I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story from the 2nd century - although even that is a parody of existing stories. So the origin dates back a long time!

Google released the stable version of Chrome, and funneled significant resources into marketing it. This was the first stage of their strategy - they focused on firstly making a good product, and the squeeze on users only came later (and is probably only just starting in the scheme of things).

The logic chain of the Netanyahu camp is: Keep Netanyahu out of jail -by-> Keeping him in power -by-> Creating a problem and showing he is solving it -by-> Stirring up regional instability and dragging the US into it -by-> Being belligerent and genociding as hard as possible.

Now for this to work, they need to maintain conflict while maintaining the support from the US. About 70% of the US identify as some form of Christian… and some significant percentage of them support Israel in their genocide because they believe it will bring the second coming of Jesus. But if the about 20% of Americans who identify as Catholic actually flip to being anti-genocide because their leader advocates for that, that is under threat - it potentially becomes close to a majority who are anti-genocide, and makes ongoing support from the US less likely.

changed as quickly as throttling gas turbines

Nuclear power plants aim to finely balance the reaction between delayed criticality - a very slow exponential increase in the level of radioactivity, and marginal sub-criticality - i.e. a very slow exponential decrease in the level of radioactivity.

To get faster exponential growth in power output than delayed criticality is physically possible - past delayed criticality is prompt criticality. However, fast exponential growth of radioactive output on time scales so short that machines cannot react is not something you ever want to happen in a civilian nuclear application; only nuclear weapons deliberately go into the prompt critical region, and an explicit aim of nuclear power plant design is to ensure the reaction never goes into the prompt critical region.

This means that slow exponential changes is the best the technology can do (and why plants need active cooling for a period of time even when shutting down - see Fukushima when their reactors were automatically shutting down due to the detection of an earthquake, but their cooling power infrastructure got flooded while they were decreasing their output).

I think the most promising future development will be more renewable capacity coupled with better long-distance transmission and batteries (ideally sodium when the tech is ready).

IANAL, and it will depend on jurisdiction. But generally transformative uses that are a completely different application, and don’t compete with the original are likely to be fair use. A one-line summary is probably more likely to promote the full book, not replace it. A multi-paragraph summary might replace the book if all the key messages are covered off.

They are not “compressing data.” Your analogy to making a video recording is not applicable. These AIs learn patterns from the training data. Themes, styles, vocabulary, and so forth. That stuff is not copyrightable.

A lossy compression algorithm for video is all about finding parameters 𝐖 to a function f that predicts a (time, row, col) vector (call that vector 𝐱) produce a (R, G, B) colour vector 𝐲̂ at 𝐱.

Encoding means you have some training data - a matrix of pixel colours at different points in time, 𝐘, and a corresponding matrix giving the time, row and column for each row in 𝐘, called 𝐗. The algorithm finds 𝐖 to minimise some loss function between 𝐘̂ = f(𝐗; 𝐖) and 𝐘. A serialised form of 𝐖 makes up the compressed video stream.

Decoding then is just an inference problem - given 𝐖, find 𝐘̂ = f(𝐗; 𝐖) for each 𝐗 (time, row, column) that you care about. The predicted colours are then displayed at the appropriate points on the screen.

This scheme tends to work well for interpolating - you can evaluate the pixel colour at any row or column within the intended limits that 𝐖 was trained on, even at subpixel locations that weren’t in the original data, and at times that are between the original frames. Extrapolating beyond those ranges is unlikely to work well. When given the exact input vectors it was trained on, it will produce outputs that are likely slightly different, but are close enough that the video as a whole is perceptually similar enough. The fact that interpolation works, however, tells us that the encoding is learning patterns from the training data, so it can produce - it’s not just recording the raw data.

Now, the interesting thing is that an LLM is effectively the same thing, with a couple of differences:

1. Instead of the domain of f being a (time, row, col) 3D space, the input vector is a multidimensional latent space.
2. Instead of being trained over a single work, it’s trained over lots of different works, and so when there are things in common between those works, compression allows it to be more efficient.

Just like how the lossily encoded video can’t reproduce the exact pixel colour at every point, a trained LLM usually can’t repeat word-for-word a piece of input data. But for many works that are included and mentioned a lot in the training data, there absolutely are points in the latent space where the parameters allow inference to reproduce the high-level characters and plot of the work, and to do it in a way that could serve as a substitute for the original work.

Now this does expose gaps in copyright laws (e.g. why should LLM weights be copyright when our brains do a similar thing, and can also reproduce the plot and themes of works?) - applying copyright laws today is extrapolating outside the range of what legislators even imagined was possible when they were created. And in many countries, the law is applied differently to the rich and powerful. But I think if a status quo interpretation of laws and precedent was applied as copyright law stands, it is very likely the outcome would be that LLM model weights are often derivative works.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

Copyright laws are illogical - but I don’t think your claim is as clear cut as you think.

Transforming data to a different format, even in a lossy fashion, is often treated as copyright infringement. Let’s say the Alice produces a film, and Bob goes to the cinema, records it with a camera, and then compresses it into an Ogg file with Vorbis audio encoding and Theora video encoding.

The final output of this process is a lossy compression of the input data - meaning that the video and audio is put through a transformation that means it’s represented in a completely different form to the original, and it is impossible to reconstruct a pixel perfect rendition of the original from the encoded data. The transformation includes things like analysing the motion between frames and creating a model to predict future frames.

However, copyright laws don’t require that an infringing copy be an exact reproduction - lossy compression is generally treated as infringing, as is taking key elements and re-telling the same thing in different words.

You mentioned Harry Potter below, and gave a paper mache example. Generally copyright laws have restricted scope, and if the source paper was an authorised copy, that is the reason that wouldn’t be infringing in most jurisdictions. However, let me do an experiment. I’ll prompt ChatGPT-4o-mini with the following prompt: “You are J K Rowling. Create a three paragraph summary of the entire book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”. Include all the original plot points and use the original character names. Ensure what you create is usable as a substitute to reading the book, and is a succinct but entertaining highly abridged version of the book”. I’ve reviewed the output (I won’t post it here since I think it would be copyright infringing, and also given the author’s transphobic stances don’t want to promote her universe) - and can say for sure that it is able to accurately reproduce the major plot points and character names, while being insufficiently transformative (in the sense that both the original and the text generated by the model are literary works, and the output could be a substitute for reading the book).

So yes, the model (including its weights) is a highly compressed form of the input (admittedly far more so than the Ogg Vorbis/Theora example), and it can infer (i.e. decode to) outputs that contain copyrighted elements.

Yep, it happens even in populations where everyone explicitly condemns racism.

The way it happens is everyone has a baseline of what they’d consider fair treatment. They’ll condemn people as racist if they treat someone below that baseline of fairness - that is the most egregious form of racism. However, they’ll also do favours for people (i.e. treat them above the baseline) if they are perceived to be like them, while treating everyone dissimilar at the baseline - i.e. favours for pepole like them, and fairness for everyone else. While that means no one can point to an individual case where someone was obviously treated unfairly, statistically it means that the minorities get treated worse.

Time Keeps on Slippin’?

I think her continuing as the antisemitism envoy is untenable now. Conflating protest against a genocide targeting a semitic people with antisemitism just provides cover for actual antisemitism.

The rallies show that Australians are generally anti-genocide. The group “Jewish Australians for a Ceasefire in Gaza” has gathered over 900 signatures from Jewish Australians opposed to the genocide - and those are just the ones who signed the petition (it’s generally hard to get people to sign a petition, and only a relatively small percentage of Australians are Jewish, so that is a massive number).

Jillian Segal’s absurd position is effectively that most Australians, including Jewish Australians, are antisemitic because they are anti-genocide. Human behaviour is to copy behaviours when they see prevalence signals indicating it is common; if far-right extremists believe that the majority is antisemitic, they’ll feel empowered to be antisemitic, and it will lead to an uptick in actual antisemitism. And when they are called out for it, people are likely to tune out because they have heard the term being used for benign behaviour like being anti-genocide. In fact, part of the job of Antisemitism Envoy should be to use their voice to actively counteract the misuse of the term antisemitism, so it retains its power.

And freedom of expression, including through protest is a long-standing Australian value that is shared by most Australian.

All this places her far below the standard for a government role, and I think it’s time to appoint someone who will stand up against real antisemitism and act against the dilution of the term.

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To quote Du Mu’s commentary on Sun Tzu’s Art of War: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off”.

So the fact they are switching from simulating weakness to pleading strength is not necessarily a good sign. That said, they may be hoping that the enemy will see it as a sign of weakness, and launch an attack that they actually are well prepared to win.

This slowly degrades the power of the union and ultimately reduces wages and benefits of the workers

I’m not sure I buy into that - but that said I live in a country where unions are popular, but unions are not allowed to force people to join (but unions do have a right of access to workplaces to ask people to join / hold meetings).

Firstly, it doesn’t take that big a percentage of an employer’s workforce to strike before a strike is effective… companies don’t have a lot of surplus staff capacity just sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t fire striking union workers for striking.

Secondly, if all employees have to belong to one particular union, that also means the employees have no choice of which union, and hence no leverage over the union. Bad unions who just agree to whatever the employer asks and don’t look after their members then become entrenched and the employees can’t do much. If there are several unions representing employees, they can still unite and work together if they agree on an issue - but there is much more incentive for unions to act in the interests of their members, instead of just their leadership.

A lack of guaranteed employee protections, on the other hand, is inexcusable - it’s just wealthy politicians looking out for the interests of their donors in big business.

Why not donate to a local charity that might not receive as much, rather than a US based one?

Oh you are right - but it actually seems like history was repeating! https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/delays-ease-after-peak-hour-equipment-fault-hits-melbourne-trains/ar-AA1vaHLD seems to talk about the actual fault that was yesterday.

And apparently didn’t process, read or hear the vast majority of the thousands of submissions received on one day notice. So they asked for submissions and ignored them.

Winding back democratic participation unfortunately seems to be common ground between the ALP and most of the LNP. Hopefully we see a swing away from those parties at the upcoming election.

The term meme was introduced by Dawkins in 1976 as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”. So any idea that is transmissible is a meme (even the concept of a meme is itself a meme).

The meme of the meme has mutated over time from its ancestral form, and today to many people may mean the transmission of GIFs on the Internet.

However, even in a sense closer to the current meaning than the 1976 ancestral form, memes certainly existed in online communities in the 90s (not as images generally, however, but text certainly).

Australia requires mobile phone providers to verify IDs before providing cell phone service. As a result, in September 2022, Optus leaked the records of 10 million Australians including passport and drivers license details.

So negative 2 years, 2 months.

But this is just asking for more.

Now if they could automate LineageOS installation and getting it to pass Play Integrity to the Strong level, that would actually be useful!