I can’t imagine who would hire him. He fucked Unity badly.

AI bots never had rights to waive. Their work is not their work.

This is only partially true. In the US (which tends to set the tone on copyright, but other jurisdictions will weigh in over time) generative AI cannot be considered an “author.” That doesn’t mean that other forms of rights don’t apply to AI generated works (for example, AI generated works may be treated as trade secrets and probably will be accepted for trademark purposes).

Also, all of the usual transformations which can take work from the public domain and result in a new copyrightable derivative also apply.

This is a much more complex issue than just, “AI bots never had rights to waive.”

Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.

This is not, “foreign to most artists,” it’s just that most artists have no idea what the mechanism of learning is.

The method by which you provide input to the network for training isn’t the same thing as learning.

There are valid concerns with regard to bidet use. They do result in aerosolized particulates in greater number than results from wiping, which means you are literally breathing more feces.

Is it enough to be problematic? Probably not, but that may also depend on how aggressively/frequently you use them.

See also:

• Ali, Wajid, et al. “Comparing bioaerosol emission after flushing in squat and bidet toilets: Quantitative microbial risk assessment for defecation and hand washing postures.” Building and Environment 221 (2022): 109284.
• Abney, S. E., et al. “Toilet hygiene—review and research needs.” Journal of Applied Microbiology 131.6 (2021): 2705-2714.

AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour.

And does this apply equally to all artists who have seen any of my work? Can I start charging all artists born after 1990, for training their neural networks on my work?

Learning is not and has never been considered a financial transaction.

Looking over their concerns, I’m not sure that they have a leg to stand on. The claim they’re making is that they’ve measured an increase in hate-related tweets (I’ll take them at their word on this) and then they associate this with Musk taking over.

They present no evidence for this later claim and do not, as far as I can see, make any attempt to compare against increases in hate among other social media platforms.

Grooming, for example, is one topic they covered. But this is a topic that Republicans have been pushing increasingly as election season spins up. Musk didn’t cause that, and that kind of nonsense can be found on Facebook and reddit as well.

I’m inclined to sympathize with an underdog nonprofit, but in this case I just can’t see why they expected not to get pushback on such poorly grounded claims

Fun fact: password controls like this have been obsolete since 2020. Standards that guide password management now focus on password length and external security features (like 2FA and robust password encryption for storage) rather than on individual characters in passwords.

How did the first tin cans get opened? A chisel and a hammer, writes Kaleigh Rogers for Motherboard. Given that the first can opener famously wasn’t invented for about fifty years after cans went into production, people must have gotten good at the method. But there are reasons the can opener took a while to show up.

Our story starts in 1795, when Napoleon Bonaparte offered a significant prize “for anyone who invented a preservation method that would allow his army’s food to remain unspoiled during its long journey to the troops’ stomachs,” writes Today I Found Out. (In France at the time, it was common to offer financial prizes to encourage scientific innovation–like the one that led to the first true-blue paint.) A scientist named Nicolas Appert cleaned up on the prize in the early 1800s, but his process used glass jars with lids rather than tin cans.

“Later that year,” writes Today I Found Out, “an inventor, Peter Durand, received a patent from King George III for the world’s first can made of iron and tin.” But early cans were more of a niche item: they were produced at a rate of about six per hour, rising to sixty per hour in the 1840s. As they began to penetrate the regular market, can openers finally started to look like a good idea.

But the first cans were just too thick to be opened in that fashion. They were made of wrought iron (like fences) and lined with tin, writes Connecticut History, and they could be as thick as 3/16 of an inch. A hammer and chisel wasn’t just the informal method of opening these cans–it was the manufacturer’s suggested method.

The first can opener was actually an American invention, patented by Ezra J. Warner on January 5, 1858. At this time, writes Connecticut History, “iron cans were just starting to be replaced by thinner steel cans.”

Warner’s can opener was a blade that cut into the can lid with a guard to prevent it from puncturing the can. A user sort of sawed their way around the can’s edge, leaving a jagged rim of raw metal as they went. “Though never a big hit with the public, Warner’s can opener served the U.S. Army during the Civil War and found a home in many grocery stores,” writes Connecticut History, “where clerks would open cans for customers to take home.”

Attempts at improvement followed, and by 1870, the basis of the modern can opener had been invented. William Lyman’s patent was the first to use a rotary cutter to cut around the can, although in other aspects it doesn’t look like the modern one. “The classic toothed-wheel crank design” that we know and use today came around in the 1920s, writes Rogers. That invention, by Charles Arthur Bunker, remains the can opener standard to this day.>

I finally figured out what’s going on. Someone at reddit asked, “ChatGPT, what are the 10 most damaging things reddit could do to alienate users and decrease its value?” They then began working on the checklist… they’re up to, what, 5?

There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.

Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, “In God We Trust,” motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, “And this be our motto - ‘In God is our trust.’”

I didn’t believe it so I looked it up… but Smithsonian says it’s even longer, 50 years!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-can-opener-wasnt-invented-until-almost-50-years-after-can-180964590/

That first one reminded me of a story I heard at a small SF convention in LA back in the '90s.

This writer was working on The Real Ghostbusters (long story behind that name) and in the episode they go in the space shuttle to a space station. Everyone on the space station is a Star Trek character analog and so hilarity ensues as the rest of the episode is just a Star Trek spoof.

One of the characters is based on Janice Rand who, in the show, had a basket-weave hairdo. The writer included in the script a note to the animators about her hair. The animators were Asian and did not know what a basket-weave was, and it being pre-Wikipedia, they just made an assumption. The test animation they got back had the Janice Rand-alike with a basket literally woven into her hair.

They kept it in the final episode, of course.

Edit: found it, at about 2:30 https://www.crackle.com/watch/d4228840-874e-418c-afd7-a9b93146e6ed/the-real-ghostbusters/ain’t-nasa-sarily-so