If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

None of what you said makes me think the situation would be worse than having Putin in charge. It’s a stretch to say Putin came from the civil sphere, and he assassinates his enemies in foreign countries using nerve agents and throws people out of windows at home.

I wish Altman would read Accelerando.

But we do know how they operate. I saw a post a while back where somebody asked the LLM how it was calculating (incorrectly) the date of Easter. It answered with the formula for the date of Easter. The only problem is that that was a lie. It doesn’t calculate. You or I can perform long multiplication if asked to, but the LLM can’t (ironically, since the hardware it runs on is far better at multiplication than we are).

This seems to be a really long way of saying that you agree that current LLMs hallucinate all the time.

I’m not sure that the ability to change in response to new data would necessarily be enough. They cannot form hypotheses and, even if they could, they have no way to test them.

The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there’s a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable… OK, I see your point now.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the leaking process will be the next process to try to allocate memory after you run out. It might actually be your window manager, for example.

The OOM killer is a last-ditch attempt by the OS to keep running, but it is very likely to leave your system in an unstable state.

Absolutely. The fundamental thing about the rules of grammar is that they’re more like guidelines. In fact, I think OP’s example is hardly the most confusing or inconsistent thing in English, which is not to say that the question isn’t a really good one. The quirks, similarities and differences are one thing that makes language-learning really interesting.

Yes, “home” and “zuhause” mean the same thing but they aren’t exactly the same, zuhause is a compound word. English also has compound words, for example “aboard” and “abed”. The English word isn’t “ahouse”; it is simply “home”.

That’s true, but they did already try it and it didn’t catch on. There’s a section about it on the Wikipedia page (“Copy protection”).

That section also mentions that Philips stated that these discs couldn’t have the CD logo on them. Since Philips was behind SACD, together with Sony, you’d think they wouldn’t have imposed that restriction on themselves if they had the choice.

You can definitely put DRM-protected content onto the physical CD media - that is exactly what SACD is. But then it isn’t an audio CD, even if it will play on a regular CD player. Search for “nonstandard or corrupted” on the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio .

It’s my understanding that only conforming CDs can carry the CD logo. It’s usually on the case, not the disc itself, and it isn’t always there, particularly when the case isn’t a jewel case. All the same, I think that most things that look like CDs are conformant.

Thanks for the tip - they do seem to have a lot. I had assumed that the labels had made it unprofitable for that type of service to exist. I guess maybe it’s simply that there is more money to be made from streaming.

There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.

But I’m not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I’d love to know.

On the other hand, you can still - although it’s getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).

No, a CD that carries the actual CD logo cannot have DRM. It is true that the music industry has often pushed ‘enhanced’ formats that look like CDs that do; SACD, for example.

Ownership is different to possession, and I want to actually own my music, not just possess the files.

CDs are digital files plus ownership.

The news story is precisely that the judge has decided that it doesn’t matter why the protesters are doing what they are doing - whether they have evidence or not. His wording was something like “that may or may not be occurring”.

According to the judge, only the fact that they damaged property is relevant. That they did it to demand action against a significant threat to humanity, is not.

It isn’t a big deal, but we do need the language to evolve a little bit. The problem with they/them is that it implies that you don’t know the person, or that it doesn’t matter who they are (like you say, you can’t or don’t want to use a more specific pronoun). It can feel quite rude to apply it to somebody that you do know.