the government in its current form would have that flaw in the content distribution system, yes, but his main idea is that it would be like open-source ran in the sense of “government of the people”

if I read a book no one sues my brain for consumption

yes, this is the fundamental point

this brings up the question: what is a book? what is art? if an “AI” can now churn out the next harry potter sequel and people literally can’t tell that it’s not written by JK Rowling, then what does that mean for what people value in stories? what is a story? is this a sign that we humans should figure something new out, instead of reacting according to an outdated protocol?

yes, authors made money in the past before AI. now that we have AI and most people can get satisfied by a book written by AI, what will differentiate human authors from AI? will it become a niche thing, where some people can tell the difference and they prefer human authors? or will there be some small number of exceptional authors who can produce something that is obviously different from AI?

i see this as an opportunity for artists to compete with AI, rather than say “hey! no fair! he can think and write faster than me!”

yes, but that’s a different situation. with the LLM, the issue is that the text from copyrighted books are influencing the way it speaks. this is the same with humans.

are we no longer allowed to borrow books from friends?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

this is so fucking stupid though. almost everyone reads books and/or watches movies, and their speech is developed from that. the way we speak is modeled after characters and dialogue in books. the way we think is often from books. do we track down what percentage of each sentence comes from what book every time we think or talk?

very interesting point

this is what i’m frustrated with. why do all these engineers let themselves be told what to do even if it makes a worse-functioning tool? that’s not real engineering.

“because they’ll get fired”

not if enough of them do the thing that should’ve been what got them interested in engineering in the first place.

maybe we shouldn’t call them engineers, but something else relating to being the one who does the dirty work for institutions that aim to steal people’s attention and decrease their quality of life.

and if they do get fired, then they should join together and make the reasonable company that makes good tools for human use.

so this is why i think that reasonable engineers (and most actual engineers are reasonable, hence being an “engineer”) should get together and make good stuff. stuff that is not corrupted by perverse incentives. an engineer is capable of understanding the flaws of an economy and how that can be detrimental to the functionality of some tool or system.

I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works)

yes, exactly! when you use the internet, you don’t manually choose which ISPs to route through. you can pick which DNS servers to use but you don’t have to. when you use youtube, netflix, or facebook, you don’t choose which CDNs to use.

such bullshit. how can engineers not let this happen?

this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don’t have to think about “instances”. accounts and communities are replicated across servers.