me, but that's why, when I went to Micro Center to buy a Raspberry Pi, they had a limit of one per customer. I asked the employee helping me about the limit, because I was thinking of buying four Pis to build a small Kubernetes cluster for my homelab. He said if I was buying four Pis, that would probably be fine, just let them know ahead of time. I figured they were trying to keep them in-stock to match demand; the idea of scalpers just didn't occur to me. Of course, GPUs are in way higher demand than Pis.
The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
reply