You’re very welcome!

Does it really matter who does the evicting ?

Yes.

After it’s done it’s anybody’s guess what will fill the power vacuum. All we know is they will wear black boots and carry guns.

And this is exactly why. In order to effect lasting, positive changes, it’s important to have builders, not to mention critical mass with the populace. “Ends-justify-the-means” thinking and ascribing friendship the the enemy of one’s enemy don’t lend themselves to establishing resilient and non-despotic results.

Yeah… I absolutely loathe their website. I’d say “abysmal” is generous when one is trying to find specs or the like.

Are they saying that the clocks in Androids still use quartz, but iPhones use MEMS clocks, even though they both use general MEMS silicon?

Correct. MEMS technology is used in the accelerometers and gyros in the inertial measurement units (IMUs) that are in pretty much every smartphone. Apple decided to switch to using MEMS clocks, probably because it means that they can reduce part count slightly as it would mean that they can incorporate them on the same chip as the CPU or the like.

I currently do this (mostly) with Xreal Air. There’s also Viture, which has proven to be much more FOSS-friendly.

Yet it couldn’t save toys r us?

Nope. Because Toys R Us was murdered by an investment firm.

But even then, is the water truly consumed?

Yes. People and crops can’t drink steam.

Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant?

That’s not a thing in nuclear plants that are functioning correctly. Water that may be evaporated is kept from contact with fissile material, by design, to prevent regional contamination. Now, Cold War era nuclear jet airplanes were a different matter.

Or does the water just get warm and then either be pumped into a water body somewhere or ideally reused to heat homes?

A minority of datacenters use water in such a way Helsinki is the only one that comes to mind. This would be an excellent way of reducing the environmental impacts but requires investments that corporations are seldom willing to make.

There’s loads of problems with the energy consumption of AI, but I don’t think the water consumption is such a huge problem? Hopefully, anyway.

Unfortunately, it is. Primarily due to climate change. Water insecurity is an an issue of increasing importance and some companies, like Nestlé (fuck Nestlé) are accelerating it for profit. Of vital importance to human lives is getting ahead of the problem, rather than trying to fix it when it inevitably becomes a disaster and millions are dying from thirst.

They are typically closed-loop for home computers. Datacenters are a different beast and a fair amount of open-loop systems seem to be in place.

Would be nice if we could have some technological privacy laws written in this century.

Viture is currently recommended as they’re the most FOSS-friendly.

Linux. Couldn’t be arsed dealing with Windows.

*proprietary epinephrinyms

First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation.

I promise you that I am not attempting emotional manipulation. We just appear to be coming at this from very different assumptions on the nature of likeness. I see it in relation to one’s identity, to which I see it as tightly coupled, where you seem to be approachining it from the perspective that it is an asset or a commodity. We’re not talking about taking inspiration from another human being’s performance but plagiarism of it and copying their external identity in voice or image, with the express intent of compensating them less (when it comes to the studios).

You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people’s bodies.

I don’t see how that tracks.

If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped.

Oh! You seem to be inferring that the hobbyist or VFX artist in this case has a fundamental right to the fruits of an AI-cloned actor’s labor, with or without their consent. I cannot agree with that. By that reasoning, enforcing laws against fraud, forgery, and identity theft is exerting power over the would-be forger or identity thief by preventing them from assuming the victim’s identity and draining their savings.

Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people’s bodies.

I do not see it primarily as an intellectual property issue (though there are definitely significant ethical issues related to IP in LLMs/plagiarism engines). I see it as an identity and labor issue. The studios and producers are pushing for the tech because they want to exploit people. VFX artists included.

Obviously that’s not what you mean. I guess

Oh, it very much is. By taking away an artist or creative worker’s very identity and reselling it, those marketing and leveraging these models are alienating these workers from their labor and their own means of production. Intellectual workers and creatives are still workers; cut one and we all bleed.

Not only that, those selling access to the myself are literally participating in rent-seeking for an amalgam of creative workers’ stolen labor. Are IP laws fucked? Absolutely. Do they and identity protection laws and systems need to be overhauled to be able to handle modern challenges and technology? Yup. Does supporting corpos in their exploitation of fellow workers because a tiny percentage of them are disgustingly wealthy help anyone but the ultra-wealthy? Nope.

I’m just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.

Is this a “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a bad guy” bit of ad hominem here? Because I’d really like to see how “workers should be compensated fairly for their labor, not have it stolen and leveraged to exploit other workers” is in any way in line with conservatism.

SAG-AFTRA …is fundamentally a conservative organization. It’s no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US.

This is not a statement that meshes with facts. Political contributions from members are so far blue that it’s not even close. And that’s including the 2008 spike from old rich racists. At worst, there are a lot of neo-libs but there’s also a fair number of soc-dems. I’ve never met any member who felt favorably towards Ronnie the Union-busting shitbag. Beyond that, I’ve yet to meet a SAG-AFTRA member that is anti-union, while finding someone who is pro-union as a member of a trades union is nearly as rare as finding a unicorn.

They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That’s what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.

There is unjust hierarchy in play, yes. Voice and video game talent, especially, have and continue to be treated as less-thans and where the union should be doing around-the-clock membership drives throughout an industry and pressuring studios to sign union contracts for more productions, they instead, generally, do about fuck-all and are happy to make concessions that “real” screen actors would never face.

I get the feeling that maybe this is less about intellectual property and more about bucket-crabbing and potentially about justification of support of tech that is based upon ethically compromised foundations and is being leveraged as an ethically-devoid weapon against labor, not to the workers’ benefit. If you consider yourself a leftist and/or pro-labor, I’d recommend some serious self-reflection because it seems like you have a bit of a hatred for a whole segment of laborers.

Also, to be clear, hobbyists aren’t the problematic group in all of this at all. It’s the producers and studios leveraging technology to exploit. However, sometimes we all have to do things that we would rather not or give up things that we want because doing otherwise causes measureable harm to others.

No. I am talking about rent-seeking.

Oh! I see. We are starting from very different places on looking at the situation. I see one’s likeness as a part of their identity that they have a fundamental right as a human being to agency over. I place it in a similar category to one’s labor - can exercising one’s agency over their body really be considered “rent-seeking”?

I see the uses of AI “plagiarism engines” in arts and creative trades by major corporations as just another way to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.

You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking.

By definition, I’d think.

Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work.

Major respect for VFX artists, stage engineers, and all the trades under IATSE. They do huge amounts of very skilled work. They are the foundation on which all modern media rests and I’m glad that a greater share of them have unionized.

Likeness rights are a clear example, though. … Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. … The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.

Here, I think, is a bit that I do agree with you on. One’s likeness should never be able to be owned by anyone else. Die and it’s public domain. Just like the ridiculous copyright terms that Disney secured, the idea of one’s likeness outlasting their life, let alone someone else having agency over it is preposterous.

The scenario that you propose is part of why unions exist in the first place. SAG-AFTRA hasn’t been doing amazingly on the subject but, they’re definitely doing more than about any union that I’ve seen in relation to AI impacting a trade and making it more susceptible exploitation. I would suggest that in your scenario, both actors (and the producer) are acting in an unethical manner. The famous actor is pulling up the ladder behind them, not giving the junior actor the opportunity to gain prestige in their trade. The junior actor is participating in exploitation that should be grounds to strike the production. The producer is using the licensed likeness as leverage to pay and credit the junior actor less.

The situation should not happen and, if SAG-AFTRA allows it, actors should form a new union that treats all of its members when respect.

🎶*Hey! / Wait! / I’ve got a new complaint! / Forever in debt from live-service designs!*🎶

Does indeed sound likely to be an fstab issue, unless system services are being used in a really weird way.

the default is smart

Looking at the systems that are supported, it makes the greatest sense to have the safest failure mode as default. If fault tolerance is available, that can be handled in the entry but, it makes sense but to assume. Having that capability built into the default adds more complexity and reduces support for systems that are not tolerant of a missing mount.

Congrats on passing the exams!

And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.

Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?.. Wow.

I am asking this in good faith as a neurodivergent individual:

Could you please clarify where you’re coming at this from?

Is it that you feel that actors and other creatives are less legitimate as workers than others?

Is it that you think that LLMs could be a path towards AGI that could save humans from themselves?

Is it something else entirely?

Myself, I am coming at it from the perspective of someone who has worked in the tech industry for a while, and is familiar with the underlying technologies and how hyped they’ve been. I additionally personally know several professional actors, SAG-AFTRA and non-union, who have been materially impacted by AI and corpo bad faith in recent years (especially streaming services and game companies). On top of that, as a millennial, I have experienced significant financial setbacks due to unfettered corporate greed and know many peers who are much worse off than myself because of price gouging and stagnant wages.

My main motivations in AI conversations are undermining hype and ensuring that people take ethics into consideration, while looking at technologies that do have some actually interesting use cases and could lead to other interesting things.

Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.

Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that. A regular contractual battle is the “in perpetuity” clause for one’s likeness. This happens at all levels. Essentially, clients often try to sneak a clause in that grants them the exclusive right to use the actor’s likeness forever. While this does not mean that the actor does not receive pay, it binds them to the client in a way that prevents them from getting other work and diminishes their bargaining ability.

But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.

If the actress was performing in an affectation to impersonate Johansson, she was effectively acting no better than a scab and enabling corpos to violate consent. Knowingly impersonating another loving actor for purposes other than parody is a scummy thing to do and the actress was ethically bound to refuse the job.

Being famous doesn’t make someone less of a person. They’re just people like the rest of us (though generally more financially lucky). We all have a right to our identity and likeness and to decide how our likeness is used. Legitimatizing the violation of that consent is not a path that benefits any worker.

You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?

That’s a poor and fallacious argument there. California is Ronnie “Pull Up the Ladder” Reagan’s home state does that make all Californians Reaganites by association?