MudMan

Patronizingly cryptic AND with disciples coming in behind him to explain his whole deal.

He should watch out for roaming cups of hemlock, just in case.

Hey, way more honest than OP.

Oh, ok.

So is this fine for kids, then? And if so, how do you draw that line in a piece of legislation?

Really? You were going for some Socratic roundabout ironic thing? Could have just said what you thought, saved everybody the trouble. That feels a bit patronizing.

I mean, I don’t disagree on the broad strokes, but it does beg the question:

What are you doing here?

This is that. You’re on social media. We don’t allow smoking and drinking for adults because it’s any less harmful for them, it’s just that we choose to let grownups choose whether they want to mess themselves up.

So why do you choose to mess yourself up and what should society do about it?

I read the piece and have been thinking about this daily for thirty years.

The guy is right and the piece sucks.

It’s borderline satanic panic that hasn’t thought through the downstream ramifications of even attempting to implement age gates online. And as the previous poster says the negative effects of social media are at the absolute least just as bad in adults. The scaremongering about drug dealers and pedophiles is just that.

I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because… well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)”, which proved to be just as incorrect.

That’s a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn’t even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn’t even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn’t even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.

I’m not referring to Ulanoff specifically, but come on, let’s not be disingenuous, you (I assume it’s you, correct me if I’m wrong) using him as an avatar of the criticism Masto was getting at the time. He made a maximalist prediction and was wrong, so he’s a convenient target to act as a dismissal of the genuine concerns being raised in general when Masto got into the mainstream’s focus.

Notably, he wasn’t entirely incorrect. Thousands of people did move on. I did. I’m not writing this on Masto. Did Ulanoff miss the fairly obvious point that with no centralized infrastructure Masto is actually more viable when it’s small than when it’s large? Sure. Was he right to claim that it was “less Snapchat than Path”? Sure. Arguably whoever remains at Masto is perfectly fine with that, and that’s cool, but at the time the debate was whether Twitter would be replaced by Masto, and that did not happen and will not happen, in no small part for the reasons more sharp-eyed critics than Ulanoff pointed out at the time.

It’s a bit of a tangent, but to interject my own take I’ll say that Masto isn’t even on my top 3 for AP applications. Twitter is just not the right format for the way AP works, Masto is not a good implementation of Twitter and some of the technical shortcomings Masto users keep insisting don’t matter actually do matter.

Seems a touch disingenuous to me. I don’t think most of the critics of Masto during the days of looking for Twitter alternatives were forecasting Masto to just poof out into thin air Google+ style.

I think they were mostly saying it wasn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes.

They were arguably right about that. Bluesky became that, not Masto. Masto went back to being… well Masto. Small, self-referential, insular and quietly chugging along.

Who cares? I’m confused. Why is their upload relevant in the first place? I thought all the IP holders were out there arguing that the download was the issue.

Never mind that in this case there is a profit reason for the download in the first place. Even in notoriously lenient areas with copyright that is a bigger strike than whether they reseeded anything in a peer to peer platform.

But hey, here we are, I’m rooting for Meta here. Absolutely put all the money in dismantling overreaching copyright regulation. Let’s find some Duck Tales comics or whatever in there. Disney vs Meta in court over copyrights. The Godzilla vs Kong our generation deserves. Let’s do it.

Well, for one thing, it’s part of a wider trend of misreporting about AI. For another, the more interesting, meaningful angle here would be why the (frankly very simplistic) research of the BBC is mismatched with the supposedly more rigorous benchmarks used for LLM quality testing and reported in new releases.

In fact, are they? What do they mean? Should people learn about them and understand them before engaging? Probably, yeah, right? But the BBC is saying their findings have “far reaching implications” without engaging with any of those issues, which are not particularly obscure or unknown in the field.

The gap between what’s being done in LLM development, what is being reported about it and how the public at large understand it is bizarre and hard to quantify. I believe once the smoke clears people will have some guilt to process about it, regardless of what the outcome of the hype cycle ends up being.

Wow, what sort of advanced techniques of investigative journalism did they deploy? Use the thing for five minutes and count?

I’m not even a big hater of LLMs and I could have told you that for free.

Sure. It’ll just be messy and painful for me a few weeks after the people who caused all this, so I intend to enjoy them.

I don’t. Don’t much give a damn what Americans think, either, assuming there’s a distinction to be made there.

At this point I’m camp decoupling. If they want their nationalism so bad they can have it. Quietly, if at all possible.

It is definitely standard MO, and both press and online chatter are letting them get away with it, with no indication that will ever change so far.

I mean, US conservatives are still mocking the French as cowardly, collaborationist and militarily ineffective on account of WW2, so if any of them need a ladder to get down from any high horses they may be stuck on I think I have one in the back.

The conversation is still about this clip and not the actual policy, though.

Which I’m sure pisses Trump off, so there is that, but it maybe shows the press hasn’t learned anything. And it’s too late for the US, but there is still a far right surge to contain back in civilization, so it’s about time they figure it out.

Note that I’m not including the UK there, Labour government or not. That BBC headline is at least as shocking as the event itself.

It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.

The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?

Mediaset is a proper multibillion dollar multinational media conglomerate. It is not the one rich guy wanting to protect their investment, any more than Disney dictating the details of US copyright law is. Diney, incidentally, also a player in this conversation.

Lobbying doesn’t happen based on percentage of GDP, friend.

Sale is the only issue because you’re talking about an exclusive right to profit for something. You can already copy a thing at any point for free. That technology is trivial, we just don’t allow it as a general rule. You’re fantasizing about creating an exception based on a thing not being widely available to purchase. If the thing is free, then there is no exception because… well, the thing is free. It’s a valid distinction in that yeah, it’d allow people to retain some control over free licenses, but it still wouldn’t fix what happens to things that haven’t been commercialized yet or that aren’t commercialized constantly.

TV shows that were aired once and aren’t available for purchase, private art that is not made freely available, one-off concerts or events, tools created for private use… there are so many things that would be severed from protections if that was the line.

And just to frame what you’re arguing regarding price control: the outlandish scenario people are trying to prevent with the price control here is one where, to prevent losing copyright under the weird “access” rule, someone keeps a game up for sale somewhwere at an inflated price because they don’t want to sell it otherwise. That is not why meida goes out of print or gets delisted, for one thing, and price control wouldn’t impact it much, for another. I mean, Starfox 64 was 80 USD in 1997, so you could sell it for like 200 bucks now, which doesn’t seem like it fixes the entirely imaginary problem that idea was trying to solve.

Meanwhile, what happens to all the games that depend on a server or that lose compatibility with modern platforms? Are you mandating people to sell iOS games that no longer work on modern phones? Movies in discontinued formats? Is Disney obligated to keep selling the VHS version of The Little Mermaid or to publish a new version of that cut? What about Star Wars, where the movie is actually different? What happens in scenarios like Apple removing the old 1080p cut of Alien and replacing it with a 4K that has different color grading that annoys purists? Are those the same thing or different? Can you take GTA San Andreas down if you sell the remaster?

This is not “easy”, and it doesn’t work the way people here seem to think it works. You’re just working backwards from a specific example that annoys you and not considering the wider context.