davidktr

During a rescue operation in the Arctic ocean, several submariners were tossed into the sea. Some of them were killed by their experimental life preservers, until then untested under real world conditions.

The life preservers were floating devices sewn into foul weather gear and boots. The boots were attached to the rest of the suit and could only be removed using a special tool. When hitting the frigid water, a number of the floating devices sewn into jackets burst, leaving the boots as the only buoyant part of the suit.

While the men's boots pulled their feet upwards, the weight of the rest of the suit pulled them under water. Quickly tiring in the churning sear, several drowned, feet pointing upwards.

Lesson still not learned: Equipment untested in the intended domain of application has not been tested.

To long term stabilize climate we need to be poor, compared with today. Tough sell in a democratic society.

Degrowth means literally to be poorer than today. Personally I am okay with that, but we should not hide it.

I read books now, or the actual material reddit was talking about ("haha who reads the article amirite"), watch a ton of great stuff on youtube, read more discussions + submissions here. My life has improved considerably.

Yesterday I looked at a huge box full of perfectly fine laptops and monitors we will scrape because selling them or even giving them away would be inconvenient.

At the same time, I have to pay parts of a business trip out of my own pocket because I chose not to fly but to take the train. The best part: My trip was CHEAPER than flying. But it was out of regulation, so tough luck.

https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/utils/versions/3.6.2...

Anyway, I quit cold turkey end of last year after being a daily user for those 15 years. Definitely right move.

You know what? None of this matters. Nothing I'll ever do, say, think, will ever convince a politician of anything. I have 0, zilch, none whatsoever influence on politics, regional, state, national, supranational.

Public politics is for show only. The real deals are done behind closed doors. I don't need these people, and they don't need me (except my money, of course).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0

you are building crazy cool stuff

This is exactly what Turing came up with as criterion for intelligence. But now that we have such machines, many tasks we thought could only be done by an AGI can also be done by not-AGI.

It is extremely good once the code has been organised and an overall structure exists. But until then it can be a distraction.

If I understand it correctly:

0. Laion uses WAT-files from Common Crawl to generate a list of suitable image-text pairs, including a URL to the raw image. [0] 1. Laion downloads the raw images for further processing. 2. Based on step 2, Laion creates a curated list of image-text pairs. The images themselves are uncurated. 3. Using [1], anyone can download the images. Tags such as `noai` are respected.

-- Question 1: Under German law, is Laion allowed to do what they are doing?

Maybe, but far from clear.

The lawyers [2] point to § 44b UrhG [3], which is rooted in [7], and § 66d UrhG [4]. These norms state that you can use publicly available data for data mining, especially if you are doing it as part of scientific research. Copyright holders may prohibit such activities but must do it in machine readable form on the website.

First, I am not positive that Laion's activities fall under the law's definition of "data mining". The law says data mining is an activity done in order to gain insight into "patterns, trends and correlations". But Laion does not even attempt to gain any insight from the data, it just wants to provide a data set for model building [0]. I don't think § 44b UrhG is applicable at all.

Second, Laion cannot simply yell "it's for research". To use of § 66d UrhG, you (a) must qualify as a research organisation, and (b) there must not be any private organisation in the background directing the research. Whether or not Laion qualifies as such would have to be decided by the courts, but I think it's questionable.

Overall I think the lawyers' position as outlined in [2] is not very strong. Perhaps they find better arguments when a court is involved.

-- Question 2: Under German law, does the photographer have any claim against Laion?

Difficult.

The photographer asked Laion to remove his work from their dataset [5]. The lawyers replied that Laion does not store any photographies so there is nothing to remove. It seems that the photographer did not understand this correctly when writing the initial cease-and-desist letter.

Does Laion infringe on the photographer's copyright if they mereley distribute links? The photographer argues that Laion admittedly does download raw images themselves, which pertains to Question 1.

Aside from this, in German law there is a theory called "Störerhaftung" [6]. It means that if what you are doing enables copyright infringement you may be liable as well, even if you do not distribute the content yourself. If you get notified that you participate in any such infringement by a copyright holder you must cease and desist immediately.

In some cases, distributors of hyperlinks to copyrighted material have been found to commit copyright infringement, though it has been rather the exception. I have no idea how a court would decide in the current case.

One may argue that simply adding the equivalent of a `robots.txt` will suffice to end the infringement, but that is too simple. The photographer sells his work to a customer who may use it on their website, but does not want anyone else to use his work.

However, the photographer cannot control whether or not the customer uses a `noai` on the website. [3] is opt-out, but for this to work, the photographer must have the opportunity to opt-out. It seems the law did not sufficiently appreciate this scenario. It also seems it did not foresee instances where content mining enables AI models replicating (parts of) the content they did mine.

One plausible scenario is that the court denies the photographer's claims to Laion because he can contractually mandate clients to place a `noai` tag on their website. In any case, I think the photographer would have to demonstrate how specifically Laion cost him money as there are no punitive damages in German law.

[0] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ [1] https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset [2] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... [3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html [4] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html [5] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-v... [6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

I'm simply skeptical that someone who can make use of Claude (or any LLM) for data analysis is in need of making use of it. Let's hope I'm too pessimistic here.

Once you have that, it's trivial to do any kind of statistical analysis. In R, a regression is simply lm(y ~ x1 + x2 + ... + xn).

You can always look up how an API works, but thinking about data in terms of structures is what hinders effective analysis in most cases.

the German foreign secretary at the time, Heiko Maas

> There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers. Instead, the industry seems willing to pay a toll to a select few who know the secret, while trying to design out the flaws that make the game vulnerable.

Already, profits from productivity increases go mostly to capital owners. This is why most of us have so little money, compared with what people used to have 50 years ago. This is why you can't afford a house.

If productivity increases had been redistributed such that people could work considerably less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living, we all would work 3-4 days per week. Instead, those gains went to the capital owning class. AI will worsen the situation.

Medication helps a lot, but not in that regard. No matter what, I cannot explain this issue to anyone, not even therapists. It's sad to think I'll never progress beyond what I currently do because of this.