I agree that this is a major concern, especially if non-renewable energy is used, and until the production process for computer technology and solar panels is much more of a circular economy. More renewable energy and circular economies, and following the sun for AI training and inference (it isn’t going to be low latency anyway, so if you need AI inference in the northern hemisphere night, just do it on the other side of the world) could greatly decrease the impact.
The argument seem most commonly from people on fediverse (which I happen to agree with) is really not about what current copyright laws and treaties say / how they should be interpreted, but how people view things should be (even if it requires changing laws to make it that way).
And it fundamentally comes down to economics - the study of how resources should be distributed. Apart from oligarchs and the wannabe oligarchs who serve as useful idiots for the real oligarchs, pretty much everyone wants a relatively fair and equal distribution of wealth amongst the people (differing between left and right in opinion on exactly how equal things should be, but there is still some common ground). Hardly anyone really wants serfdom or similar where all the wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few (obviously it’s a spectrum of how concentrated, but very few people want the extreme position to the right).
Depending on how things go, AI technologies have the power to serve humanity and lift everyone up equally if they are widely distributed, removing barriers and breaking existing ‘moats’ that let a few oligarchs hoard a lot of resources. Or it could go the other way - oligarchs are the only ones that have access to the state of the art model weights, and use this to undercut whatever they want in the economy until they own everything and everyone else rents everything from them on their terms.
The first scenario is a utopia scenario, and the second is a dystopia, and the way AI is regulated is the fork in the road between the two. So of course people are going to want to cheer for regulation that steers towards the utopia.
That means things like:
Fundamentally, all of this is just exacerbating cracks in the copyright system as a policy. I personally think that a better system would look like this:
If we had that policy, I’d be okay for AI companies to be slurping up everything and training model weights.
However, with the current policies, it is pushing us towards the dystopic path where AI companies take what they want and never give anything back.
Starlink is a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not geostationary satellites. That means that the ground station (i.e. subscriber equipment) talks to one satellite as it comes into view, and over time that satellite moves across the sky, and they switch to another satellite. This means the latency is highly variable as the distance changes, but at its lowest is much lower than a geostationary satellite since it is far closer.
Generally speaking optometrists measure the core measurements of how your vision is and make the prescription.
However, to make glasses as well as the prescription they need the interpupillary distance (IPD); how far apart the pupils in the centre of the eyes are.
The IPD rarely changes much / at all in adults (so saving for certain conditions, once you know it you could keep using that value), and measuring it is not that hard if you have another person to do it (read how to do it properly on the Internet).
I don’t know the law in Canada around what they have to disclose. I believe Canada has privacy legislation that says that people have access to private information about them held by companies in at least some cases, so that might be something to look into, and then request all the information they hold on you if you ever need the information again.
In the modern sense, I think most people would take the word “democracy” to include universal suffrage - at a minimum, all adults born or granted citizenship there should have the equal right to vote for it to be considered a democracy.
In practice, Israel has substantial control over the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, between Egypt and Lebanon (that is not to say that they should, just the reality) - in the sense that anyone in that area’s lives are significantly controlled by Israeli government decisions, and the Israeli government and military operates over that entire area.
So the minimum bar for it being a democracy is that adults - including the people with ancestral ties to the area that it controls - get an equal say in the governance. That is clearly not the case, and has not been for quite some time; it not being a democracy is not a recent development (maybe it’s never actually been a true democracy).
There’s a lot one side of the market can do with collusion to drive up prices.
For example, the housing supply available on the market right now often fluctuates over time - once someone has a long term tenancy, their price is locked in until the next legal opportunity to change the price. If there is a low season - fewer people living in an area, higher vacancy rate - in a competitive market, tenants often want a long term contract (if they are planning on staying), and the landlord who can offer that will win the contract. The landlord gets income during the low period, but forgo a higher rent they might get during a high period. Another landlord who tries to take a hardline policy of insisting tenants renew their contract during the high period would lose out - they would just miss out on rent entirely during the low period, likely making less than the other landlord.
Now if the landlords form a cartel during the low period, and it is not possible to lease a rental property long term, then the tenants have no choice but to be in a position to re-negotiate price during the high period. Landlords avoid having to choose between no revenue during the low period and higher during the high period, or a consistent lower rent - instead they get the lower rent during the low period (at a slightly lower occupancy rate, but shared across all the landlords) AND the higher rent during the high period.
The mission to mars will be well after he builds the hyper loop across California, US, and Tesla implements full self driving. In other words, it’s something he told investors to secure their investment for something shorter term, while making it sound like he’s thinking far into the future.
And if he ever does sacrifice some suckers to keep up appearances, I don’t think he’d put up his hand to be one of them!
An exchange of nuclear weapons would be expected to ignite many fires and to spread dust and fallout into the atmosphere - similar to a large scale bush fire, volcanic eruption or a meteorite hit, depending on the size and number of weapons. This would have a chilling and darkening effect on the climate, causing crop failures worldwide. A world-wide nuclear winter effect would impact everyone, not just the parties to the conflict.
That’s why, for all the posturing and sabre rattling, even the most belligerent states don’t want a nuclear war - it means destruction of all sides, and massive casualties around the world.
The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
This sort of thing is increasingly making TSMC a monopoly as a fab. Due to the extreme economies of scale, fabbing looks like something that is hard to do well under the capitalist model. Perhaps a good time for some of the larger nations of the world to start publicly owned fabs (that publish their research instead of hoarding it) instead of ending up with the whole world reliant on one company that will eventually be able to name its price.
It could also go the other way and someone could sue Google or other companies. Web browsers and ad blockers run on the client not the server, generally with the authorisation of the owner of said client system. It is a technical measure to prevent unauthorised code (i.e. unwanted ads) from running on the system, imposed by the owner of the system. Anti ad blocker tech is really an attempt to run software on someone’s computer by circumventing measures the owner of said computer has deployed to prevent that software from running, and has not authorised it to run. That sounds very similar to the definition of computer fraud / abuse / unauthorised access to a computer system / illegal hacking in many jurisdictions.
Maybe technically in Florida and Texas, given that they passed a law to try to stop sites deplatforming Trump.
https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3102.htm
“The owner or operator of a social media website who contracts with a social media website user in this State is subject to a private right of action by a user if the social media website purposely: … (2) uses an algorithm to disfavor, shadowban, or censure the user’s religious speech or political speech”.
In May 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled to strike the law (and similarly there was a 5th Circuit judgement), but just this month the US Supreme Court vacated the Court of Appeals judgement (i.e. reinstated the law) and remanded it back to the respective Court of Appeals. That said, the grounds for doing that were the court had not done the proper analysis, and after they do that it might be struck down again. But for now, the laws are technically not struck down.
It would be ironic if after conservatives passed this law, and stacked the supreme court and got the challenge to it vacated, the first major use of it was used against Xitter for censoring Harris!
Here’s an idea: if the US wants a say in the ICC, maybe they should sign the Rome Statute.
When Russia adopts economic policy from satire: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
GitHub are not some bastion of righteousness - they are literally owned by Microsoft. And they work hard to stop people from getting too much Open Source from them, with rate limits and the like, so essentially gate keep.
I think CSDN probably want to gatekeep their clone even harder, but in general having archives of GitHub on the Internet is a good thing.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?
A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.
YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.
The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.
The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.
This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.
would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark
And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.
Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.
So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.
Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.