I mean, it would probably be better than many tattoo artist’s art. At the very least it’s not a bad way to see how something would look on you before you permanently do it.
I just saw a Twitter thread of someone calling out realtors with absolutely egregious editing examples. Think pools and landscaping being added to backyards, a background being changed to a mountainous region, and furniture being “staged” in an attic space that definitely couldn’t fit that furniture.
A realtor in the comments said they legally need to also post the same images but unedited, but I’m sure when you’re doing this the first 50 are the edited ones and the last 50 are the unedited. How many people make it to the unedited?
The vast majority of the homeless you see on the streets in the US are there no because of money trouble, but because of mental health or drug issues (or both).
People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.
Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...
I don't know why people seem to think the US has "no societal safety nets."
We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.
We really should go with a harsh Chinese solution. If you do drugs in China, you hope your dad is Jackie Chan or you are going to have a really hard life. And being caught homeless in a big city gets you a free escorted bus ticket back to the poor rural area your hukou is in, where you couldnt make it either.
The more western solutions are compassionate containment like in Finland.
America cant make up its mind if it wants to be like China or Finland.
I think the reason why it shouldn't be claimed as a moral good is pretty obvious - authors deserve to get paid for their work. I certainly can't claim I stand on a bedrock of morality as I've used it from time to time, but even though I don't have the money that a lot of HN commenters do I make sure to not use it for small-time authors. Even really successful authors I'll only use it about 50% of the time.
If you want information to be free? Great. But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.
> But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.
My understanding is that the number of authors that can make a full-time job of writing is a rounding error compared to the population of authors. I believe that people should be paid for their work, but I don't think the current copyright regime is actually very effective at paying authors for their work. So I value copyright enforcement proportionately less based on that observation.
Meanwhile, on the flip side of the coin, copyright rulings are causing companies like Atheropic to destroy books as they scan them, creating a rising sense of panic around knowledge scarcity. This panic is a direct result of the scarcity of the copyright intended to create in the first place. It's entirely artificial.
I've been saying this for 25 years, but copyright is essentially broken.
Personally I would say copyright should last somewhere less than 10 years. On the basis that business decisions about whether to fund a book/film/whatever today isn't based on earnings 10 years from now.
So I would say it is morally acceptable to download stuff older than that. Torrents offer brand new things, so I wouldn't say they are morally good. I don't think they're morally worse than those locking up old media though.
Information itself should be free, authors deserve the right to monetise other ways (merch, physical media, exhibitions/shows, etc.) but society should pay artists and creators to do their thing[0]
Not everything needs to be a business, and I think art is one of those things
[0] I don't know much about it but maybe Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a model. I think some other European countries do similar-ish things, too
I’m sorry, but if I’m giving someone who is - at best - an acquaintance of mine $50 a month out of the goodness of my heart and then one day decide to stop, that’s not a broken promise. If that acquaintance got angry at me about stopping I’d get pretty upset back.
I really don’t understand what link you think there is between USAID spending being cut and inflation. Gas prices are obviously Iran. Everything else started years ago.
Inflation is high because interest rates are high. Interest rates are high because top holders of US Treasury bonds like Japan, UK, China, are all dumping bonds. Why do you think they're doing that?
My jimmies are hard to rustle. I'm fortunate that I have flexible hours, and can leave work if I need to visit a clinic. If either of my adult kids gets sick, they start making calls to find someone who can take their shift. So I suspect it boils down to individual or family circumstances.
For those that have never looked it up, the median RN salary in the US is about $100k a year. Germany and the UK are more like $60k.
It’s funny, because it’s a career that feels both overpaid and underpaid to me. I went to a college where almost half of the students were going for nursing - and you certainly don’t need to be especially intelligent.
At least to an outsider, some nursing fields seem damned easy. The nurse that sees me before my GP? Pretty easy job.
Other specialties? Like the nurses that needed to clean up my wife after she massively bled during/after a c-section and they had to give her medications that also caused all sorts of other fluids to intermingle with the blood? Or the nurses that had to stand there for 10 minutes squeezing our infant daughter’s heel in the NICU to try to get enough blood out while she screamed as hard as a little baby can?
$100k doesn’t seem like enough. Odd occupation. For $60k I’d rather work at Costco, that’s for certain.
Sure, but shouldn’t the programs to run the LLMs go “the user has this much vram and the model is this size, so I’ll start with sensible defaults based on that”?
There are plenty of places without zoning issues that have that same housing problems.
More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.
That's why you'll find in old economics textbooks that it's up to the government to fix these issues, by hiring and raising compensation for (all) their employees. This then forces other employers to raise compensation as well and so makes housing affordable again.
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