According to most sites TOS, when we write our posts we give them basically full access to do whatever they like including make derivative works.

2 points:
1 - I’m generally talking about companies extracting data from other websites, such as OpenAI scraping posts from reddit or other such postings. Companies that use their own collection of data are a very different thing.
2 - Terms of Service and Intellectual Property are not the same thing and a ToS is not guaranteed to be a fully legally binding document (the last part is the important part.) This is why services that have dealt with user created data that are used to licensing issues (think deviant art or other art hosting services) usually require the user to specify the license that they wish to distribute their content under (cc0, for example, would be fully permissible in this context.) This also means that most fan art is fair game as licensing that content is dubious at best, but raises the question around whether said content can be used to train an AI (again, intellectual property is generally different from a ToS).

It’s no different from how Github’s Copilot has to respect the license of your code regardless of whether you’ve agreed to the terms of service or not. Granted, this is legally disputable and I’m sure this will come up at some point with how these AI companies operate – This is a brave new world. Having said that, services like Twitter might want to give second thought of claiming ownership over every post on their site as it essentially means they are liable for the content that they host. This is something they’ve wanted to avoid in the past because it gives them good coverage for user submitted content that they think is harmful.

If I was a company, I wouldn’t want to be hinging my entire business on my terms of service being a legally binding document – they generally aren’t and can frequently be found to be unbinding. And, again, this is different from OpenAI as much of their data is based on data they’ve scraped from websites which they haven’t agreed to take data from (finders-keepers is generally not how ownership works and is more akin to piracy. I wouldn’t want to base a multinational business off of piracy.)

They almost certainly had, as it was downloaded from the net.

That’s not how it works. That’s not how anything works.

This is why some of us have been ringing the alarm on these companies stealing data from users without consent. They know the data is valuable yet refuse to pay for the rights to use said data.

Insanely deep rpgs are a bit of an issue for me as well. And I generally do love rpg games, but I feel like the good ones should ease you into decisions a bit better than dropping you into a character creator.

So it’s a mixed bag for me.

Does anyone know if this affects mods like CS?

Edit: Idk if it’s just me on linux, but it seems like CS1.6 no longer launches on the new update. A bummer, but I had a lot of fun play HLDM just now so I think they’ll fix it eventually.

Security Experts probably don’t log into smart tvs all that often. Just a guess.

signing into cloud services and downloading apps is just so much easier to do!

This is actually true, but it doesn’t speak to why self hosting is “impossible” and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.

There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.

I’ll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting – especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)

Absolutely crazy. Doesn’t even seem like it would be in their jurisdiction to do this.

I have a kind of complicated system for organizing my music files – some of which is admittedly way too much maintenance but it might be of interest to some.

For my general “commercial” music collection, the folder structure is roughly
Music/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

This is simple to maintain. I basically just use MusicBrainz Picard and set up appropriate paths.

For my soundtrack collection, it gets a bit more complicated. For Anime/Film/Whatever, I have it sorted basically the same way but in a different root folder. So something like:
Music/Anime/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

Which is also easy to maintain since most of these also have commercial releases.

But games are sorted more strangely. To put it simply, I have a folder structure that puts the console or platform first, followed by the game name and then the loose files. Since some of these files are emulated formats (.vgm, .nsf, .spc), I generally don’t bother renaming them and keep them as is and trust that the music program in question has tagging support. It also means that having them sorted by console is mostly beneficial to quickly find emulated file formats, but YMMV and I have regretted the choice on occasion.

Obviously game soundtracks are spotty when it comes to releases. Some companies have reliable metadata you can get from MusicBrainz Picard, like SquareEnix, but others have no tagging at all or very incorrect tag values. Because of this, I generally use something like VGMDB, which is usually higher quality but not always. I do have to resort to manually correcting files on occasion.

If anyone has a nice automated way to sort this stuff out, it would be a real benefit to me as well.

Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can’t tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.

I think this highlights a bigger issue when it comes to this discussion.

The issue isn’t the mp3 format – for the most part, the format of any lossy encoder can sound good with the right settings. The problem is that, unlike flac, all encoded lossy files are essentially untrustworthy audio formats. So when people say mp3 sounds bad, it’s only a half truth in the same way that it’s a half truth to say that people cannot tell a difference. You are putting trust in the person who encoded the audio to make the right choice and the encoder is putting trust in the idea that the person consuming the media can’t tell the difference.

When it comes to being cheap on bandwidth since most users can’t hear it, that’s a huge cop-out being made for a company that can do better. While Apple is pretty notorious for making terrible decisions for arbitrary reasons, even they respect the user enough to allow you to opt into higher audio format quality. It’s decisions like these that cement Apple as the kings of the creative computer user.

I imagine they’ll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.

It’s a shame, and it’s really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren’t as cheap as they are today, they wouldn’t be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.

I agree. It’s a mistake for Valve to reduce platform support as it becomes a justification for dropping other platforms for other developers as well.

I know that MacOS is a bit of a pain to support right now with how steam and third party applications are treated, but it would be a bigger issue for Apple to drop support if Valve maintained a strong presence on the platform via steam. With the way things are now, Apple might rip the bandaid off and just remove the ability to have third party stores on their computers. This is already what they do with Iphones/Ipads

Both in that case are a copyright violation, depending on which images your source. Collages are a frequent example of this, it’s already an answered problem.

As an update, I think this was a side effect of how Wordpress / Gitlab was set up, where it was expecting it to be IP:PORT, which would force a redirect to the port specifically. Using the subdomain as the setting for web url seemed to resolve my problem. Thanks for the replies from everyone as all of the advice here is still really useful!

The smartest thing to do would be to bake in more profit percentage on the parts compared to the phone. Doesn’t seem all that complicated for them honestly.

🧂🧂🧂

You know you’re being disingenuous with this.

And then everyone would bitch because it wasn’t good, like what happend with the last seasons of GoT.

They were,

But AI is industrial plagiarism. There’s a big difference in the legality of using AI vs using publically licensed materials.

Big Tech Pinky and the Brain

This is good to know and I’m glad to hear.

As an aside, do we have a system for OP to pin this comment to the top? This context is pretty important.