While I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of creatives, and their need to eat, I feel like the pendulum has swung so far to the interests of the copyright holders and away from the needs of the public that the bargain is no longer one I support. To the extent that AI is helping to expose the absurdity of this system, I'm all for it.
I don't think "burn it all down" is the answer, but I'd love to see the pendulum swing back our way.
Because copyright laws rarely serve small independent creatives, but rather corporations like Disney that are in the business of hoarding and monetizing culture.
Yeah, I would argue that, just systemically, intellectual property laws can't really do anything but overwhelmingly serve the interests of the wealthy and mega corporations. I also think they're ethically wrong and run counter to the kind of artistic and information culture that I would prefer, but those are arguments more people are likely to disagree on.
I think most people would argue that dismantling intellectual property would mean the end of all new creative endeavors, as if humanity is only driven to create art for practical reasons.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, would argue that true art must serve absolutely no practical or utilitarian purpose, and that pecuniary concerns only corrupt artistic and intellectual labors leading to mediocrity and dishonesty.
Copyright laws as we know them came into being sometime in the 18th century. The earliest recorded works of art produced by humans are from 40,000-45,000 BC. So it's hard to take the "we'll never have creative output without strict copyright!!" extremism seriously.
> Schopenhauer, on the other hand, would argue that true art must serve absolutely no practical or utilitarian purpose, and that pecuniary concerns only corrupt artistic and intellectual labors leading to mediocrity and dishonesty.
As, similarly, would Bataille, one of the philosophers I'm interested in!
While true, 'rarely' ought not be conflated with 'never.' I am a small, independent creator, and I've used copyright laws many times over the years to stop larger entities from raiding my catalog for content. Of course now Anthropic et al. are gobbling up such catalogs for indirect misappropriation, with no sign of consequences, so perhaps copyright has truly shrunk to a one-way street favoring the major players.
Every morning for the past 14 months or so I've sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and spent ~20 minutes writing out a page of thoughts in my Hobonichi Techo journal with my trusty Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. I try to write plainly and honestly about whatever pops into my head, and before I know it, I'm done.
It hasn't been super life changing, but I do enjoy doing it. Sometimes during the course of the day I'll think back about an aspiration I had that morning, and actually do something I might not have done otherwise.
About a year into this practice my hand started hurting a bit, so I've slowly trained myself to write using the muscles in my arm and shoulder rather than moving the muscles in my hand. My handwriting quality took a nose-dive in the short term, but my hand stopped hurting and I have moments now where my cursive looks nearly as good as it used to.
I do this too but on a laptop. It is more beneficial to use paper but I don’t want readers to think it isn’t incredibly important even without the gear. Like how good running shoes are not important to start running.
Different people engage in different ways. I think OP is telling us what got them over that initial habit adoption hurdle. Sometimes spending money on something makes you use it.
My example case is I paid for a year of gym membership up front so I could feel the total I'd spent more tangibly. That got me to go regularly, even if I was just showing up to recovery stretching at first. Now I enjoy going and I look forward to it, and I didn't need a PT to motivate me this time.
I was honestly just thinking the same thing. Like...damn, why is OP advertising such expensive gear to people who might want to just try something?
You can do exactly the same thing with a mead spiral bound and a ticonderoga pencil...
Or text notes on an existing device
Or audio notes on an existing device
Or for the price OP is advertising, get a whole drawing tablet to plug in
Or for the price OP is advertising, get a used android tablet
There are both cheaper options and, to me, better options that are also cheaper as they offer search, cross linking, algorithmic analysis (what have I been writing about lately, what have I stopped writing about), and easy duplication so that I don't lose my notes.
Personally, I use an obisidan vault in a cloud folder...easy duplication on any device, easy review, easy search, easy cross reference...
To do what I do on with my notes with a pen and paper, I'd be spending half of my time indexing and notating rather than producing results driven by the notes...which, I guess is valid if the entire goal is spending time with your notes, but I just personally feel like I've got to get something out of the process other than staring at shit I used to think about.
For instance, on paper, I'd have to underline or otherwise mark key words and maintain a live index in order to find: what's been worrying me lately, what was that dream that one night, what's my second most common topic of thought...and a million other things. Whereas in reviewing my obsidian vault all of those things are at most 30 seconds away, and I didn't have to do any work on top of writing the notes to get that functionality.
I know there is a lot of value in these indexes but I’ve never actually reviewed anything except sometimes the previous day. For me, this is more about taking a moment to check up on myself and the writing is a means to an end rather than a meaningful output.
I started doing this too after reading The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. She prescribes these “morning pages” as one of principal tools for overcoming internal creativity blocks. I also really enjoy drinking my coffee and writing these pages with my pilot fountain pens.
Can verify. When I started in the catalog department in '97, "the catalog" was essentially a giant Berkeley DB keyed on ISBN/ASIN that was built/updated and pushed out (via a mountain of Perl tools) to every web server in the fleet on a regular cadence. There were a bunch of other DBs too, like for indexes, product reviews, and other site features. Once the files landed, the deploy tooling would "flip the symlinks" to make them live.
Berkeley DBs were the go-to online databases for a long time at Amazon, at least until I left at the turn of the century. We had Oracle databases too, but they weren't used in production, they were just another source of truth for the BDBs.
The stocks app is essentially Apple Business News, with stock prices on one side. I'm not entirely sure how the weather app pushes News on you, but my guess is that it's there somewhere.
my stock app has the Apple business news towards the bottom where it’s pretty easy to ignore and I find it’s at least somewhat relevant, even if I don’t look at it. Even so, totally get it. I don’t really want ads there one way or another.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
I have a lot of respect for Postgres' massive feature set, and how easy it is to immediately put to use, but I don't care for the care and feeding of it, especially dealing with upgrades, vacuuming, and maintaining replication chains.
Once upon a time, logical replication wasn't a thing, and upgrading major versions was a nightmare, as all databases in the chain had to be on the same major version. Upgrading big databases took days because you had to dump and restore. The MVCC bloat and VACCUM problem was such a pain in the ass, whereas with MySQL I rarely had any problems with InnoDB purge threads not able to keep up with garbage collecting historical row versions.
Lots of these problems are mitigated now, but the scars still sometimes itch.
Maybe? When I did LFS/BLFS I opted for an i3-gaps setup with a compositor and some other eye candy, and had a lot of fun tinkering. I suppose some folks might want the experience of building an entire DE from source, but that seems like a bit much.
That's funny, I did LFS a few years ago and specifically chose the systemd version so I could better understand it. I don't think this is a huge deal, I believe the older versions of the document that include SysVinit will still be available for a long time to come, and people who want it will figure out how to muddle through. If at some point in the future things diverge to such a point where that that becomes untenable, someone will step up and document how it is to be accomplished.
Didn't you find though that systemd was just a black box? I was hoping to learn more about it as well- and I did manage to get a fully baked LFS CLI system up and running, and it was just like "ok install systemd..." and now... it just goes.
Sysv at least gave you a peak under the covers when you used it, and while it may have given people headaches and lacked some functionality, was IMHO simple to understand. Of course the entire spaghetti of scripts was hard to understand in terms of making sense of all the dependencies, but it felt a lot less like magic than systemd does.
> "ok install systemd..." and now... it just goes.
I believe it's `systemctl list-unit-files` to see all the config that's executed, included by the distro, and then if you want to see the whole hierarchy `systemd-analyze dot | dot -Tpng -o stuff.png`
To me, seems much easier to understand what's actually going on, and one of the benefits of config as data rather than config as scripts.
The only other page that covers it is how to compile it and it install it (make configure, make, make install essentially- with a bunch of flags).
It kind of touches upon a few commands that will let you know what its doing and how to get it started, but from this page you don't learn much about how it works.
In fact, one of my takeaways from LFS was that I already kind of knew how a linux system starts... and what I really wanted to learn was how the devices are discovered and configured upon startup to be used, and that is pretty much all done in the black box that is SystemD.
This decision means that no testing of SysVinit will be done in future LFS and BLFS versions. The onus will be on the experimenter each time, but my hope is that a body of advice and best practices will accumulate online in lieu of having a ''works out of the book'' SysVinit solution.
> Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
Everything I write, every thought I have, and the output of my every creative endeavor is profoundly shaped by the work of others that I have ingested, compressed, and iterated on over the course of my lifetime, yet I have the audacity to call it my own. Any meager success I may have, I attribute to naught but my own ingenosity.
I think this is a paradox that AIs have introduced.
We write open source software so everyone can learn and benefit from it. But why do we not like it when they are being trained on them and allow normies to use it as well?
We want news, knowledge and information to be spread everywhere. So why don't we share all of our books, articles and blogs openly to any AI companies that want to use them? We should all want to have our work to be used by everyone more easily.
Personally, I don't have any fundamental refutation to this. There's a sense that it is wrong. I can somewhat articulate why its wrong in term of control and incentives. But those are not well formed just yet.
I sit along this fence and the only real "wrong" I can garner from it is that the economic model simply hasn't updated to reflect this shift.
I think the "wrongness" would go away, for me anyways, if we found a way that everyone was still remunerated in some way when this sharing occurred.
A lá, the vision of what crypto ought to have been: Every single thing created and shared has a .000xx cent value and as it makes it's way around being used/shared/iterated upon just sends those royalty checks to the "creator" always, forever.
Humans participate in the human struggle of existence, limited in our time, attention, energy, and host of other various constraining natures. We are limited and finite. To learn from those of greater talent than yourself is to dedicate all of those resources towards its acquisition. AI has no such limitations, and so does not participate in the same category as humans. A human struggles to learn the patterns of an artist, a machine does not. A human tires of learning, a machine does not. A human puts in effort, a machine does not.
It is the humanness that is the difference, that which exists outside the abstraction of the imposed categories. The human cannot compete with the machine which ingests ALL works and renders the patterns easily available. The artist toiled to perfect those patterns, and now is no longer granted the decency of reaping the fruits of their labors. Humans can give, the machine can only take.
Man is a tool using animal. Language, writing, the printing press, photography, audio recording, computers, the Internet, and now AI -- each of these innovations has fundamentally changed how we create and preserve knowledge, art, and culture.
None of these changes came without losses. Writing eroded our capacity to remember, printing fueled decades of bloody religious conflict, photography harmed portrait artists, audio recordings wrecked social collaborative parlor music, computers fucked up our spelling & arithmetic, and the Internet... don't get me started.
Ultimately there is no going back, we will change and adapt to our new capabilities. Some will be harmed and some will be left behind. So turns the wheel of progress, I don't think anyone can stop it.
While I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of creatives, and their need to eat, I feel like the pendulum has swung so far to the interests of the copyright holders and away from the needs of the public that the bargain is no longer one I support. To the extent that AI is helping to expose the absurdity of this system, I'm all for it.
I don't think "burn it all down" is the answer, but I'd love to see the pendulum swing back our way.
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