cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/mildlyinfuriating/p/1784290/interesting
We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.
Capitalism working as intended.
Came to the comments to post the "first time?" meme but yes exactly this. This isn't a bug of capitalism, it isn't even a feature; it's literally just capitalism itself. That's how it works
No, no. It's dumber:
The library is still open, you can freely enter. But now they've put "a guy" in the library to whom you can pay money and they will answer your question with the stuff they "more or less remember".
The guy is also standing right next to the computer terminal where you can search for books, and starts telling you everything they think they know about the book you're looking up, whether you asked or not.
He also broke the terminal a bit, making everything just a little bit slower and the results a little less useful. Cause he's definitely better than that thing.
He is also seeking out every author and spamming them with millions of pages of useless and flawed edits and suggestions, slowing down their ability to create the books you want to read.
Don't forget he also managed to raise prices for all your loved tech-stuf. Just because he hates you deeply but also needs your moneyz.
This isn't just with projects either
I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.
The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner's information.
This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.
It's ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it's just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they're the only thing the user sees.
If I hadn't already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.
They also fired most of the librarians (search engines) and set fire to parts of it causing everything to get shuffled around.
Sure you can get to books (sites) you know of, good luck finding obscure ones or special ones now that aren't junk or spam magazines however.
I don’t see the humor…
We are so far beyond 'the people who did this have names and addresses'.
The people who fucking did this are the most famous people on the planet, at this point.
Stop being afraid.
Stop acting like anything they can bring on you is legitimate or justified.
Like Howard Beale, I want you to get mad.
Stop complaining on the internet, and start protesting loudly at every single physical place these people ever are.
You'll get arrested. You might end up put away for weeks or months... but those penalties will only get worse, the more power they accumulate, while we all just sit back and bitch about, uselessly.
They are the system.
There is no 'safe' way, according to the system, to meaningfully challenge it.
Actually become ungovernable, instead of just being fucking catty on Twitter!
also stop working for them and claim your damn sovereignty. Sure it comes with responsibility, and if you don't want that it's fine, but no complaining for you when they treat you like a number in a system.
It's insane to me how intelligent software developers and people in general are, and how fucking stupid they can still be. STOP WORKING FOR CENTRALIZED CORPORATIONS, THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.
That 6 figure paycheck is well accounted for in their books and they're cashing in on it in multiples.
Open-source is hard, but look at all the hard challenges corporations are forcing you to spend relentless hours solving so they can multiply their bottom line. These are the challenges engineers are built for, why do we allow our motivations to be manipulated into something that doesn't even serve us? That's a serious question that deserves attention. Why do employees feel so committed to their companies? It's simple, but highly effective psychological manipulation, but at the end of the day only you have agency over your actions.
Let's put our collective minds to work at figuring how how to get off the tit of corporations. That milk is ultra-processed generic-branded shit.
Yeah that's a whole insane aspect of this to me:
So many people will have whatever set of values, and then also a 6 or greater figure salary... from one of the main causes of the problem.
Now in most instances it would be stupid to criticize a low income wage slave for Walmart or Starbucks for being a low income wage slave. You should do the opposite, sympathize with them, help them form a union, etc.
But the tech industry?
These people are much more likely to actually have the means to exit gracefully, downsize their life a bit, and not be a hypocrite.
'Just following orders' didn't work at Nuremberg, and it doesn't work for me either.
In some parts of the country, six figures isn't even enough to support a wife and kids anymore.
Working class is working class, the key is solidarity. Unilateral sacrifices will just exhaust our most useful people. The first risk we take with our jobs needs to be organizing unions, or else we'll just build a new capitalist economy.
AI companies turned it all into products worth billions.
AI companies would appreciate you telling them where those products are, because they are almost universally losing money.
Well it's just that the products worth billions cost trillions to make.
And anytime they try to rectify people balk at the price increase and drop.
It’s not the critical lynchpin of work that they were hoping they could charge stupid money for.
I’m waiting for people to start noticing… taps watch… any day now. But the billionaires who control the media keep pushing the goddamn narrative and corpo fuckwits keep regurgitating it along with all the jizz they suck.
This is an insightful post, it's not funny though?
It's just depressing, there's no humour here
On point, but it's been a lot longer than 20 years
ever since one guy said 'this granary belongs to me now' and people believed him.
They are right. Ai is just an attempt to monitize the Internet.
I mean so are social networks mostly and most search engines and so on. Name of the game is to provide a service to gain people's attention to serve them ads and / or collect their data. Either that or you pay for it up front and they still serve ads and collect your data.
Ironically this tweet looks written by AI
Well, yes, but also - you don't have to pay them. There are open-weights models you can run locally that contain most of that common-wealth knowledge.
It’s the modern digital equivalent of the Inclosure Acts
The whole point of make our lives an endless cash grab.
I mean there's almost no secret sauce about these AI's currently which is why open source models are nearly as good. We are totally free to set up a nonprofit kinda like Wikipedia where people donate to train and run AI models for the public based on open source datasets. We're now seeing people like PewDiePie kinda getting the ball rolling.
Absolutely true, but that doesn't change the fact that those AI companies stole the knowledge to train their models and they did this on a massive scale.
It's so ridiculous to see a guy torrenting a few movies getting jailtime while the AI companies make off with the biggest IP heist in history and get applauded for it.
There could be a class action lawsuit. I wonder how other major players in AI are managing this, particularly labs in China, Israel, UK, Singapore, and India. Of course each nation had its own laws around copyright. Like isn't there an equal pushback like this for Chinese AI labs or is it a uniquely American or western thing?
I think a major problem is that it is difficult to prove which IP is in the model data. That's why the AI companies argue that there isn't a verbatim copy in the model, and therefore it's not theft. The law in most countries is not equipped to deal with this scenario
Seems easy enough to prove with a court order. Short of that though I've seen people get models to perfectly complete content inferring that information is in there somewhere or at minimum the model is willing to go fetch that information breaching copyright. I am still curious if this is an issue in AI labs elsewhere or if it's primarily a US / UK issue.
You've got a lot of faith in the symmetry of the legal system!
With what seems like millions upon millions of copyright infringements, seems like more than enough for a serious firm to take on. With some major copyright owners on board I don't think it would be as David and Goliath as you're making it out to be. I wouldn't be surprised to see one of these cases come to pass when these labs actually become profitable. I haven't heard any pushback on copyright for AI labs in other countries so far so it seems to be a uniquely western complaint although I'm more than happy to be proved incorrect. I honestly have no clue how copyright is managed in Israel, India, or China.
Interesting per se
You can still Google it for free. You only have to pay for AI if you use AI.
Recall if you will, how much better Google search used to be, and what they present at the top now.
You don't like the AI response at the top? It's free and I find it super helpful. But you are welcome to ignore it.
Stop being a professional victim! You don't have to use US tech. There are open source AI models and tools. You don't need to pay to compete: in fact by doing so you're contributing to the problem.
All the top “open source” models have been created by Chinese and US private companies.
And they aren’t giving anything away because of the love in their hearts.
Please link to the original social-media post so that we can like or boost it in its own network.
It was on X. I, for one, don’t want that. This person should be on mastodon and giving them a like would effectively reward them to stay on that Nazi platform and give clicks to Xitter. Effffffffff that.
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