PuppyTailWags

I fully agree that we should be working on preventing ACES and other environmental effects that specifically have proven out to have causal effects on mental illness. But psychosis cannot be eliminated altogether, and if someone is psychotic I would both like them to be allowed back into health even if they do not give informed consent and also I would like them to not be raped, assaulted, or otherwise abused.

On one hand I want to be sympathetic to the author here, who has personal stake in preventing the severely mentally ill from murdering people. At the same time, the author doesn't at all go into the deeply personal and often traumatic reasons the mentally ill may resist being forcibly hospitalized in the way the author suggests should be done to them. The author doesn't go into cases like Brittney Spears's conservatorship, forced to take medication and have an IUD inserted and have her estate taken over by her parents under spurious claims of being unable to care for herself. The author doesn't go into how little oversight there is over ensuring the safety of patients once they're in the healthcare system, many of which go on to develop medical trauma due to rape, assault, etc.

There has to be some kind of middle way where people who are deeply sick can have healthcare even if they are resistant and also heavy guardrails in place to prevent them from being abused while they're vulnerable.

I don't think anyone's argued seriously about whether or not a calorie deficit causes weight loss, mostly I've seen that CICO doesn't actually help people perform the calorie deficit part and is instead primarily used for people to be smug about the struggles fat people have about losing weight.

You're still focused on accurately describing the category of falsehood ChatGPT produces. You're missing the point. The point is that people don't even understand that ChatGPT produces falsehoods significantly enough that every statement it produces must be first determined about its truthfulness. To describe it as a liar effectively explains that understanding without any technical knowledge.

I think the concern is to get laypeople to understand that ChatGPT's output has a non-tangential chance of being completely false, not to get laypeople to understand the nuances of the falsities ChatGPT may produce. In this case, lying is the most effective description even if it isn't the most accurate one.

I'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :) I just disagree with the notion that copyright should just magically go away without any serious consideration of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy with some hypothetical solution that both prevents inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that creatives should be compensated for their labor.

No, because HBO has more than license: they also have audience and money to pay for actors, animators, script writers and, most importantly, a marketing campaign. They could still make a ton of money off of it, just that George R.R. Martin wouldn't see a single cent of it! That's what I'm saying would suck terribly. [See: All the lovecraft works in public domain-- big productions based on the mythos are still making toooons of money!]

Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass cooperative event against an existential threat!]

I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.

Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably signing over his rights; he signed a specific business agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims that would totally change corporate law if it was made valid precedent.

Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with the original advocacy to do away with copyright altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are you arguing that copyright is bad because it's sellable under unfair terms, and therefore no one should be able to sell their work?

Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.

I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work.

Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice versa (where I know for certain make significant income for authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011) even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series) are getting more attention nowadays.

The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all-- the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy research into this, but I know from panels and talks from other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire backlist.)

But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?

I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.

Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.]

The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.

I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?

Appreciated! I'd delete it if I could since you pointed it out, but I can't, so I appreciate the move. :)

Warning: That thread has mostly devolved into discussing crime, totally ignoring Bob Lee.

Baby powder is usually corn starch now.

Do we know if this settlement is actually significant in incentivizing J&J to never pull this shit again?

I'm really confused by this blog post. On one hand he claims he doesn't believe women might experience hostile workplaces or discrimination, but then he points out he sees plenty of women doing software engagement where the woman has more control over her working circumstances (founding a company, being an independent consultant).

Obviously, if regular employment is hostile to a woman who is interested in software, she would instead do software where she has more control over her employment terms. His outright dismissal just because he, a dude, notices other dudes encouraging women to apply to their company, does not address whether or not those dudes are good co-workers for women in the same way an incel may be desperate for women but that doesn't mean an incel is women-friendly!

Instead he concludes some bizarre logics: he tries to conclude some inherent quality to being a woman that explains this phenomenon vs being a man.

The problem with gambling isn't a lack of education. Gambling preys on people when they're vulnerable and gamifies their desperation into a death spiral of suck. I would also keep children away from it, since they're at a disadvantage even when educated as their brains are so underdeveloped.

I, a non-ADHD person, do not have to put myself into situations where I have no choice but to do the thing I need to do. I simply see I need to do something and then do it. Does this strongly deviate from how I described a disability above? (the inability to do something without extra assistance or significant extra effort)

Something has to be happening in the environment that's making people fatter. The only process that is statistically successful on a population level in getting people to lose significant amount of weight is a hormone regulating drug, and it has to be kept up for the rest of the life of the fat person or they'll gain it all back. Even the extreme surgical intervention of cutting the stomach seems somewhat temporary. WTF is happening?

I'm just pointing out, in my anecdotal experience, that the smartest people I know don't have interest in AI because of the way AI clashes with the things they find the most intellectual stimulation from. None of what you said really addresses any of that, and I really have no interest in debating the subjectivity of AI art on the internet, as there's nothing about it that hasn't already been said.

Genuine question: are ADHD people inherently disabled in developing self-discipline due to their brain wiring? [I mean disabled in the sense of "they need external assistance or must put way more effort", in the same way someone with a muscular disorder might need a cane or put way more effort into walking.]

It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition.

The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: why does neon genesis rebuild movies use live action camera techniques and what does that do to the overall themes of the work? Why does one painting use the texture of the paint instead of the color theory of the paint as a message conveyor? How is the use of reflective or matte surfaces communicating an environment in an installed art piece?

Furthermore, of the very smart people I know, the intellectually stimulating stuff is kind of bizarre, and avenues of finding this stuff or funding this stuff is being drowned out by comparatively understimulating works. Artists usually fund their more unusual pursuits with the commercial work that MidJourney/Stable Diffusion targets.

It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writing.

This doesn't read like a complaint about the pricing per se. It's more like pointing out Apple's low sales might have something to do with their high pricing and then providing that the pricing is unattainable for laypeople by way of stating the single figurehead of a country will still be out a month's income if they want one.

Right, so it's still justified to feel bad for visa workers in this case, because they are stuck at an abusive workplace because of circumstances of their visa.

It's harder with visas, because you're not gambling if you can find another job, you're gambling if your employer can acquire a visa in time for you to not be deported.

I would say it's equally hard to sympathize with the cops that pushed down an elderly man, then left him bleeding from the head on the street, marching over his unmoving body towards protestors, in broad daylight.

It's important to remember that it's the cops with the deadly weapons, its the cops with the chemical weapons, and its the cops depriving access to medicine when they hurt protestors.