FaceDeer

I’m a fan of the Machete Order.

There may be some spoilers in that blog post, it’s been a while since I read it, so here it is in summary:

• A New Hope (4)
• Empire Strikes Back (5)
• Attack of the Clones (2)
• Revenge of the Sith (3)
• Return of the Jedi (5)

Phantom Menace is omitted because it’s the weakest of the prequel trilogy and everything that happens in it is summarized at the beginning of Attack of the Clones anyway. If you want to be a completionist then watch it between Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones.

There’s good reasons for following this order, but it’s hard to describe them without spoiling anything. Basically, Lucas assumed you’d watched the original trilogy when he made the prequels, so it’s got a bunch of spoilers in it that the Machete Order preserves quite nicely.

But if you did randomly choose the 0% option, you’d be correct. So if one of the possible answers was 0% the correct answer would be 25%.

My understanding is it’s because black holes are the way to maximum entropy. Widely dispersed material has lots of potential energy and lots of possible states, but black holes are “the end” - there’s no further change possible once you get there. There is no state of matter or spacetime with more entropy than that.

I love that we’re this far along in physics and the question of “what even is gravity anyway?” Is still fundamentally unsolved.

My favourite theory that I’ve seen so far is “entropy increases, and black holes have maximum entropy of anything in the universe, so everything is always trying to become a black hole.” Stuff falls downward just because that’s the easiest and most immediate way of making progress towards being a black hole.

Obviously, this is a layman’s understanding.

The conversion is intended for Americans, not for people who are good at math.

Not actually the case. GPL’s “viral” nature depends on copyright prohibiting the use of the code you publish without agreeing to the GPL’s conditions. Without copyright you could take GPLed code and use it in a closed-source program without publishing your own version or licencing it under the GPL. Most copyleft licenses are like that, including stuff like the Creative Commons.

Ooh, they’re offering free database hosting? Put me in touch.

It’s been funny over the past year or two seeing threads in piracy forums where people were upset with AI trainers scraping pirated material to train their AI with. I’m curious where the general consensus will eventually land.

Open source generally depends quite heavily on copyright, though. None of the copyleft licenses work without it.

Alaskans and Hawaiians are incapable of forming bonds of friendship.

Rule 3: Don’t request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

That’s why he’s asking why he’s not allowed to ask.

One of the things I like about this one is that the containment procedures include:

As a way of limiting the impact of the anomaly, Foundation staff are to monitor all educational institutes for high rates of bear attacks

Implying that educational institutes have some rate of bear attacks that would not be considered “high.”

Reminds me of SCP-1313.

I’m not expecting them to do anything specifically to benefit the rest of us. But let them fight. If nothing else, it costs them money.

You don’t think the publishing industry would like to sue Meta over this?

Well, yes, why would you believe something without seeing it? But given how litigious the publishing industry is about this kind of thing I don’t see it as likely that they wouldn’t fight.

They’ll compare the amount the publishers are demanding against how much it would cost them to lawyer up to prevent that and any future payments. Meta’s heavyweight enough that they can use “lobbying their way out of the law, aka changing the law so that they’re not violating it at all” as a strategy.

If they do simply pay the publishers off, oh well, at least it’s just the status quo. But I don’t see a reason to assume that’s the way this is going to go. Other countries have already carved explicit exceptions to copyright for AI training, Meta would be in favor of that kind of thing.

You think Meta will just roll over and hand out whatever penalties the publishers demand of them?

Meta isn’t going to be defending us. It’s going to be defending itself. Because it is now one of us.

I think this is still going to be a net benefit to us, though. Meta may not have contributed much bandwidth, which is leeching in the short term, but in the long term they’re now forced to contribute something much more important; lawyer power. Meta is going to have to fight to defend piracy.

Anything that pushes back copyright is fine by me.