The hole in that analogy is that in some cases these other platforms aren't imaginary. The open, ad-free, privacy-protecting, you-own-your-data alternative to Twitter actually exists: Mastodon.
The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.
But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.
I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.
(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)
I'm building a compositor now, and I've been thinking about multi-seat from the beginning, but I know there are lots of places that assume a single seat, and so this sort of thing won't work for me. It's actually a lot more work than you'd think to support this...
Given that a lot of the use case is interacting with two different programs simultaneously, even just supporting it at the compositor level is pretty valuable: then it should "just work" for that use case. You can't really do a whole lot about the fact that most Wayland clients are making assumptions about seats; well, you can, but that's a lot more work...
I keep thinking of trying to see how far I get re-doing Niri in River.
The one other constraint that I'd really like to see relaxed is about displays, about being able to merge and subdivide screens as I please. Having a huge ultra-wide display really would be so much better if I could divide it up somehow. This is kind of the headline feature of stilch, which is a pretty neat compositor,
https://github.com/wegel/stilch .
There's been all kinds of rough incredibly hard things going on with Niri just trying to figure out how to handle some of the more interesting copy-paste scenarios, and with really weird sequencing issues across basically ephemeral inputs, that have really plagued the project and made life incredibly bad for downstream apps. This is just my opinion, man, but I think the lack of ambition about these ridiculous over the top features eventually starts hampering what turns out to be relatively prosaic asks. Better models for multi-seat, multi-cursor help scenarios like remote-desktop, and video-chat remote control, that at first don't seem needed, but are fundamentals that pay dividends if you shoot for them.
Sometimes that's true, but sometimes (imo the superior approach) the touchscreen is independent from the cursor. I think touchscreen Chromebooks are like that, for example.
I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so.
> and yes that's 100% copyright infringement
Says what court of law?
I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredibly off-putting and not sympathetic. You're throwing out wild assertions about the law that are not supported by... anything, really.
There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine if you are infringing on a copyright / trademark by using it to sell something. That's why whether or not an LLM can produce a picture of Pikachu is largely irrelevant. It's what you do with it that matters. Even more interestingly if I draw a picture of Pikachu and then the Pokemon Company decides they wanna use that specific picture they actually would have to pay ME for the copyright to use it.
Let's not mix copyright and trademark in mixed phrases like "infringing on a copyright / trademark". The two are very different concepts with different goals.
The main question in the "AI image generator generates a Pikachu image" is whether the AI company serving that image generator to you is violating the copyright or not. Because they make money when doing so (API / subscription cost), and so it's like selling images of Pikachu. The user is likely in the clear as long as they don't go on sell that Pikachu further. But the AI company sold the Pikachu image to the user.
That question is irrelevant. Artists may be hired to reproduce copywritten work without the consent of the copyright owner. In this case an LLM is no different from Photoshop. It is a tool. Nothing more.
Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be?
As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the training material itself was acquired legally.
I mean, its theoretically possible that a court might rule that if an LLM outputs an exact or lightly modified piece of copyrighted work, that it won't be copyright encumbered. We'll end up in a situation where copyright doesn't exist anymore, because you can always claim that its been laundered through an AI. This seems terribly unlikely to me, because 1:1 transformations (eg copying an image into memory) are already established to count as making a copy for legal purposes, there's strong precedent around piracy
There's also been court cases where material has been found to be infringingly used, eg song lyrics, so the case where copyright ceases to exist doesn't seem to be coming through yet, thankfully. It'd be the most staggering upheaval of copyright of all time if this doesn't turn out to be true
Ok, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?
Sure, that's fine. But some people like to play around and hack just for the sake of hacking. If you don't like that, that's cool, no issue with that. But some people do.
(FWIW, I have the same attitude/preference as you do. Until I can run SOTA models on my own hardware without taking out a second mortgage, I'll pay our AI overlords for the privilege.)
The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.
But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.
I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.
(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)
reply