• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • donuts@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Relatable
    8·
    8 months ago

    Armed with what?

    Guns, knives, blunt weapons, tasers, bear spray, hand cuffs and zip ties.

    Taking the stand in the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four associates, Terry Cummings showed jurors an AR-15 firearm and an orange box for ammunition that he contributed to the so-called quick reaction force the Oath Keepers had staged at the hotel outside of Washington in case they needed weapons.

    “I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military,” said Cummings, a veteran who joined the Oath Keepers in Florida in 2020.

    https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-florida-virginia-conspiracy-government-and-politics-6ac80882e8cf61af36be6c46252ac24c

    But a review of the federal charges against the alleged rioters shows that they did come armed, and with a variety of weapons: stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs. An additional suspect also allegedly planted pipe bombs by the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties the night before the riot and remains at large.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters-were-armed-here-are-the-weapons-prosecutors-say-they-used

    Online sleuths who have aided in hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions say he is the same man they identified to the FBI who is currently individual No. 200 on the bureau’s Capitol Violence page, which he first appeared on three years ago. Videos and photographs from the Capitol on Jan. 6 showed him with what appears to be a gun in his waistband. As NBC News previously reported, that man, John Emanuel Banuelos, told Salt Lake City police that he was at the Capitol and had been captured on film with a gun. “I was in the D.C. riots,” he told the investigators, according to a police transcript. “I’m the one in the video with the gun right here.”

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/new-jan-6-footage-appears-show-rioter-firing-gun-air-capitol-attack-rcna138137

    And I recall Hillary’s plot to get electors to “vote their concious”

    The source you’ve linked quotes Martin Sheen and other “celebrities”, not Hillary Clinton, who conceded the election as someone who believed in democracy would (despite being much more popular than Trump and winning the national vote by millions).

    Also, you should know that official electors are not always bound. As a Trump voter I know you’re not big on education or knowledge, but if you want you can read all about unpledged electors here.

    Meanwhile, what Trump and his gang of indicted co-conspirators did was to submit a slate of fraudulent and fake electors to the election certification process in order to literally steal swing state electoral college votes and appoint himself President. Or as he likes to say “dictator on day one”.

    Here’s a list of the names of the fraudulent electors in each state that Trump tried to overthrow.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Relatable
    223·
    8 months ago

    Just because he wasn’t charged with treason doesn’t mean he didn’t commit treason by advocating an armed insurrection against our democracy. (See: the US post-Civil War Reconstruction Era for further examples.)

    And if you want to why he wasn’t charged for that, it’s because of Republican Special Counsel Ken Starr’s disastrous opinion that sitting presidents are above the law and can’t be prosecuted, and must instead be impeached–which, if you remember, Trump was, not once but twice. Of course now Trump is arguing that he’s still above the law and deserves “total immunity”, which only further shows that he is, in fact, a wanna-be dictator.

    Saying “Trump wasn’t charged with a crime so therefore he did nothing wrong” and “Trump can’t be charged with a crime because current and former US Presidents must have total immunity from prosecution” is very clearly circular logic.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Midjourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt win a victory in copyright case by artists — but the fight continues
    1·
    11 months ago

    Copyright is an artificial restriction

    All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.

    AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There’s no having it both ways.

    What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves.

    I’m a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.

    Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else’s code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you’ll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.

    I’m also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a “fair use” of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it’s baked into the license.

    Long story short, whether it’s code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as “fair use”.

    tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright

    TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I’m advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.

    If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you’re entitled to think that.

    But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Midjourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt win a victory in copyright case by artists — but the fight continues
    32·
    11 months ago

    If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

    That’s because I’m a human being. I’m acting on my own volition and while I’ve observed artwork, I’ve also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I’m not owned or beholden to any company.

    “AI” “art” is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

    All of these are factors in determining whether it’s fair to use someone else’s copyrighted material, which is why it’s fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it’s not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

    Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

    I’m not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else’s copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

    AI training is using people’s copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that’s absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people’s copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is “fair” under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

    Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

    The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don’t get to unilaterally decided what people’s art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

    Take Spotify for example, artists don’t get paid a lot per stream and it’s arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it’s worth it to be on those platforms. That’s not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

    So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that’s because it probably is–another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•What is the point of Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc?
    36·
    1 year ago

    I like Flatpaks and AppImages for application delivery and here’s why:

    1. Software doesn’t just magically appear in various distros’ repositories. There is a considerable amount of work (time/effort/energy/thought) that goes into including and maintaining any given program in a single distro’s repo, and then very similar work must be done by the maintainers of other independent repositories. To make matters worse, some programs are not straight-forward to compile and/or may use customized dependencies. In those cases, package maintainers for each distro will have to do even more work and pay close attention to deliver the application as intended, or risk shipping a version that works differently in subtle ways and possibly with rare bugs. (Needing to ship custom versions of deps for a certain program also totally eliminates a lot of the benefits of shared libraries; namely reduced storage space and shared functionality or security.) That’s part of the reality of managing packages, and the fact is that there’s a lot of wasted effort and repeated work that goes into putting this or that application into a distro repository. I have a ton of respect for distro package maintainers, but I would prefer that their talents and energy could be used on making the user experience and polish of their distro better, or developing new/better software, than wrestling with every new version of every package over and over again multiple times per year.

    2. As a developer it’s very nice to know exactly what is being “shipped” to your users, and that most of your users are running the same code in a very similar environment. In my opinion, it’s simply better for users and developers of a piece of software to have a more direct path, instead of running through a third party middle-man. Developers ship it, users use it, if there’s a bug the users report it, developers fix it and add features and then ship again. It’s simple, it’s effective, and there’s very little reason to add a bunch of extra steps to this process.

    3. The more time I spend using immutable, atomic Linux distros like Silverblue, the more I value a strong separation between system and applications. I want my base system to be solid as a rock, and ideally pretty fucking hard to accidentally break (either on the user end or the distro end). At the same time I also want to be able to use the latest and greatest applications as soon as humanly possible. Well, Silverblue has shown that there’s a viable model to do that in the form of an immutable and atomic base system combined with containerized applications and dev environment. What Silverblue does may not be the only way of achieving a separation between system and applications, but I’ve never been more certain that it’s the right direction for creating a more stable and predictable Linux experience without many compromises. I don’t necessarily want to update my whole system to get the newest version of an application, and I certainly don’t want my system to break due to dependency hell in the process.

    4. The advantages of the old way of distributing applications on Linux are way overblown compared to the advantages of Flatpak. Do flatpaks take up more drive space than traditionally packaged apps? Maybe, I don’t even know. But even if they do, who the hell cares? Linux systems and applications are mostly pretty tiny, and a 1TB nvme ssd is like $50 these days. Does using shared library create less potential for security flaws going unfixed? Possibly, but again, sometimes it just isn’t possible or practical for applications to share libraries, Flatpaks can technically share libraries too, and the containerized nature of Flatpaks mean that security vulnerabilities in specific applications are mitigated somewhat. I’m not a security guy, but I’d guess that Flatpaks are generally pretty safe.

    Well, that’s all I can think of right now. I really like Flatpaks and to some extent AppImages too. I still think that most “system-level” stuff is fine to do with traditional packaging (or something like ostree), but for “application-level” stuff, I think Flatpaks are the current king. They’re very up-to-date, sandboxed, often packaged by the developers themselves, consistent across many distros, save distro maintainers effort that could be better used elsewhere, easy for users to update, integrate with software centers, are very very unlikely to cause your system to break, and so on.

    It would be really hard for me to want to switch back to a traditional distro using only repo packages.