• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven’t been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating…

    Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user’s location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

    If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al’s demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers’ supposed losses and legal expenses, and “destroy” all “unlawful copies” of the books under the publishers’ copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

    I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don’t know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I’ve concluded.

    Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the “emergency library”, their legality was in a grey area even before that… And I don’t remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I’ve seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

    Edit: I just saw https://lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ…



  • it would reject invalid answers

    Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted. I.e. they were aware that the images weren’t 100% lined up with the labels in their database, so they’d give some leeway to the users, letting them correct those potential mistakes and smooth out the data.

    it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van

    That’s your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would’ve let you through anyway, it’s not necessarily that strict. Or it would just give you a new captcha to solve. Either way, if your answer did not line up with what the system expected (your assumption being that they had already classified it as a bus) it would call attention to the image. So, they might send it over to a real human to check what it really is, or put it into some different combination with other vehicles to filter it out and reclassify.



  • This is the first time in my life I’ve seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called ‘xenophobia’.

    Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.

    Personally I just don’t want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It’s a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English… stuff that I’d expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There’s still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I’m sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don’t want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.

    We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.

    Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn’t have to be for everyone.

    Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don’t get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn’t need many millions of users to work well.



  • antonim@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoodReads alternative
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    11 months ago

    Bookwyrm is open-source, works similarly to Lemmy (i.e. is a federated platform). Storygraph and LibraryThing are also popular alternatives, but IIRC they’re both closed source.

    Personally I think just creating a spreadsheet file with your reading data is better. (In LibreOffice, of course.)





  • over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget

    The site is now run by a skeleton crew

    TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It’s been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It’s impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don’t have the capabilities to do them properly…

    Goodreads never made money

    Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.



  • Human language change happens first of all because the reality that the language is meant to represent changes. I.e. you create a new thing, you create a new name for it too.

    ChatGPT does not intend to represent a reality when it uses a language. It does not even know of a reality outside of its language.

    Human language also changes due to various rather vague “economic” reasons, e.g. simplified pronunciation, merging sounds, developing some new habits in grammar that spread within one community but do not spread elsewhere… For example, we have extremely obvious proof that Latin developed into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc., so language change clearly isn’t some magical process. On the other hand, if you fed a ton of ancient Latin into ChatGPT, it wouldn’t even develop the pronunciation of medieval Latin used by priests, much less the totally different descendant languages that developed at the time.





  • So you understand the system very well, yet completely ignore the ethically dubious aspects of the system.

    People are not born desiring harmful garbage. They are, at least in part, taught, conditioned to desire it.

    When you say that a site “feeds you whatever you want”, you’re ignoring the chicken-or-the-egg pattern of desire and satisfaction on the market. The site teaches you want you want. Internet addiction and the ways in which contemporary media and tech affect your mind (most obviously by reducing people’s attention spans) are fairly well known today.

    Imagine a drug dealer who sells his garbage to the same person so much that they develop an addiction. With your logic, we can just blame the junkie who keeps returning to the dealer, while the dealer is pretty much innocent - surely it’s not his responsibility if someone else develops an addiction and destroys their life!


  • You can relativise things all you want, it’s a fact that online insanity does leak back into the reality. For example see Qanon, or Brenton Tarrant, who used to frequent 4chan and 8chan. Not to mention the more trivial things such as people openly agreeing with Andrew Tate, or becoming fans and voters of Donald Trump due to his online presence, etc.

    If you know people IRL that believe lgbt people shouldn’t exist, I guess I feel bad for you and who you associate with.

    Did you just spin this into a covert ad hominem? Nice job, but I don’t “associate” with every person whose views I hear espoused IRL.

    I don’t know anyone at all like that, not even close to that.

    Ok? But why assume that every community and society is exactly like yours? From your other comments I notice you’re from Canada, I hope you’re aware your political culture isn’t typical for the rest of the world, not even for the entire “west”.

    I don’t feel the need to defend the most extreme examples of dumb things you’ve read online that someone else posted.

    Right, so you didn’t have to claim such people and such extreme positions literally don’t exist - with caps lock, no less. I probably wouldn’t think of replying to you if you didn’t formulate it so categorically.