I always found the anti-theft protection employed by Chevette in William Gibsons Virtual Light really cool.
The bike would issue a verbal warning to anyone coming to close, something like „back off buddy“, „keep your hands off or you’ll regret it“ and finally an electric shock to anyone trying to tamper with the lock without her fingerprint.
Not sure how effective it would be in the real world though
I've got a motion alarm on my bicycle, which is in the same vein I suppose. If my bike gets jostled it'll first do quite a stern beeping. If it keeps getting moved after some seconds it will produce a LOUD alarm. If nothing else it'll annoy any potential bike thieves.
Of course any thief with an angle grinder can easily pop the metal zip ties the alarm is attached with, but then an angle grinder is probably going to be louder than the alarm in any case.
My tactic has always been to make my bicycle slightly more annoying to steal than any of the bicycles next to it.
If you ventilate through a heat exchanger when inside and outside are different temperatures, you can have more fresh air more of the time while saving energy.
energy consumption wise, yes, I guess. though mechanical ventilation requires electricity to be used, so it costs energy too. the heat exchangers are max 90% efficient as far as I know from my own research on what's available on a reasonable budget and size.
there are some potential issues if outside temp is higher and it's humid tough. these systems can cause mold.
> there are some potential issues if outside temp is higher and it's humid tough. these systems can cause mold.
Moreso than the shock ventilation method?
If there's worrying amounts of moisture, we could go ahead and say we'll do the same amount of air with the heat exchanger. Is that worse for mold potential than the alternative?
Mechanical ventilation refers to just using fans. The comment you’re replying to is suggesting that heat recovery ventilators (HRV) be used to transfer heat from the warm exhausted to the incoming outside air via a heat exchanger (or cools incoming outside air in hot climates). It reduces the need for heating or cooling while still getting fresh air into the building.
No. It usually takes the form of extractors in the most humid locations of the house (kitchen, bathroom, laundry) that are connected to a central unit that vents air to the outside. Fresh air comes in through ventilation grills around the house, normally located above windows by means of the resulting pressure. No air conditioning is involved, or recirculating, though more modern (and much more expensive) units have heat recovery systems and air filters that will also bring fresh air back in.
It's funny because a few years ago everyone was stating this. Now that GPT and transformer technology exists, abolishing copyright is suddenly no longer popular. It's almost like this is just one giant echo chamber and things swish and swirl like the ocean on opinion.
I don't completely agree with the parent but it's definitely too long. Life + 70 so in average 110 years coverage is ridiculous. Why is that not good? Because it push studio to milk their cash cow forever (as we see with the big franchises occupying all multimedia space and monopolizing all large investments) and it just limits creativity. If the duration was reduced it would force them to invest on creators to find new successes and that would benefit the general public and the creators.
Fair use is also far too restrictive as we see with LLMs. What do you think about when you read "video game plumber"? So basically it became a foundational concept cognitively for you and me (polite way to say that we've been brainwashed by millions of $ in investment in publicity such that the concept is deeply ingrained in our minds) and on top of occupying a significant amount of space in our brains we should be forbidden to use the concept in our communication and creative work?
I don't think the pattern you're describing exists.
I've seen a few people want to abolish copyright, but not many. The vast majority always seemed to want reductions in length. And historically a lot of people have wanted fair use to be easier.
When I look at the arguments against AI, they're not asking for copyright to be longer. They're asking for it to be stricter in a very particular way. And they're making a distinction between human use and transformer use.
There's no "swish and swirl" that I have seen. There's not really a conflict between those opinions on fair use, and there's definitely no conflict with the opinion on duration.
I believe, if anything, copyright is more useless than ever. It's an anachronism when these powerful tools of media creation are so available to so many people. Is it more valuable to society that a select few benefit from decades of cultural appropriation, or is it better for society that cultural artifacts from my youth to be freely available to everyone? As it stands, I may even die before material from before my birth becomes public domain. That's greedy, stupidly shortsighted, and an inefficient allocation of resources.
The issue though is that art is not stolen from a select few, but from society by a select few. The roles are inverted. There’s no benefit for society when a few greedy corporations steal art they then monetise. Said “resources” are not dug out of the ground. They the fruit of people’s labour. Stealing it does no good.
If it was actually theft, I'd agree, but an idea is not able to be stolen. And who inspired the person to create? Did they steal by observing the world around them? No one is an island, and who's to say they'd even have the creative muse without the support of language and other art. Calling "copying" stealing does no good.
We could reserve the scifi for an esoteric inner circle of enlightened thinkers. People better able to handle the fire of scifi without munging things up.
The exoteric hoi polloi get pablum and propaganda. (They can't appreciate good scifi anyway). Give them moral fables wrapped in cowboys with laser-guns.
The problem isn't imagining and building the future, it's the particular political narrative out of which the tech class is trying to build the future.
The problem is the future is being created by sociopathic, crony capitalist neo-reactionary cultists who want to rule over a broken world as its brutal philosopher kings, and consign everyone else into the mouth of Moloch. These are the people for whom the meme "Please don't create the Torment Nexus" was made. These people are the reason Ted Kaczynski is so popular amongst the tech underclass.
I don't know what the alternative is, but we should be concerned.
Well sure but why blame it on sci-fi?
Sounds to me like those people would create the torment nexus with or without sci-fi.
It’s not like it’s super hard to come up with the concept of e.g. colonising Mars.
Scifi can deliver an illusion of understanding. A metaphorical description of something very strange that the reader never actually experienced firsthand.
That's a deep kind of dream. Not saying the vision is entirely invalid, but maybe it isn't as intimate an understanding as the reader thinks.
The article isn't blaming sci-fi, it's blaming tech elites for missing or ignoring the deeper implications and warnings in what they read, and twisting it into some wierd, dark mirror utopian fetish.
I mean, one could just as well be a fan of sci-fi and realize the torment nexus is a bad thing, and not create it, even if one is a nerd with all the time, power and money in the world.
I've seen the preamble to his manifesto quoted enough to know that isn't the case. Kaczynski's views on "the left" are point for point mainstream within internet culture now, and plenty of people will defend his views on technology, if not his violence.
There was a recent thread about him here[0,1]. Plenty of people denouncing him, of course, but also lots of sympathy. I've also noticed a trend to reform (and excuse) his violent actions as being the effect of psychological torture by the CIA and MKULTRA. The linked article goes a bit deeper into how influential his manifesto has been on the culture.
Unions and taxes are the alternative. Nobody should be a billionaire. If there wasn't such a concentration of wealth among a few, detached sociopaths we wouldn't have to worry about their pseudo-religious delusions.
Exactly—and I would add onto that regulations with teeth, especially antitrust regulations.
The gutting of antitrust under Reagan was instrumental in allowing the massive hyperconsolidation in all markets, with tech very prominent among them. The Biden administration's repudiation of the intellectually and morally bankrupt Chicago school interpretation of antitrust paves the way for a much better future, but it's going to take time, and it's going to need our support.
The notion that we'd be able to design a society from the ground up in the manner dictated by Communism is fundamentally science fiction as well. This isn't unique to Communism, overall I think the degree a society can be controlled by anyone in power is significantly overstated. It's quite a parallel to the project of terraforming Mars. Nobody is doubting we might affect a change with policy or violence, but what's missing a degree of control in the magnitude and direction of that change.
Communism seems bad because Western countries still have a good quality of life for a large percentage of the population. The moment this stops being the case, people in the West will be clamoring for communism. This is just a matter of time and perspective.
Well by Marx' predictions, this should already have happened. It throws a real spanner in the works for the theory that the evolution of a society is quite so inevitable and predictable.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
Well that's why they use tools like tiktok to try to convince the West that life is terrible and everyone is miserable. They need to speed things along
Marx theory is about the fight of classes in society. There is nothing predictable about how this fight will happen. The only prediction is that in the end only one class will remain. It cannot be the bourgeoisie simply because they don't work! Moreover, even if only the bourgeoisie happened to survive without work, their instinct is to kill each other (economically) until only one remains. So his observation, that the final state must be some form of socialism or total destruction, makes complete sense.
In recent years, the term fascism has grown to expand almost anything with an authoritarian or totalitarian bent, which would certainly include at least the Lenin and Stalin years of the Soviet Union.
Though I think this is a bit of unfortunate expansion of its definition, as it leaves us with no term to use when talking about Fascism.
I could sort of see that, though I think authoritarian does a fine job of saying the same thing. But to say the communist party of the Soviet Union wasn't communist, that they used the word communism to make communism/themselves look bad? Thats hard to even follow the logic.
We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
We have a system that is kind of working. Laws and regulations are ways to tweak the system, tune it for better performance.
So, lets say we notice that huge wealth inequality is having a negative impact, then we can tax the wealth, and yes, 'distribute' it, like to build roads. That does NOT mean suddenly we are communist.
People stuck in the Capitalist's/Communism argument, if they think it is binary, then really don't understand either one.
> We can design it. That is what Congress should be doing by passing laws.
They sure are passing laws, yet there has been repeated failures at affecting the desired change despite near unilateral agreement among the lawmakers about the direction of the desired change. This includes the war on drugs, the prohibition, and so on.
I'm not disputing these laws have some effect, I'm disputing the ability to envision an outcome, and pass a law such that it has the desired effect.
I'm just saying, we do have a system in place to make corrections. Because they have not been doing it, doesn't mean we can toss it all out and start over.
I'm not sure that would follow in the first place. If the thesis is that strong guidance over the shape and direction of a society is largely impossible, then starting over wouldn't really make much of a difference.
Capitalism is bad; Communism… how do we describe excruciatingly bad?
We’ve tried it, it’s never worked, and because it relies on a fundamental denial of basic human freedoms, it will literally never work. The only question is how much misery it causes in the latest attempt.
Nope, it’s not. It has a very capitalist society in terms of structure, regulation, safety nets, etc. On paper, sure, land is a 70-year lease, but China appears to just want to renew them.
This is also because China already tried pure communism. There were no corporations, all industries were state owned. This lasted about a decade and was a bloodbath with famines, and almost all intellectuals or people with degrees were executed for promoting inequality by their existence (not kidding - actual history (“Stinking Old Ninth”) - go look it up at your library). Be careful what you wish for when putting communism and inequality in the same sentence.
Do not assume China is the only guilty party. The USSR, as just one example, imprisoned 3,000 biologists for being on the wrong side of an evolution debate for being against Lamarckism. This culminated with banning study of neurophysiology, cell biology, and other fields. (The “Lysenkoism” purges - showing that, ironically, communist countries are among the most dangerous places to be a scientist.)
All anyone who espouses communism can ever seem to reliably produce is a never-ending dictatorship of the proletariat (which always seems to be run by people who strangely look like the bourgeoisie) and I don't think that should count for much, if anything. It's not just a dead end, it's a well documented dead end with body counts totaling in the millions.
Most people who create for a living aren't motivated purely by money, but are driven by the necessities of capitalism to do so. You're presenting a false dichotomy, pretending to care about the quality of art, but really like everyone, you just want other people's work for free.
Great art - especially in modern times when that art involves expensive education (which if you're American must be paid for with interest) and the incorporation of technology and equipment - takes time and effort. If that time and effort cannot be paid for, then no matter how passionate an artist may be, unless they have sufficient personal wealth, that art must suffer.
Even the great artists of old needed patrons, because they needed to eat like anyone else. Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for the love of the game, nor would he have.
I guarantee you that the working artists who have already lost commissions and work due to AI care about their craft.
Artists are "rightsholders" and their ilk. You didn't even separate the two in your former comment, so you clearly weren't talking about corporate owners of IP like Sony and Disney, exclusively.
Maybe you believe no artist who works for a corporation has any motivation but money, as opposed to purely "indie" artists, I don't know where the line in your head is drawn, but you do seem willing to throw most artists under the bus for some arbitrary standard of purity.
AI is harming working artists right now, and will likely never harm corporate rightsholders. They'll simply run their own AIs and fire as many people as they can get away with. The end result will not be that only the "true" artists survive but simply less art of any kind, everywhere. So I stand by my comment.
With rightsholders I mean exactly those big corporations who do nothing else but buy up copyrights to successful art.
I for example have never benefited from copyright, neither from GEMA (the German artist association for musicians) - 99% of payouts go to the rich and successful mainstream artists and „indie“ artists get nothing but are forced by law to pay in if they want to perform in public.
So yea I have little sympathy for artists who only work for corporations or are rich enough to afford lawyers to enforce their copyright.
The way I see it there exist 3 ways to make a living as an artist now:
- be rich trustfundkid and don’t care about money
- be „purist“ and just live from selling your art and be on the brink of starvation constantly
- get a „money“job and produce art in your spare time
Apparently there exists a huge population of artists who can make a living from working for corporations - but I have yet to meet one in real life. They are always brought up in these HN discussions but in my experience they don’t exist.
Oh yeah, I forgot artists are spiritual creatures who don't have to eat. It certainly isn't the only reason to create but a necessary condition to actually be a professional artist, no ?
Why don't you just ask for an increase in the allowance from your family trust fund? People have become so lazy nowadays, they can't even be bothered to have a hard talk about their financial estate with their rich grand-papá anymore.
Also, patronage is garbage, in my opinion. It ensures artists are exclusively either already wealthy, or well connected. It also helps ensure that the wealthy are most often represented in the art created; for some reason this seems like a bad idea to me.
copyright based scarcity is effectively dead for anyone with an Internet connection anyway
honestly I think a gratuity model may become dominant with or without any legal changes at this point
you'll often see on YouTube patreon revenue equally or dwarfing ads
the reliance of the music industry on merch seems similar too*
I think people are more willing than you'd think to pay for art simply because they understand it won't exist without money.
*(if that sounds like a stretch, consider if in a world devoid of copyright, whether a Walmart printed band shirt for cheap would be equivalent for most purchasers to the same shirt sold by the actual artist )
What exactly am I stealing if I don't take the deal, walk away and then enjoy an AI-generated artwork that just so happens to resemble the thing closely instead? I'd think that stealing requires taking something away from someone, regardless of how hard certain industries try to gaslight me into expanding the definition to protect their business model.
Stop trying to gaslight yourself into thinking what you are doing isn't morally wrong.
If you do not agree with their business model, don't get involved with their business, at all. Your disagreement doesn't give you the right to exploit flaws in their methods to protect their business. Just like the fact you don't want to pay for something doesn't grant you the right to exploit the fact that the laws of physics allow you to just grab something you didn't pay for with your hand and run away with it.
Don’t worry there are many people out there who have copies of it all, there is no way they manage to get the cat back in the bag even if all governments work together on this.
The bike would issue a verbal warning to anyone coming to close, something like „back off buddy“, „keep your hands off or you’ll regret it“ and finally an electric shock to anyone trying to tamper with the lock without her fingerprint.
Not sure how effective it would be in the real world though