Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.

To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.

My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.

And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.

I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong against the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.

ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.

I feel like in that case one would be loudly fighting to get the law changed, rather than insisting it’s actually fine. Maybe that’s just semantics.

I do not understand what point you’re making. Can you elaborate?

I switched to Mint for my new PC a few months ago. There are a handful of games that don’t work on it, but they’re few and far between.

I’m in the same boat. There are a lot of parts of the Internet that should be free, but YouTube is not one of them. Video hosting is one of the most resource intensive services around, and if we as consumers aren’t paying for it they’ll find a worse way to fund it.

A hit-piece commissioned by the Joker to distract you from his upcoming bank heist!!!

What’s trust cafe?

I can’t find it now, but my company attempted to get that from Slack and IIRC it was an option but more expensive than they were willing to pay.

The girl in the passenger seat clearly has a look of “we knew this was going to happen”, too.

No worries, I may have just been unclear considering multiple people appear to have downvoted my comment.

That’s what I’m saying. It has anticheat, and it runs on Linux without issue.

I wouldn’t say “any” major games. Helldivers 2 is a notable exception.

(•_•)

That would require that it be a social media platform, as supposed to a money laundering front.

Oh whoops! 😬 I hope you get the answer you needed!

I’ll explain for you, because there’s a lot of misinformation around.

What is being called AI these days is various companies’ version of what’s called an LLM – Large Language Model. Put simply, an LLM is a very sophisticated piece of software that takes what is asked of it to determine what is statistically the most likely sequence of words to follow as an answer.

This means you can ask a question the way you’d ask a human, and the way it answers will closely mirror how a person would answer (as opposed to stuff like Google Assistant or Siri, where you need to ask a question a specific way to get a decent answer).

Note, however, that at no point did I say that an LLM is accurate. This is the fatal issue that is never included by proponents of this kind of AI. They don’t have any mechanism to retrieve information, or verify the truthfulness of the answers given. You wind up seeing a lot of answers from this kind of AI that is either partially or completely wrong.

My favorite example is the result you get when googling “african countries that start with the letter K”. Someone posted the answer they got from an LLM to a forum online, which said that there is no country, and that became the top google result…despite the fact that Kenya obviously exists and starts with the letter K.

Essentially, LLMs are really fascinating in how well they approximate human speech – but they have absolutely no intelligence behind them. Proponents of this tech as AI either ignore this, or outright lie about it. As a result, a lot of companies have started using this tech to replace their support teams and/or the search functionality of their websites. I’m sure you can imagine the negative effects this has caused.

Rocko?!

He’s my go-to for tech reviews. He’ll happily gush about what he likes, but he isn’t shy about what isn’t good.

Okay.