MystikIncarnate

This is what I do.

Today I signed into some "free" wifi as Joe mama (Joe@mama.tech)

Smooth sailing for Joe after that.

... and uses the wifi there.

To me the AI thing is about big vs small.

Steal from a big company, that's the cost of doing business baby!

Steal from a small business and.... WTF do you think you're doing?

The AI thing is largely large companies stealing from everyone. Large and small alike.

Real-world example: I'm not alone in this, as has been made clear from my time on the internet, but if I saw someone shoplifting groceries from Walmart or something, then, I didn't see anyone stealing from Walmart. I didn't see shit. Turn that around and say someone stole some handmade trinket from a booth at a convention, I'm going to go find the nearest security guard.

AI steals from small artists and authors, commentators and you and I, as much as it steals from big businesses. We, the people, don't have the same capability to fight against someone like openAI taking our shit, compared to a multinational media conglomerate. The AI folks seem to believe that it's fine as long as nobody complains, then enter agreements with meta and Reddit to buy up all of our written, photographed, and otherwise self-published information to buy everything we've ever submitted to their platform.

The big companies are raping us of our intellectual property, claiming it as their own, and selling it to other businesses for fun and profit. We generated all of that content that they sold and they gave us nothing for it. They got it for free, all the while, selling us ads and confusing "algorithm based" feeds of bullshit to try to enhance their bottom line.

We've been lied to, stolen from, intellectually and financially raped, and we've gotten nothing in return. They took our inherent need to connect with one another, and turned it into dollars in their bank accounts. They're not providing a service, certainly not providing one worth using.... What they are doing is farming us to line their own pockets. Our ideas, thoughts, comments, videos and pictures are their crops that they repackage and sell to whomever will pay for it. This is just the latest in "people are the product" things that gets repackaged and resold back to the people it came from, and we get the privilege to pay to use the AI they develop off the backs of our labor.

If AI wants to steal from big businesses like news media outlets, or companies like Disney, nobody would give any shits about it. Go the fuck ahead. You want to wholesale steal the thoughts and ideas of every person who has ever submitted anything to the internet? Fuck you.

AI is borderline useless anyways, just the hallucinations of a machine that's doing it's best to regurgitate the most likely combination of symbols that will make the "success" metric go up. The order of those symbols is entirely based on a long history of what symbols, in what order, followed a real interaction between two flesh creatures. Emulate the response of the flesh creatures, win the favor of the flesh creatures.

It doesn't think, it doesn't care, it gives canned responses from a mind bogglingly large dataset of possibilities. The ones that are given the blessing of the fleshy creators are ranked higher than those that don't. It's a tape recorder with more steps. A lot more.

Mitigating the loss isn't the point.

Pirates account for some of the most significant internet users. Pirates generally buy higher tier plans, and actually use them. These are high value clients to the ISP.

Most households have maybe a handful of people, let's say, 4 on average, where each can be doing around one thing on the internet at any given time. Some of the highest bandwidth activities that they can legally engage in, aside from bulk downloads (games, files, etc), is video streaming. Most 4K video services are streaming at around 25-40Mbps, across four people, that's 100-160mbps. Accounting for overhead, most households don't require more than 200mbps.

These are small fry users for the ISP, since presently 200mbps is very middle-of-the-road for available speeds in most places.

Pirates are usually in the 500+ Mbps plans whenever they're made available, usually at a significant premium for the speed, and for the unlimited bandwidth that they need for their consumption. They're the prosumers that see the value in the extra speed and cost.... And there's a LOT of them. Whether it's casual piracy, like watching licensed content for free on some ad-riddled shady site from overseas, to full on data warehouse pirates who download terabytes of data every month.... There's a large number of users that pirate content of all sorts.

ISPs know this, they see the copyright claim notices, and they know how much of their userbase is going to vaporize if something like this passes.

You think it's maybe half? That they should just increase pricing to make up for it? Yeah, they did the math, if that was the problem, they wouldn't care, nor spend the money to fight it.

The fact that they're fighting against this should be extremely telling that this kind of legislation would significantly impact the business. They would lose a huge portion of their clients. They would need to overhaul the business to stay afloat, if they can survive it at all.

You're comment is reductive and short sighted. You don't seem to realize what their actions actually mean, or at least, what they imply. ISPs are not fighting for us out of the goodness of their hearts. They're not charities. They're profit mongering business people who only care about the bottom line. So if they're going to bat against the MPAA/RIAA for something that will benefit their clients who are doing things that are clearly illegal, what does that say about how this will affect their bottom line.

IMO, if this goes through, then we're going to see more than a few ISPs go chapter 11.

This. I'm one of those older millennials... Over 40. I wouldn't have a car if I didn't live in the middle of nowhere.

The past few years I've mainly been working from home, so during that time, the only reason I still had a car is that I had already bought it. I still work from home, and if my car stops working, I'll be hard pressed to find a reason to buy a replacement. The only good reason I have is for work, since I occasionally need to travel to a place for my job. And honestly, that's the only valid reason I have right now to continue owning one.

All cars are a waste of money.

Easily one of the worst "investments" anyone can make.

For the business types, this is called total cost of ownership.

Between depreciation of resale value, the costs for fuel, maintenance, storage, insurance, etc. The actual cost of owning a car is significantly higher than what it says on the sticker.

I'm not a business type, but I took classes about it in college and some of the stuff I read was specifically saying that vehicles were easily one of the biggest cost sinks out of everything you will ever own. Aka, they have the most significant unrecoverable costs associated with them.

If you think about it for even a few seconds, that's absolutely true, the vehicle loses a large portion of its value simply by being used at all. The fuel doesn't add value to the investment, the maintenance doesn't either. With another large investment, such as a house/real estate, if you do upgrades/maintenance/whatever to the property, the value of the house generally increases, the property generally doesn't lose value over time, though it's widely considered one of the worst types of investments to hold property for capital gains in the value of the property, it's at least moving in the right direction. Install/repair the HVAC in a car, bfd. No significant change in value. Repair/upgrade the HVAC in a house, you can recover most of that cost if you need to sell the house.

Vehicles suck.

I wouldn't own one except that I live in the middle of fucking nowhere. We neither have bus, train, nor taxi service where I live, and the Uber/Lyft/whatever ride apps might as well laugh in my face when I load them.

If you live anywhere with a functional transit system, buying a car is generally a bad move, financially.

Probably the only cost I would consider worse than a car is renting a place to live, unfortunately, many don't have the choice of owning their living space, and since everyone needs somewhere to call home, you don't really have a choice. With a vehicle, you don't have to own one, as long as you live somewhere with alternatives available.

Can we ask the question?

.... Why are people getting violent at a fucking grocery chain?

Are the customers disgruntled because it's too expensive?

Are the employees disgruntled because you treat them like wage slaves?

What's going on at Loblaws?

I used to work grocery before I graduated college, and for the most part, my time there was positive. Granted, that was many years ago, so I have to wonder wtf happened? A nontrivial number of years for me were spent working at a Loblaws subsidiary store. I had not experienced, nor heard of anyone else experiencing violence from a customer. It just didn't happen.

So what in the glory hole of corporate greed, happened?

Also, why the fuck are body cams needed? Most of their stores have security cameras out the ass. What the fuck could they possibly be hoping to capture by making the employees, who are already on the security cameras, wear additional recording equipment?

Sounds like bullshit to me. This excuse for the extra camera is just blowing smoke up the ass of the civilians to make them think it's for their protection, when they just want to monitor their employees and what they're up to when they're not in front of a camera.

IMO, this is about control.

I'm holding out hope that the fiber provider figures it out and I'll never move again.

I'm fairly positive it's just a matter of time before someone brings in fiber to the neighborhood.

The DSL provider is running fiber to a new subdivision that hasn't even started construction about 1km from my house. Seems like a farmer retired and a developer bought the land. The power utility already put in a pad transformer for the new subdivision, there's no reason to put a transformer there unless you're putting in something significant, and the local DSL guys don't do copper for new builds. They've migrated to XGS-PON fiber, and won't install anything less than that in new areas.

My house is in the pre-existing town, so it will take a bit longer before I see it.

I'm rooting for the local fiber guys, but if they don't make a move soon, the DSL guys will beat them to it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about years or decades here. It'll be a while before I can call up and get service dropped to my address from the DSL guys, so the local fiber company doesn't have to move fast, they just need to move faster than the DSL guys will.

Both companies have fiber on the utility post across the street. I can literally look up at the post and identify it. I don't think the DSL guys have the splitters set up to provide access to my neighborhood, they're just moving mostly dark fiber through, and they're serving a community center and a school up the road. So it's not all dark fiber. The local fiber guys are just missing an over-the-road aerial line permit... They're much closer to being done, they just need permission from the town to run the line across the road so I can get service. IMO, they're much closer to being done, but the DSL company is a pretty big operator. They could get everything done within a few months if they wanted to push for it. Clearly, my little community is small fries for them.

I survive on cable because I have to. It's not great, but it's also not bad.

I just assumed that they forget the horrid shit because of some twisted confirmation bias.

Everyone keeps pointing it out, and they keep telling themselves about the "good" things he's done. Reinforcing their own confirmation bias.

I first heard about this phenomenon in "how to win friends and influence people"... It's a book, crazy, right? It's about human nature, and how arguing with someone often results in them arguing for their point, further entrenching them in their opinion. While they don't convince you with their arguments, they convince themselves and that makes arguing with someone a difficult thing to do, and "win" at (by convincing the opposing person of your viewpoint).

The fact is, the more we argue with them about Trump, the more they have to argue for him being someone that's going to "make America great again", and the further they get entrenched into that viewpoint.

The sooner more people realize that this is a viscous cycle of mental violence and simply decide not to continue, the better. Obviously that's hard to do when you are faced with the very real possibility of him being reelected, and essentially bringing back the Nazi party with him....

Idk what's the right thing to do, but clearly, nobody is going to change the minds of the deranged "MAGA" crowd anytime soon.

I wish that would happen to me. There's two big companies that service most of my area, one is cable, the other is DSL. The DSL provider, whenever I've checked, only offers 10Mbps download. Big nope from me. Cable has gigabit, but capped at 30mbps upload.

There's a third regional provider that operates in my area that does fiber exclusively (plus a bunch of resellers and wireless providers). The fiber company doesn't serve my address. Just me though.... Well, my side of the street. If I put in my neighbors address into their service form, it says they're capable of getting gigabit up and down for a very reasonable price. I put in mine, and "sorry, we don't serve your address" or whatever. I think that's because the utility poles are on the other side of the street, and they're on the poles, but don't have a permit to cross the street (generally by aerial lines)... Which is what the cable provider did when I finally purchased their service; they ran a line over the road to my house.

Upload is important to me, and 10:1 speeds are fine, but 30:1 or more, no thanks. The plan I went for was 300/30, which is the fastest upload they offer with the slowest download (the 200mbps plan was 20mbps upload or something, and the gigabit was 30mbps upload).... I want fiber.

If that regional fiber company knocked on my door saying that they service my area now, I'd ask where I sign.

And before anyone asks: I contacted them about it and they said something about the permits and blah, and blah. I've tried to contact them several times about how I can help get them the permits to operate in my area more broadly (including my address), but they have not responded. I'm happy to petition my town hall or regional governmental office to push things along or even canvassing for signatures on a petition to give them the required permits to serve the area.... Even paying for a portion of the permit cost if necessary.... Not a word from them.

Feels bad.

IKR. I'd apply for a job if that was a perk.

Right now the only way you'll get that is if you work in an Indian restaurant, and bluntly, that would be a massive downgrade for me.

If I could upgrade my job and smell delicious food that I want to eat all day, and probably eat it too? Fuck yeah, there's no downside here.