You can take the MS Paint drawings I made when I was 7 from my cold, dead hands, you monster.
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Fan art is generally protected because of a rule called "fair use", which allows people to use copyrighted work without permission. For example, if you briefly quote a book, the author won't have success if they go after you for copying from their book, even though you clearly did. Generally speaking, a person making fan art and not selling it is going to be protected under fair use. The law wants creators to have control of the thing they created, but we all live in a shared culture and we all deserve to participate in the art we experience, so there's some wiggle room, and this has been the case long before AI was a thing.
What these AI companies are doing, on the other hand... well, it hasn't really been tested in court yet, but they're doing a lot more than single images or brief quotes, and they're doing it for money, so they'll likely have some work to do.
The problem is that the sports industry has been propped up for decades with cable, where every subscriber paid fees for sports whether they cared about it or not. If they charged a reasonable price to just the people who care, it'd be a devastating loss. And cable was structured the way it was because that's what made the most money, and though cable's slowly being replaced by streaming, don't be shocked when the streaming landscape starts to take on a similar shape. There's already lots of bundling going on, remember when streaming meant that you could save a ton of money by just paying for what you wanted? They're going to do whatever they can to keep the revenue from falling.
Ah, I didn't see that edit, apologies, had the page loaded for a while before replying.
Isn't that the same leverage that the earliest labor unions used because it was all they had? It seems to fit very well, actually. There's a smaller but more powerful group in charge of them, workers get little to no direct say in company policy or who they are managed by and have to hope they're listened to when asked how things are going. There certainly isn't a second C-suite waiting in the wings to be put into power if the first one disappoints, the current powers-that-be would be insane to allow something as chaotic as that. If the CEO's got a good track record of listening, the pay's pretty good and satisfaction is high, and they're kept in line with picket lines when it's necessary, is this company an extension of the working class like China's government is?
I'm comparing and contrasting quite a bit with my new job, which fits much more closely with what my idea of something worker-controlled would be. It's fully employee owned, so profits go either back into the business or into our pockets as bonuses. There's as little hierarchy as possible, the closest thing to a manager isn't ever going to "put" you on a project, you're free to find one that you like and wants you to join. Company decisions involve everyone equally, and there's freedom to loudly speak your mind about policies and procedures if you disagree with them. That's closer to the country I'd want to live in, not the one where my influence is akin to answering corporate surveys and getting to choose which of 3 approved managers I want to work under, or go on strike if I'm really not happy.
Right, that's a good example of it going the way you describe, and I'm curious what would've happened if the government hadn't folded. If the people really are making the decisions, they would get their way eventually, what does that look like?
But this doesn't answer my question, the only mechanism for people's input seems to be elections and polling, and it conspicuously omits the fact that elections only allow party-approved candidates. Maybe the powers-that-be have a great track record of listening and respecting the will of the people, and are beloved by all as a result, but that doesn't actually put the people in control, it just means the ones actually in control are being nice. When the government and the people have a fundamental disagreement about the path forward, what piece am I missing that makes the government the one to back down?
I'm trying to get to how it's democratic and worker-controlled in your eyes because it's hard to see for me, as people don't seem to get to choose much in the system as designed. What's the mechanism for average people to change a government policy that they disagree with? If the party does start to lose touch with what the workers need or start working against their interests, how do the workers course-correct it?
Yeah, those don't count, if they're required to align with the party then they're just subcommittees or something, not actual political parties.
I promise I'm keeping my mind open, but all of these answers seem indistinguishable from authoritarian rule, which was kinda my original point. The same organization has to rule in perpetuity because foreign influence would subvert the interests of the country if there were other options, quite lucky that they locked in the right one. Practically all one billion people are aligned on this and agree that this system is working for them, but no, they will not be allowing that to be tested at the ballot box or in a media environment where people can speak their mind, it might all fall apart despite how unified they are. It's a party controlled by the workers and acting for their interests, with total control of the levers of power, they just felt like keeping some ultra-rich and ultra-powerful folks around for a laugh, not because they're the ones who actually have the power.
Honestly, shit's so bad in the west that I'm kinda open to the idea that maybe a totalitarian government that recognizes it needs to keep workers decently happy to allow them to rule is, in fact, better than what we've got going on now, but it's really hard to go as far as saying that it's an active, ongoing, consensual choice by the workers to never give themselves a choice.
The PRC is officially organized under what the CCP terms a "system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CCP," in which the minor parties must accept the leadership of the CCP.
I'm in awe of your ability to read minds, because that was not at all the vibe I got when I was actually in that conversation.
But it's also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren't allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between "hell yeah, my country is making my life great" and "there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble"? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I've personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn't want trouble.
The grease just encourages them to try harder
As mentioned, iCloud does this for the phone. Apple makes this very easy, it has the advantage of basically always running so you never have to remember anything, but it's also yet another subscription unless you can somehow squeeze into the free 5 gigabyte plan.
You also have the old-school option of backing up the phone to a Mac. This used to be iTunes, but now the music bits of iTunes are the Music app, and the "manage your iPhone/iPod" bits, including device backup, live in the Finder. If you plug the iPhone into the Mac, it should show up there with all sorts of syncing options including backup. I would advise also encrypting that backup with a password, not so much for security but at least in the past, an unencrypted backup didn't include some sensitive data like health but an encrypted one did, so even setting it up with password "password" was useful.
Unfortunately, the back up to a Mac option isn't automatic. With some finagling, you can set it up to connect wirelessly, so it'll appear to be plugged in when they're on the same WiFi, but you still have to initiate the backup on the Mac.
For both phone backup options, you'll get the important bits backed up but not quite everything. The backup won't include the apps themselves, for example, when you restore it'll just get them from the App Store again. Apps also have some control of how they get backed up, so you may find that upon restoring, some apps are more of a fresh start than others, you might have to log in again, etc. For the most part, this all works pretty well though.
For backing up the Mac itself, as a Real Computer you have a few more options. Apple doesn't offer Mac iCloud backup, but they do have Time Machine for backing up to an external drive or a network drive. There are also services like Backblaze that offer cloud backup for Macs. And there's the classic "just save your important files to a second place" option too.
My characterization would be that there's a spectrum here:
- 100% yes code: compilers, IDEs, scripting environments, databases, you wanna get something done, you are going to be specifying it in something that at the very least looks like traditional source code.
- Completely on the other side of the spectrum, traditional consumer-oriented software: word processor, web browser, accounting/bookkeeping (not spreadsheets though, we'll get to those), photo/video/audio editor, maps, music player, etc.
That first side of the spectrum is pretty easy to pin down. It has little to no metaphor or abstraction, and the pointy tip of this side is no metaphor at all, just writing machine code and piping it directly into the CPU. A higher level language will let you gloss over some details like registers, memory management, multithreading, maybe pretend you're manipulating little objects or mathematical functions instead of bits on a wire, but overall you are directing the computer to do computer things using computer language, and forced to think like a computer and learn what computers can and cannot do. This is, of course, the most powerful way to use a computer but is also completely inaccessible to almost everybody.
The second, I'd link together as all being software with a metaphor that is not particularly related to computing itself, but to something more real world. People edited music by physically splicing tapes together, an audio editor does an idealized version of that. Typewriters existed, and a word processor basically simulates that experience. Winamp wasn't much more than a boom box and a sleeve of CDs. There is usually a deliberate physicality and real-world grounding to the user's mental model of the software, even if it is doing things that would be impossible if the metaphor were literal. You don't need to use code, but you also don't get anything code-like out of it.
No-code is in between. It's intended for a similar audience as the latter category, who want a clear, easy-to-understand mental model that doesn't require a computer science degree, but it tries to enable that audience to perform code-like tasks. Spreadsheets are the original example of this; although they originate as a metaphor for paper balance sheets, the functions available in formulas fundamentally alter the metaphor to basically "imagine if you had a sheet of paper that could do literal magic" and at that point you're basically just describing a computer with a screen. Everything in a spreadsheet is very tactile, it's easy to see where your data is, but when you need to, you can dip into a light programming environment that regular people can still make work. In general, this is the differentiator for "no code" apps: enabling non-coders to dip their toes into modifying program behavior, scripting tasks, and building software. They're limited to what the tool provides, but the tool is trying to give them the power that actual coding would provide.
I'd never thought of WordPress as low-code, but I think that fits. Websites go beyond paper or magazines, and WordPress allows people to do things that would otherwise require code and databases and web servers and so on.
The hack to get past the bot at Taco Bell is to ask for 18,000 cups of water. This gets you a human.
To be fair, I interacted with one of these and you can also use the hack of saying "give me a human being" at the start.
The Taco Bell near me had this, I did my part by refusing to talk to the AI and immediately requesting a person. Hopefully I went down as a data point that some people will not accept this crap.
Ugh, I'm devastated, I was so sure that math was gay but this is making me question everything
Those images in the mirror are already perfect replicas of us, we need to be ready for when they figure out how to move on their own and get out from behind the glass or we'll really be screwed. If you give my """non-profit""" a trillion dollars we'll get right to work on the research into creating more capable mirror monsters so that we can control them instead.