manholio

Post war interventionism included energy utilities, which in many cases were rebuilt from the ground up, but also transport, rail in particular, telecommunication, extractive and heavy industries - and it happened in economies with a much smaller tertial services sector.

I don't know what the equivalent contemporaries would be, but in any case we would need to see public spending or nationalization on a scale incomprehensible to the current neo-liberal european business climate, not just some puny guarantees & price ceilings, which are not very sustainable anyway.

You are, yes and yes.

I'm unconvinced that the power of those load guarantees can be in any way compared to the massive post war interventionism that, at least in Europe&UK saw large scale nationalizations in key areas.

Sure, a green loan guarantee spurs investment in that area but the business model must still be sound or it will be falter in the marketplace. And if government steps in and, say, also guarantees an energy price, that's just another form of taxation for the consumers that must pay the costs of a political choice in energy. This will quickly hit a wall of resistance from consumers if that particular technology is a mallinvestment.

Furthermore, the loan guarantees themselves might not be officially counted in the debt to GDP ratio, but rational investors will be aware of them and price government bonds accordingly. A state that over-guarantees bad loans will see trouble servicing their debt in the marketplace, and at least in Europe the well known structural fragility of the Eurozone will amplify those shocks and bring them into the foreground.

I'm not claiming the problem is identical to pre-existing problems in the copyright space, just that it's sufficiently similar not to pose a significant challenge for legal scholars, IMHO. Existing copyright laws not only forbid verbatim reproduction, but require derivative works too not prejudice the original author, and grants those authors the power to authorize and reject derivation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

You anthropomorphic analogy falls flat in its face because the algorithm does not "know" anything, not in any sense of the "know" word for sentient and rational creatures. The algorithm embeds an association between the text "Wonder woman" and actual artistic representations of Wonder woman included in the prior art it is trained on. When prompted, it can reproduce one (see the Copilot fail where it spited out verbatim copyrighted code including comments) or a remix of such representations and integrate them into the output. That's plain as day a derivative work.

The particular case you are referring too, style extraction, could be considered fair use assuming you can technically separate the base visual model from the output style and you can prove the training data for the output module is distilled into abstract, statistical quantities pertaining to that style, such as color palete, stroke weight etc. That sounds like a tall order and I would consider any AI-model trained with copyrighted works as tainted until that burden of proof is satisfied.

> The internet has happened, and it works on credit card-style numbers.

and that's a usability disaster. the entire experience is atrocious, you have to enter and secure multiple pieces of numeric data.

it's a system begging to be disrupted.

What I really need is an location aware task list, that allows me to easily setup recurring or one-off tasks and reminds me to do it whenever I'm at a location where they make sense. Basically, the "Getting Things done" methodology by David Alen, but updated for the event-driven 21st century man. Here is a simplified version: https://hamberg.no/gtd

For example, if I setup a task that I need to purchase a road toll sticker every year and that can only be acquired at a gas station, the app should track when the current sticker expires and prompt me when I am at a gas station. At the store, I get a notification with all missing gorceries that I've earlier identified back home and inserted in the "Groceries" task list. When I come back home, the app will prompt me to, for example, read the gas meter that is due that day.

I'm currently using Google Tasks for these tasks but it's less than optimal, although the gmail integration is pretty cool. Your Recall app could make up the Archival module of a great tasklist; i.e, if items come up that seem important and I might later need them (such as, say, a particularly interesting hackernews thread or news item), I need a fast and easy way to archive them with as much context and metadata, so I can easily reference them later. Such items could have optional reminders, so I can snooze them and they keep popping up.

Obfuscation is not a valid defense against copyright infringement. If my database contains full encrypted copies of unlicensed works and I distribute keys to my customers for parts of those works, no forensic auditor will ever prove the full extent of my infringement without learning the full keyset. But I would argue that reproduction of even a single instance of an unlicensed non trivial fragment of a copyrighted work would taint that entire database.

In the same way in AI a crafted prompt that creates striking similarities to a well known work, like this example here, is suficient proof that the model embeds unlicensed works; using a copyrighted work for training models is just another form of commercial exploitation that the original author should be compensated for.

Sure, if you build your own model, train it on copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you use someone else's model which properly license its copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently different from its parents to not constitute infringement and enjoy its own copyright protection.

However, the model creator/distributor will never be able to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained on such material. It's not really a subtle or particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a database of copyrighted works (trained model).

The trained model is not a sufficiently different work that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed algorithmic representation of the works used to train it, legally speaking it is those works.

As a general rule, the fair use thumbnails enjoy is very limited, only in certain jurisdictions, and only for very specific use-cases.

An universal art-production machine that can compete in the market place with the original artist - and indeed crush them on productivity and price - certainly does not qualify as fair use.

Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the benefits of fair use.

Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural embodiment in algorithmic form.

It doesn't really matter: the AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works processed by a generic, non-artistic algorithm specifically engineered to extract the artistic features of such works.

Conceptually, it's very similar to running lossy JPEG over a single copyrighted work versus a giant folder of works from different artists, then shipping that compressed collection to you customers so they cut and paste sections of those works in their collages. The output your customers create with this tool might be sufficiently original to warant copyright protection and fair use, but your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation, it doesn't matter if it affects a single artist or thousands.

> No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform

Humans aren't yet computers, so algorithms are (obviously) not directly relevant to them.

But in the general sense, that clam is wrong. Human behavior is amenable to rules, incentives and social pressure, and technical tools have found a role in shaping that since the dawn of civilization. From simple technology such as voting down to the most oppressive algorithmic surveillance state, algorithms can be used to influence and control human behavior or enforce rules.

this is a very interesting take. Is it a sample of personal research or is it based on some external source?

I have this exact view that "everything is politics". For profit businesses are just a particular case of a top down authoritarian political structure, but they work politically too in the broad sense, people fighting for power, influence and resources. it's the only constant i can think of regarding human behavior across cultures and types of organizations.

> Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.

Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.

Typically, applications where bandwidth is sufficiently limited to warrant AI heavy lossy compression are also application with tight latency and computational constraints. Not to disparage these results, but the area of very low bitrate codecs is more or less over, voice and audio streaming is a solved problem. In terms of relative bitrate you can do much better with AI, but it will have diminishing returns in the real world.

On the other hand, I think AI-informed video compression will be absolutely transformational; it could enable practical transmission and reproduction of high definition holography (reproduction of an entire wavefront, allowing real 3D scenes viewable from multiple angles) that currently requires a small data-center to process.

I would go even further and say we need a massive conversion program of existing ICE cars into electrics instead of scrapping a billion perfectly usable cars.

The body, the steering system, suspension, wheels, passenger area, brakes and electronic stability systems etc. they can be used for another 20 years.

A 15kWh conversion kit will turn all these clunkers into perfectly usable daily drivers.

Sounds like a very boring game. The two races are basically distinct, just like the human race is distinct from geology. For all we know, Earth's geology might be sentient already.

> Your eyes focus "into" the VR scene, not at the screens one inch from your eye.

3D head gear like Oculus have optical systems that move the physical screens virtually to a much greater (and comfortable) distance - most people can't even focus objects closer than about 10 cm.

That's not what I meant. Rather, even that virtual 3D screen is still at a fixed apparent distance from your eyes, unlike a natural scene that contains objects that are father or closer. Such objects scatter light not only at different angles for the two eyes, the bulk of the 3D effect, but also at different internal convergence, requiring the eye's lens to deform and compensate.

This is an effect current tech cannot reproduce, leading to a nauseating and tiring viewing experience - as if the whole immersive virtual world wasn't already.

As I said above, true holographic digital screens could make 3D seamless and ubiquitous. At current computing trends, that appears at least a number of decades away from consumer gear.

I think stereoscopic viewing is fundamentally a bad idea that holds little promise - it's not really 3D, but a parlor trick that gives confusing depth information, the eye must focus at the screen even if the scene is very close or very far. It's too annoying and tiring as a sustainable consumer technology; maybe tools only professionals are required to use, ex. remote surgery gear, with pros and cons well understood.

This could change if holographic digital screens become practical, allowing, for example, multiple people in a room to see a real 3D scene, each from a different angle without any head gear.

VR is just the most recent incarnation of the "3D vision" gimmick every generation will rediscovered and then abandon. We had multiple waves of this fad, starting with the stereoscopic novelty postcards of the 19th century, the many 3D cinema revivals (the Avatar craze even saw the rise of ludicrous 3D TVs), and now Metaverse and its ilk.

It always fails because, once the novelty of the effect wears off, people realize it's basically pointless. The extra information 3D brings is not worth the logistic cost. So they revert to regular 2D cinema, classic virtual worlds like MMORPGs etc. which are much more comfortable to experience and deliver the same basic product.

There is nothing fundamental preventing advertisers to create unblockable ads that are served from the same domain as the website and embedded in the pages. It's more convoluted and needs to setup a back-channel to the website, but it's definitely doable. See for example Facebook and Twitter ads, they are very hard to block without customized, site-specific extensions.

What stops advertisers form going through the hassle is the minority of users who use ad-blocking and even those can be easily detected and annoyed with warning pop-ups.

But make no mistake about it, when website owners decide you need to see their ads because their existence depends on it, you most definitely will.

> soon enough the vast majority of mass will be catapulted from the lunar surface

Other than naturally falling asteroids, to date we have managed to acquire about 400Kg of moon rock at a price point of roughly $200bln in today's money. That's about $500k per gram.

These speculative predictions about moon & asteroid mining imply technology advances that are so far into the future that they are basically mindless daydreaming. Things like self replicating robots, nuclear space-ships and other sci-fi staples.

We are decades or centuries away from that and the impact of such tech cannot be predicted - they will change society so much that we cannot even begin to imagine their impacts. Sort of like people in the 19th century imagined a future of personal balloons, not being able to imagine the impact of airplanes and the automobile.

You don't seem to resonate witn the basic premise of this discussion: the mass of the structure must stil be lifted into orbit in the form of raw materials, printer fillament, etc. We were debating the finer points of wheter the high cost of space fabrication is covered by space optimized design that will never need to experince atmospheric drag, gravity, launch forces, vibrations and volume constraints etc.

> My point was that 3d printing lightweight plastic structural parts where they are needed, will be to space based solar power, what mixing concrete on a construction site is when compared to having everything transported to the site via cement mixers. Sometimes it makes sense for the project to mix on site, other times it won’t.

I argue that any kind of large scale structure fabrication is fundamentally different than the preparation of raw inputs, like your concrete example. A large orbital 3D printer is a complex industrial machinery that needs servicing, constant supervision and human involvement, it's more akin to the Hubble telescope than to an concrete mixer. The costs to operate it in space are orders of magnitude higher than on the ground even in the most optimistic orbit cost reduction scenario, short of space elevators and the like.

Until we have self replicating and selfrepairing orbital robots, any space project will need to contend with the fact that human labor in a spacesuit in orbit is inconceivably more expensive than a guy riding his bike to the factory in sweatpants, breathing the free air our planet seems to have aplenty and drinking the water that falls from the sky from time to time. And this is, I repeat, a fundamental stumbling block no matter how far launch vehicles advance, space will always be insanely hard compared to surface.

So you better have a damn good economic case for printing structures in orbit which are 1000x more expensive than the same structures built on earth. The savings from the support structure and the lack of foldable mechanisms necessary to deploy into orbit could be significant, but definitely less than a single order of magnitude.

This might be the most nonsensical proposal I have read in a while.

Because why should we build things on the ground and deliver the finished products in orbit, when we can push an entire industrial chain into orbit and furnish it with the vast quantities of required inputs, while taking advantage of the vast nothingness that exists there, and the 100000 times more expensive labor. It's like Elon Musk's Mars city, but in vacuum, with zero in situ resource utilization.

> 24hr sunlight

That means you either need to sync the satellite with the Earth's rotation (Sun synchronous orbit), so you will deliver power at the exact time the corresponding Earth region has full sunlight (and thus, a surplus), or that you will have to go at insane altitudes. Or that you would need to launch some sort of orbital power ring that can transport the energy around the world.

Good-luck beaming power from SSO or across spans of thousands of miles. First let's see a phone that charges from across the room with no matter how bad efficiency, or an electric car charging wirelessly on the go.

For a given mass of solar panels, the space version is perhaps 50% more efficient, due to the fact they operate in space. Putting them there, in the most optimistic scenario, will cost perhaps 100x versus the ground level version. Currently it's something like 1000x, but let's asume prices go down due to Starship and what not.

So you really have to ask what kind of practical scenario affords you to use energy that is at least 60 times more expensive than what is available at ground level (but more realistically, at least 300-400x). Even if you include the capital cost of Li-ion batteries, their wear and tear and road transport for over 1000 miles, you can still get power much cheaper by just trucking batteries around. That, mind you, is before any transmission loses, investment in ground infrastructure etc., it makes no sense to put solar panels in space because the efficiency gains are simply too limited.

This leaves the military scenario indeed - which is basically sci-fi, but bras has been known to abandon common sense when planning technology, see the initial Space Shuttle concept, space laser weapons etc.

But why not pay them? Perhaps you cannot pay market wages without a being a competitive capitalist enterprise, but surely there is a point where access to subsidized labor allows you to break even, paying them, say $3 or $5 an hour.

And perhaps you cannot pay them in cash, but why not invest the money for the duration of their incarceration, or pay a stipend to some dependent on the outside, like a wife/child? A $10k/year rate of savings is above what many people achieve outside, and a massive boost to get one's life in order once they get out.

In other times it was said that a woman takes away a job a man might to, or a black man the job a white. You may want to google the "lump of labor fallacy".