Of course you understand that people made creative things before copyright existed. You understand that that happened when the copyright term was 14 years. You understand that it happened before Warner Bros. Discovery existed.

You understand that it is possible for a company to make games without requiring a 120 year copyright term, right?

Right. Copyright is supposed to be for the good of the population. In order to encourage people to create things, they’re given a short monopoly on it after which it enters the public domain. The original copyright term was 14 years, I think.

The new setup is absurd. The public doesn’t benefit for more than a century, at which point the copyrighted item is probably of next to no value.

And, like you said, the artist rarely benefits. Writers are probably the ones who come the closest to benefitting. They only have to pay their agent a cut, their publisher, then, finally Amazon. With advances, etc. you have to wonder how much they get paid for each additional book sold. Musicians basically don’t make anything anymore, with the bullshit that Spotify (partially owned by the record companies) does. And then movies, TV, and other video stuff, the amount that creators get is massively watered down, and that’s after the “Hollywood accounting” makes profits from even successful things disappear.

I really don’t respect copyright anymore because it doesn’t benefit me (a member of the public) nor does it benefit the artist. It’s just a tool to hand money to certain entertainment conglomerates.

“give it back” means “seed to at least a ratio of 1.0”

There are a few authors and musicians who do things like that, selling things DRM-free on their own site. But, the US “content” industry is a handful of mega companies who are doing everything possible to maximize copyright so they can lock up and control as much stuff as possible.

Piracy has never been stealing.

When you steal something, the real issue is that the other person is deprived of some tangible item they used to have.

When you “pirate”, you’re merely violating a copyright. The government granted someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea, and you’re not respecting the government’s decision on that item’s exclusivity.

The stakes are always so much higher when the things that can be realistic are realistic.

It was what made the John Wick movies so good too. Sure, it’s unrealistic that there’s this man who can single-handedly take on hundreds of other trained killers and only suffer minor injuries. But, they made sure that each moment in each fight itself is as realistic as possible. Keanu Reeves trained hard on weapon handling so that everything he does looks like it’s being done by a weapons expert.

I’d love to see a gritty, realistic action movie where silencers weren’t silent, bullets didn’t make people fly backwards, fighting was visibly exhausting, punches and kicks don’t make “slap” or “crack” sounds, women were at a clear disadvantage to men, weight class really matters, handguns were hard to aim well, people had adrenaline crashes, a concussion was a serious event…

And, while we’re at it, I wish people in the movies would wash the blood off. Far too often someone gets injured and spends the rest of the movie with their face caked with blood. Even if you don’t care how you look, having blood on your skin is itchy and uncomfortable.

As far as I can remember, datacenters aren’t mentioned in the Terminator movies at all. They did have an idea of a computer system gaining sentience, but it wasn’t a word-guessing program running in a datacenter. Their idea was that it was an advanced chip that gave the computers intelligence.

The story has a fun time loop in it. A terminator went back in time to kill Sarah Connor, who was the mother of the leader of the resistance. The terminator was crushed by a hydraulic press in the Cyberdine Systems factory. This left behind a computer chip from the future. Cyberdine Systems used that to create Skynet, which became self-aware, which eventually resulted in the creation of the Terminators, one of which was sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Loop again. (Of course, that’s one of a number of origin stories for Skynet, it seems like each new movie, TV series, RPG or comic book comes up with its own story.)

Anyhow, the point being, the focus of “AI” in the series isn’t datacenters that magically become self-aware. It’s a magic computer chip that has properties allowing something to become self-aware. And, at least in one of the interpretations, it requires a time loop.

It’s ironic that the first two things you put in quotation marks are the first two things you spell wrong.

The answer is guillotines. Make the rich scared enough about losing their lives and they’ll voluntarily surrender some of their power. The trick is to scare the rich without the rest of the death and chaos that were part of the French Revolution.

The disguise was really just about being human. The cop disguise was because it was a cop who had first discovered him after the time travel, and it was a useful disguise. It worked because we knew that Arnie was the terminator, and this guy looked like a regular human. He came through the time portal “nude”, looking like a human. Until then, the only terminators we’d seen were either obviously robots, or were these massive T-800s that, even when naked, don’t really look like normal humans.

In those early scenes before we know that the T-1000 is evil and the T-800 is good, the T-1000 plausibly acts like a human sent back in time trying to locate John Connor before the T-800 does. We don’t know that he’s a terminator, but we do know he’s not a cop – we saw him steal the cop’s uniform, gun and car. When he talks to the foster parents in disguise, he shows emotion, something that the T-800 model doesn’t really do.

The only person we know to actually be a cop up until that point in the movie is the dude who goes out to investigate an “electrical disturbance” before having a run-in with the T-1000.

No, and by saying that you’re giving credence to crazy conspiracy theories instead of what actually happened.

There’s no “cabal”. There are people trying to amass power and get the government to change in ways that benefits them, but they’re hardly acting in secret. Elon Musk got up on stage and did a Nazi salute! Other people like Timothy Mellon, the Adelsons, the Uihleins, etc. are openly funding political groups. They’re so open about it that they are happy to sit for an interview and tell you exactly why the world should be the way they’re trying to make it.

In addition, there isn’t even a conspiracy. Not only are they not acting secretly in the shadows, they can’t even agree on anything but a few basics like cut taxes for the rich and lower benefits for the rest. They fight about almost everything else. The ones who own businesses that are based on intellectual property want LLMs to have to license everything they ingest. The ones who are rich from the AI grift want the opposite. The ones who are rich from fossil fuels want alternative energy slowed and banned to keep energy prices high. The ones who run AI companies want their energy to be as cheap as possible.

As for their being pedophiles, maybe some of them were or are. Many aren’t. Epstein got ultra rich by being the guy who could introduce people to other people. Most of them weren’t pedophiles, but they were willing to not look too closely at Epstein’s “girls” because he was useful to them and they didn’t want to make him an enemy.

I’m generally fine with the ultra-rich being called the Epstein class, and being connected with pedophelia. For some reason, people didn’t hate these people for merely being ultra rich and using that wealth to warp the justice system and the government. If believing they’re pedophiles changes things, well at least they hate them, even if it’s based on a silly conspiracy.

In any case, these people have always been in power. The US founding fathers were rich 20 year olds who owned a lot of land (and most of them owned slaves). In other words, the US was founded by oligarchs. They’ve been the ones with most of the power since the beginning. It’s not like there was some coup under Trump. It’s just that some of them are expressing their power more openly rather than using it behind the scenes so that the democratic system seemed more honest to the average voter.

He’s the salesman. His ability to lie convincingly is a big reason for the bubble. If it weren’t for him, the regular boom/bust cycle of AI that has happened regularly since the 1960s would have hit bust already.

Yeah, I think people go into the movies today knowing that Arnie is the “good terminator”. But, when the movie came out he was the bad guy, and there was no reason to think that the liquid metal one was the bad guy…

Robert Patrick did an amazing job of appearing to have emotions, making him seem like the good guy, only to make it clear over time that he was only mimicking emotions to blend in and accomplish his mission.

he can’t be that far off the beaten track

He just needs to be somewhere with cell phone service.

There are rural areas of the world where people still use oxen to pull their plows rather than a tractor, but these days they have cell phones.

There have been cases where chatbots were held liable for what they said.

When an Air Canada chatbot told a passenger he could get a bereavement discount on returning from a funeral instead of having to arrange it up front, the courts found that Air Canada was responsible for that advice and had to honour it, even if it wasn’t their policy.

But, good luck getting them to hold the word guessing machine companies responsible for when someone talks directly to it and blindly follows its advice. I’m sure that among the pages and pages of terms and conditions that people just ignore, there’s something in there saying that it’s just for entertainment and nothing it says should be taken seriously.

To a certain extent, people need to make responsible choices. I really hope that, in time, people realize that talking to an LLM chatbot is not ever a responsible choice.

Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.

Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.

And there is anger at being ignored

Hey now, being ignored is the Gen X identity, millennials don’t get to steal that!

But seriously, although the whole “generation names” stuff is BS, people are influenced by what things are like when they were growing up. People who had access to the Internet when they were kids are naturally going to see the world differently than those who didn’t.

It has also been a consistent fact that older voters vote more. So, as “Millennials” get older, they’ll probably vote more, like every group does.

The real question is whether those votes will matter. I’m not going to claim that there’s no difference between democrats and republicans. But, in the past the democrats and republicans that won their primaries were both heavily constrained in what they were allowed to do after taking office by powerful special interest groups. So, a democrat might be more likely to vote for something like more federal funding for the arts, and a republican might be more likely to vote for something like more tax cuts (without lowering spending of course), neither one would likely vote for an increase in the minimum wage because the people who fund their campaigns don’t want that to be considered.

This time, it could actually be different. There’s enough anger out there that people who aren’t owned by the wealthy are surviving the primary process. Some “traditional” democrats are either finding their courage, or are getting scared of what might happen to them if they don’t stand for the things their constituents care about.

Capitalism isn’t the problem, it’s wealth inequality. Do you think things were better back under the Manorialism system? No capitalism there, but the rich owned vast manors and the poor who worked their lands were born there and had to work that land for their entire lives.

All capitalism did was to give a shred of social mobility where none existed before.

Being confined to the same house as an extrovert? Yeah, that was struggling.