• 3 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

    Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

    If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

    I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

    Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

    Come on, Aldi.




  • Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?

    Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn’t doing half bad, financially, maybe they’ll bring tapes back.

    It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old “sign the EULA or lose everything” bullshit and it’s just not working for them. Too bad we can’t kick them in the dick like other nations can.





  • Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.

    Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

    Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

    BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

    This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

    Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.

    Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

    “I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

    What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.

    Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.

    So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.



  • It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.

    Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.







  • The thing I’m seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it’s very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want “evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.

    Now that it’s in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it’s sort of “washed” in the money laundering sense, and I don’t see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don’t see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you’re in violation of copyright, and we’re on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.

    So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.

    Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]

    My quote is a bit messy there (i’m quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.

    The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.

    So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.