Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?

Well, I certainly can’t make my point to you. You have bested my patience, my fellow lemming.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Nah, I’m good.

I think an athiest would have a better chance trying to deconvert a Catholic Bishop than I’d have getting you up to speed.

I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.

I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?

The pissed-off engineers that develop effective adblockers, for which there remains robust support.

Much like the west coast oyster monopolies of the 1880s that were scourged by oyster pirates, YouTube is fighting a losing battle.

PS: I take you’re aware of the cord-cutting epidemic of cable television, yes?

It doesn’t, which informs the rise technical mitigations of YouTube’s terrible ad schemes. YouTube isn’t interested in a more egalitarian society but serving its shareholder masters, and it sucks even at that.

YouTube subscriptions are not a good deal for the consumers, so they’re not going to be popular, which might serve to explain to you why everyone is not a paying subscriber, nor will they ever be.

The Jessica Fletcher problem?

The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.

We need that money more than they do.

For-profit tooling tends to get usability right

Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that’s turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.

If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.

Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.

Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.

Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.

Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

I start with a flying spaghetti monster off a cliffside and then try to graduate to microfactories to conserve CPU load, especially once I make the shift to refineries.

Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don’t think Paramount Studios would buy anyone’s defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.

However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.

No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.

That’s part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in boosting their own profit gains.

Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art but from IP property of their own kin.

Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from the work of human creatives. But those artists mostly signed away their rights long ago to their publishing house masters. Since the ownership class controlled the presses, those contracts were far from fair.

Artists, today, routinely see their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and it’s embittering and soul-crushing. We’ve seen Hollywood accounting come into play throughout the last century. Famous actors are notoriously cheated out of residuals. (With the rise of the internet, and prior to that a few smart agents, we’ve seen a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)

The artists were screwed long before AI ever came around.

Instead this fight is about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin. But we’re already in squalor, anyway.

Can’t say you’re wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn’t yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren’t perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.

Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I’d be interesting if little dogs – the robots – are used for couriers.) So it’s not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

This is like bullet deflectors to keep your gun from shooting holes in the propellor.

Yes, early WWI planes had them.

Yes, but that model is late in the gravity game. We were toying with the two bodies experiment before heliocentrism, let alone higher-dimension curvature of space.