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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Different people have different skin, oils, water supplies and diets.

    Everyone needs to clean themselves regularly, but the exact details of what that means varies by circumstances.

    Most people are fine with shampoo, a gentle soap, and warm water.
    As long as you’re getting rid of old dead skin, excess oils and any grime you’re fine though. Soaps make that easier, but they’re not a requirement.
    I’m prone to dry skin and greasy hair, so I use a shampoo, cool water and a scrub brush instead of soap for my body. Perfectly clean, just need to scrub a little longer to make sure I get everything.



  • If you have reason to believe they are, you explain that reasoning to a court and if the reasoning is sufficiently persuasive the company can be compelled to provide internal information that could show whatever is going on.
    Hiding this information or destroying it typically carries personal penalties for the individuals involved in it’s destruction, as well as itself being evidence against the organization. “If your company didn’t collect this information, why are four IT administrators and their manager serving 10 years in prison for intentionally deleting relevant business records?”

    The courts are allowed to go through your stuff.


  • Just for an example that isn’t visible to the user: the server needs to know how it can communicate responses to the browser.
    So it’s not just “what fonts do you have”, it also needs to know "what type of image can you render? What type of data compression do you speak? Can I hold this connection open for a few seconds to avoid having to spend a bunch of time establishing a new connection? We all agree that basic text can be represented using 7-bit ASCII, but can you parse something from this millennium?”.

    Beyond that there’s all the parameters of the actual connection that lives beneath http. What tls ciphers do you support? What extensions?

    The exposure of the basic information needed to make a request reveals information which may be sufficient to significantly track a user.




  • Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

    The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

    https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

    It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
    Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
    The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

    It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

    Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.


  • I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

    If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
    The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

    A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?




  • Just a few nits: he did cause the price to drop, but it’s not as significant as you make it sound. Their price had just spiked up to all time highs, and it dropped down to where it was before the spike.

    The drop wasn’t even out of proportion with the fluctuations the price normally has seen over recent history.

    Finally, stock price falling doesn’t actually get us anything. If anything, it’ll make them more aggressive about costs to bolster the earnings sheet to get the price back up.

    I’d focus on the “spotlight on the dark situation” side of things, and how making the insurance companies aware that we’re mad enough to kill them and laugh at their death means we might actually be getting close to mad enough to institute a program that saves us money and pays for more treatment of higher quality for more people.


  • I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion, although I’d detach the violence from people.

    Guns are weapons specifically designed as tools of violence. Some are for designed with animal hunting in mind, some for hurting people, and some for target sports, which are ultimately derived from the other two.

    Like any tool, how people intend to use it matters, as well as how they expect to use it and how they prepare to use it.
    I will easily judge people based on those factors.
    Separating the tool from the use also lets us be a little more objective in our discussions about how we want to regulate the tool. “This type of weapon poses an undue risk to surrounding people in this context, so you can’t have it in this context”.

    I think just about every gun owner I’ve met agrees with the sentiment if you get rid of the “against people” part.


  • If you voted for Harris you’re not the person being talked to, are you? They asked why people were mad at those that voted third party.
    Why would I be mad at people who voted for Harris?

    I don’t buy the whole "you’re not allowed to be mad at the voters!” thing. They had the same information I did, and decided that instead of saying “gee, the easiest thing I can do to in anyway stop the obvious bad things that could happen is to vote against trump” they did some form of “not that”.

    If it’s a choice between the zoo and the crotch kicking factory, and three vote for the zoo, four for the crotch kicking, and three more couldn’t be bothered to vote, *I’m gonna be mad at the people who voted for the crotch kicking as well as the people who didn’t vote", and I’m gonna be frustrated when they say it’s the zoo’s fault for not advertising more and we need to move on and hold hands through the kicking.


  • The election is over though, Harris lost because she ran a shit campaign on proven losing policy. People need to get over that and focus on actually dealing with the shit sandwich we’ve collectively been handed instead of continuing to point fingers and argue about whose fault it was.

    I mean this with all sincerity: fuck off.
    Arguing that letting this and everything else happen is better than what Harris brought to the table doesn’t just get forgotten because the people who said this would be better are upset they were wrong and don’t want to be blamed.

    The “winning policy” is evidently “ethnic cleansing”. That’s what came of all this, do you get that? Milquetoast ceasefire and continuing the slow push towards a two state solution lost to ethnic cleansing.

    Whether it’s Trump or Harris that wasn’t going to change. The biggest difference is just one of political posturing.

    Trump has already increased the weapons being sent, rolling back a Biden administration block on certain weapons. You can’t just say “no, they won’t use US troops” when we’re on an article about trump wanting to use US troops for ethnic cleansing. Why do you think Israel gets a say in what troops go in? It’s not like they can stop US if we want to send ours in. Why do you think American troops wouldn’t do these things?

    We’re not at the hypothetical stage here. There have already been concrete changes in policy that are beyond “posturing”.

    The real problem ultimately though is that none of this existed in a vacuum. If this was literally a referendum on how the US should respond to Israel that would be one thing, but that was such a tiny slice of a much bigger discussion.

    Yes, and that’s exactly the point. Even if their policies on Gaza were exactly the same, which they very much were not, it would still be better to have voted for Harris because of so many reasons, none of which mattered to the people who swore to not vote for her over Gaza.

    This is being civil about things. We’re not saying that the people who refused Harris because of Gaza are transphobic, antivax, anti-education, anti abortion, racist misogynists, even though supporting Harris evidently makes one a genocidal racist in their eyes.

    Maybe if people said “you know what? Maybe I made a mistake” there wouldn’t be such animosity, but here we are. Better a mask off fascist than an imperfect compromise.

    And don’t worry, I am doing what I can to deal with the shit sandwich they wanted us to have. That doesn’t keep me from having the ability, nor seeing the need for, needling people who thought that this would be better for Gaza than what Harris wanted.



  • There’s a lot of frustration at the segment of the population who 1) vocally said that Harris would be just as bad as trump in regards to Gaza 2) loudly argued that failure to listen to them in regards to Gaza would cost the Democrats the election, and 3) said that anyone who was willing to vote for Harris despite not perfectly walking the line in regards to Gaza was a supporter of genocide. “The lesser of two evils is still a vote for genocide”, and “it’s not like it can be more genocide” are both things that have been said to me.

    So, according to the people in question: yes, they are that numerous. I’m incredibly sad that I seem to have been right, but also fuck you to all the absolute assholes who accused me of supporting genocide because I’d rather the president get a middling cease fire and shamefully keep sending munitions to Israel than have us actively send troops to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Congrats! You got what you wanted! No more war in Gaza, because we’re going to finish it now.
    Even if they’re in they’re not large enough to matter, electorally, they were consistently aggressively smug and superior to anyone who said that maybe trump wasn’t going to be the savior of the Palestinians, as evidence by his explicit words.
    It’s cathartic to be mad at people who were condescending towards you when they were wrong, even if you’d rather not be right, purely because they called you a bad person for wanting the same thing but thinking their way to get it wouldn’t work.


  • I think the most alive you could be would then be some manner of homeless drug addict. You have no power over your life, so no notion of what any day will look like.

    This quote kinda rubs me the wrong way because it treats predictability the same as banality.
    If you want a job where you never know what the day is going to look like, work for a poorly managed company. You never know what you’re going to be doing, sometimes the project you’re working on one day is cancelled without warning and now people are mad at you for not having been working on the new priority for the past month. Sometimes you go in and you work 36 hours straight without warning because someone else messed up and your boss doesn’t give a shit who’s responsible and you’re the one who knows how to fix it, so fix it or fuck off. Better hope you don’t have a family or you’re going to have to make choices.

    Knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow is just having work of any consequence. Food service knows what they’re doing tomorrow. So does a CEO, a software developer at a competent business, or a project manager. I can think of very few jobs whose scope of work is limited to a day, and is so variable that you just don’t know what you’ll be doing. Temp? Personal assistant to an eccentric actor? (Not the manager type assistant, they need to know the schedule. The one that buys coffee, six turtles and a pair of roller skates and doesn’t actually exist).

    I could just be dead inside because I know that tomorrow is going to go a particular way that I like.


  • I literally linked you to a large collection of their statements on the matter, backed by data. “Appeal to authority” isn’t a magic phrase that lets you dismiss expertise entirely. “Appeal to authority” is a fallacy, but “deferring to expertise” is not. I’m not saying these tariffs are wrong because economists say they are, but that it’s reasonable to accept consensus opinion of regarded experts without walking through every step of their argument.

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/informal-logic/appeals-to-authority/F455E1D4279677917F379D9464A76060

    In general, the use of argument from expert opinion is a reasonable, if inherently defeasible, type of argument. Appeals to expert opinion can be a legitimate form of obtaining advice or guidance for drawing tentative conclusions on an issue or problem where objective knowledge is unavailable or inconclusive. It is well recognized in law, for example, where expert testimony is treated as an important kind of evidence in a trial, even though it often leads to conflicting testimony, in a “battle of the experts.”

    I specifically mentioned that they can be wrong, and that it’s maybe worth reconsidering when you’re disagreeing with the experts. Of course engineers can make mistakes. But if a group of them say “that bridge is unsafe, we can show you our calculations”, and a non-engineer says that they have an “intuitive feeling” that it is, I know who I’m listening to.

    Are you going to keep shifting to different topics? As far as economic arguments go “there’s a theoretical economist who thinks this is a good idea that I haven’t cited and that agrees with my intuition” is… Not very interesting.


  • I do ultimately think tariffs will be good for the US.

    Can you see how maybe it would be easy for a person to think that you thought tariffs would be good for the US? If that wasn’t your point, then I have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Why don’t you care what economists say? They’re people who have actually spent time looking at and thinking about these things. They have numbers to back up their claims and, while fallible, they’re likely the most qualified people to make assessments about the economic impact of policy changes.
    It’s like saying you don’t care what engineers say when what you’re doing is building a bridge. At the very least it should raise a red flag when nearly all of them say something is a bad idea.