Music labels sue AI music generators for copyright infringement

I"ll leave it with these thoughts from a former Ars staffer, whose essay that spawned the name of his web site has shaped my thinking on mimicry vs artistry. Which, should be mentioned, I originally encountered here on Ars.

It's a good set of arguments. I can find no fault in it.

Yet gripping hand remains that the technology is here. It will not be regulated or put back into a bottle easily, or at all.
Thus we need to change the way our society works in order to make sure that humans are still incentivized to create art.

And that's something we need to do quickly, because what I keep saying is that artists being out of a job due to LLM's isn't the end result or goal of those currently investing enormous amounts of resources into the development of functional LLM's.
Picture Amazon with but a single employee in every warehouse dealing with the ever rarer algorithm conflicts of the automated robotics. Skyscrapers on Wall Street where only a single employee exists on every floor. The call center 'manned' by only a single person dealing with complaints escalated beyond the capacity of machines to handle.

The core premise of LLM's is that they promise to replace humanity in as may job types as is possible in general. The holy grail sought for so long by every corporation in the world. The abolition of the need for employees.

It won't just be the artists out of a job. Once the first LLM proves capable of completely replacing customer service, ten years later not a single job in CS will exist. Same as with the vast majority of white and blue collar work alike.

What then? Our near future may be one where the majority of the population lives off a sort of 'citizen's salary' and the upper crust alone holds down some sort of job. In the best of all possible worlds this should be the first step towards the post-scarcity society of Star Trek where every human focuses on self-improvement.
I'm sure that we non-fictional people will somehow manage to fuck ourselves into an even grimmer dystopia instead.
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Elden Ring: FromSoftware’s Latest Game (also George R. R. Martin)

I don't have a steam deck but keep in mind that you can't pause the game. I'm not sure how well suspension would work unless you are resting at a site of grace or at least exit to the main menu

Just a PSA: in spite of From games looking like they don't have a save game function, they actually do save the current state when you exit the game. So you can stop playing at any time.

They just reset everything when you die, not when you exit because rl calls.

The 2025 Polestar 4: Great steering and a small carbon footprint stand out

The Polestar 4 isn't quite that heavy—5,192 lbs (2,355 kg)—so it forgoes air suspension in favor of conventional coil springs and dampers.
Not that heavy? Since when has a more than two ton passenger car been considered "not quite that heavy"? A small carbon foot print is kind of a misnomer when considering externalities like road and tire wear.
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The new Riven remake is even better than Myst

I also loved The Witness and The Talos Principle so very much, and have been terribly disappointed that the sequel to Talos doesn’t run natively on my Mac (even a Mac Studio M3), and won’t even run under VMware as it requires far too advanced a version of DirectX.
Damn, really? I loved TTP.
I know it's not native but have you tried running The Talos Principle 2 in Whisky?

Another way to run TTP2 ‘natively’ on Mac is via GeForce Now. It’s one of the games they support. I have GFN and quite like it. At the highest level it’s like equipping all my Mac / iOS devices with a RTX 4080. I can say TTP2 runs smooth as butter on my 4K screen & on my macbook.

Overall annual cost is cheaper than upgrading my Mac, or keeping a spare Windows machine with a high-end GPU. Also it abstracts away many of the ‘fiddling’ that comes with Windows, OS upgrades etc.

Works best with Ethernet from computer to a fibre optic feed, but WiFi to cable or ADSL also works adequately, just with a bit more latency. But for a game like TTP latency isn’t an issue.

You can test it for free for an hour or buy a day / month pass. Note it works with games you have already purchased, in your Stream or Epic etc library. Most - but far from all - popular games are supported.
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An ultra-athlete goes head-to-head with the world’s most formidable sharks

Am I the only one feeling let down by the fact he's not literally going head to head with the sharks?

Let's see how high he can jump with a great white chasing him.
Can he out-swim a mako in the open ocean while smeared with shark-attractant?
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Nature interrupted: Impact of the US-Mexico border wall on wildlife

It is hard to believe an Ars reader could be so uninformed. There has been plenty of consensus and action on border issues. Just this year, Senators from both sides of the aisle hammered out a very extensive proposal. It had wide support until Trump made a phone call and killed it for what he freely admits were purely political reasons. The only real difference of opinion comes from the extreme right-wing. Most people in any political party in the US are for strong control over illegal immigration. It is just that Trump and the far right hate all immigrants, legal or not. Notice he just says "immigrant" now in his tirades, he does not even bother with the word "illegal" anymore.
I look forward to a brighter future where the Simpsons episode Much Apu About Nothing becomes an interesting historical footnote in pop culture studies rather than a poignant and timely commentary.
"Immigants, I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!"
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Nature interrupted: Impact of the US-Mexico border wall on wildlife

Interesting to see all the downvotes. This is exactly why there has not been any consensus and action on immigration.

However, we’re now at a level where the costs are too high for some. How many are some? We’ll find out in November.
It is hard to believe an Ars reader could be so uninformed. There has been plenty of consensus and action on border issues. Just this year, Senators from both sides of the aisle hammered out a very extensive proposal. It had wide support until Trump made a phone call and killed it for what he freely admits were purely political reasons. The only real difference of opinion comes from the extreme right-wing. Most people in any political party in the US are for strong control over illegal immigration. It is just that Trump and the far right hate all immigrants, legal or not. Notice he just says "immigrant" now in his tirades, he does not even bother with the word "illegal" anymore.
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The Fall of a Republic? Perpetual French Political thread

Bardella has Italian and Algerian ancestry. I guess he thinks that he’s white-passing enough. Rational thought isn’t a strong suit for these people.
It's totally rational to think that whiteness is a skin color and not some legalese thing tied to nationality or whatever. "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time". RN politicians and electors say they don't like Arabs/muslims and (too much) colored people. It's really simple, listen to what they say. They act perfectly accordingly.

What would the perfect programming language look like?

So when the IF on line 1860 evaluates to true, everything from THEN to end of line is executed. So you need that GOTO to skip over line 1870 that handles the ELSE situation.
I grew up with BBC BASIC, which had IF, THEN and ELSE; as well as named functions and 'procedures'. It entirely avoided the use of GOSUB and GOTO <line number>. It also had REPEAT .. UNTIL. Later version had WHILE.

Nature interrupted: Impact of the US-Mexico border wall on wildlife

I really like Mexico's new President. Being a scientist, I would imagine she can understand the danger of letting another country wall off your water supply to the north. Would be nice to see Mexico sue for what is being done. Can they even do it? Outside pressure is the only thing likely to make anyone inside the US look at the problem.
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Apple’s 24-page defense of its repair strategy also contains some policy changes

From your post history I see you’ve been drinking Rossman’s Kool-Aid for a long time. I’m not sure how I can get across to you that his interests are not your interests.
Erm... Simple. Like with any other subject. Facts, Sound reasoning, Concise arguments regarding the case. But instead of doing that, you try to frame my post history as evidence of me being partial... You know what? That's a fun exercise! Let's do it! Over the last 10 years I averaged 16.3 comments a year- so there is not really much to go over. But among those few comment, I referenced Rossman... One Time in a single thread... That's it. Even that thread was about parts serialisation.

Oh crap I forgot. I did reference the CBC piece about Apple repairability with Jessa Jones. That basically said the same thing as Rossman. So I drank two Kool-Aid apparently.
Think of how Epic said they were doing it for the small devs, when actually they were just doing it for themselves.
This is again nothing substantive, just whataboutism. To answer your point Epic is not a company I like very much and they are just as self-centred as any company. But regardless of that, (at least in my opinion) their actions directly induced legalisation like the european "Digital Markets Act". Now you can argue whether it is a good thing or not. But it is a fact that Apple and others did create an imbalance in the market that legislators assessed as substantive enough to make a law for it.
Rossman cares nothing about anything except the money in his pocket.
Sigh... You do realise that for years and years there was no monetisation on his channel? And he himself openly advocates to his viewers to use ad-block freely on his videos. Quite the personal and corporate greed there...
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Mac info-stealer malware distributed through Google ads

If that's true for every user on any shared macs you have, then you are giving every user admin rights, which is a sub-optimal use of having user accounts at all.
Not so.

If you are logged into an admin account and you're doing admin-type things, macOS will ask for your password to allow it to proceed. The main exception, from memory, is dragging and dropping an application into the system-wide Applications folder (but running a package installer requires the password.)

If you are logged into a non admin account and you're doing admin-type things, macOS will ask for an admin username and password to allow it to proceed. This includes dragging and dropping an application into the system-wide Applications folder. You can still do the thing - but only if you know an admin username and the password that goes with it. If you've been set up as a regular user and don't have an admin username/password combo, you can't do admin-type things.

The latter setup - being logged into a non admin account - is how I run my Mac Studio, and how I ran my Mac Pro before it was retired (it's still sitting there, but it's not been powered on in quite some time.) The admin account is there, and I can use the username and password when admin credentials are needed, but my main account has no rights to do admin-type stuff on its own. I have a few family members who also have logins to my Mac Studio, but they don't know the admin username or password, so they can't alter the administrative-level stuff.
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“Corporate rip-off:” White House slams Big Pharma’s drug price reform attacks

I dunno, fam. Even if you're right, I don't think "Won't someone think of the shareholders?" is gonna fly really well in this thread.

As I keep saying, the most generally prosperous era in the US - the golden age where a single breadwinner could support an entire family and the middle class was the major part of the population - was under FDR, in a system where unionization was ubiquitous, social services and living minimum wages were a thing, and taxes could reach 90% for the highest income brackets for both people and corporations.

The current dystopia has grown concomitant to the rate at which these fairly socialist mechanisms were dismantled.
Capital will still be invested at maximum rates if the roi is 2:1 rather than 20:1, and the nation as a whole will be much healthier when the purpose of the currency and economy is that of production rather than ending up in Scrooge McDuck's money vault.
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Microdosing candies linked to seizures, intubation finally recalled

As the article notes, previous COAs showed undetectable levels of muscimol. If those COAs were from CLIA-certfied labs, they're accurate or those labs are in deeper shit than any mushroom could dream of: CLIA is overseen by CMS, and if the Jaws theme isn't playing in your head at that acronym, then you don't work in medicine.

So I'm going to take the word of CLIA-certified lab COAs and whatever government lab found 4-Aco-DMT in these candies, over the word of executives desperate for a regulatory violation because the CSA is one of the few criminal laws less friendly to defendants than regulatory law.
the issue is the lack of regulation of supplements. there is no real information how often products were tested, how they were sampled etc. for what we know they might have been tested once, or multiple times until the results were satisfactory... so all that was done seem to be mostly voluntary tests by the brand company.
on the other hand i spotted typos (fortunately inconsequential ones) in the reports and i'm not a trained chemist so the quality of the data might not be great too.
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2.5 Gb managed switch, worth it?

Thanks for this. What’s your drive config for that NAS? I’m running 2x4TB and 2x8TB HDDs with btrfs, 1 disk redundancy etc. and I think even getting 1Gb out of it is pushing it. The SoC just isn’t that strong.

I’m sure it’s great with SSDs and/or striping though.
It's a Synology DS218+, with "8 TB" Seagate drives in both bays in a mirroring configuration. Note that the drives are pretty close to full, with around 400 GB free space.

I did some more testing. It looks like using the cp command in the terminal (handy because then I can put "time" in front of it so no manual stopwatching) is somewhat slower than using the Finder to copy files.

At 1 Gbps I could get a pretty consistent 110 MB/sec (fake 10^6 MBs, not real 2^20 ones, but at least so far nobody has redefined the second...). That's close to the theoretical max, which is something like 117. But at 2.5 Gbps the write speed to the NAS initially starts well over 200 MB/sec (data going into the cache?) but then things slow down and I get an inconsistent 100 - 200 MB/sec. Like so:

Screenshot 2024-07-01 at 10.48.16.png

This shows the data read from the local SSD, but the network traffic looks the same.

Interestingly, files that got on the NAS through BitTorrent are slower and the drives rattle more than "normal" files written start to finish. As BitTorrent tends to download parts of files in random order, I guess those files end up on the drives fragmented.

I also did a test with a USB HDD to/from my Mac and that gave me about 120 MB/sec. So assuming those 3.5" Seagates are about the same speed as this 2.5" drive and good parallel reading of data, it should be possible to get well over 200 MB/sec, right?

“Corporate rip-off:” White House slams Big Pharma’s drug price reform attacks

Side question: can you point me to data on this? Not doubting you, but would be interested to see. I'd assume that the numbers are roughly equivalent to US firms.

For the drug price discrepancy? That's easy enough to establish and you don't need me to point you towards an over-the-counter or prescription cost comparison.

As to the audit results? No, for the same reason that we can not know the exact breakdowns of R&D expenses in the US. An audit of this kind is closed and the information handed over to authorities such as national statistics centres and similar are under strict secrecy/confidentiality. What comes out of it, however, is aggregated information which once again points to a self-evident conclusion.

There have been think tanks who have gone through the data in Sweden at least. The conclusion is that much of national pharma is outsourced to universities and the "R&D investments" show up as grants to university researchers who perform the bulk of the core research.
Leading to a whole mess of concerns, most of which would be centered around to which extent partially tax funded research is handed over, in the form of patents, to pharma companies to develop further.

To address an elephant in the room of your statements above, however;

My theory is that the US is subsidizing the world by paying outrageous amounts. In other words if everyone paid that much, the companies couldn't do as much R&D. Maybe we'll see but I'm sick of the high prices here.

That's an assertion incredibly hyped and pushed by the pharma lobby. It's a talking point which has no backing what so ever.
And this is also self-evident bullshit.
Pharma companies don't have to do business outside of the US. If the european price controls/negotiations are a net loss, why do the pharma companies keep selling to those places? No one has a gun to the head of Pfizer telling them they need to sell medicine to the EU at a net loss - and in fact, the CEO would in such a case be forced to cut that market off.

I.e. your theory is disproven by the simplest nonpartisan logic. It's a lie which assumes that pharma companies are willing to eat a massive net loss in several markets. A lie told so often it's become normalized even among those who ought to know better.

The US isn't subsidizing anything of the sort, because if any company eats a net loss in a market then they leave that market. That's how basic capitalism works. It is, however, very much in the interest of pharma companies to push a narrative so twisted it resembles what Big Tobacco used to say about the "Benefits of smoking".

Finally, about R&D...did you know that a substantial competitor to Big Pharma in the area of vaccines and cheap cures used to be third world countries such as Cuba? Biology research tends not to consume vast sums. Compared to NASA and other forms of research demanding precision tooling and high-rarity materials, bio-research is incredibly cheap. Hell, Cuba actually did build a Covid vaccine which, even if not quite as effective as that of the mainline labels, did save massive amounts of lives. And they produced that on publicly available research and a shoestring budget.

The entire premise that you need enormous sums of money to perform biological R&D is a falsehood in the first place. Again proven by the most basic logic of looking at similar results being produced by comparative ramshackle operations outside of the US.

So why is R&D considered such a vast expense post specifically in the US? My own personal theory is that pharma wants to keep that number as high as possible and has, similar to Hollywood accounting, a massive shell game going to circulate "R&D" money internally until they're either funnelled straight back into the company while still presenting a nominal "cost" to be presented to the IRS - or in the acquisition of assets which serve dual use (a research center doubling as a dormitory for staff, or including offices for legal and finance, for example).
We'll never know what exactly is done with the money unless an audit is somehow leaked, but we can still look at comparative research having been made by outfits a lot smaller which still produce sufficient results to be competitive and know that there's something fundamentally wrong with the numbers presented on the spreadsheet.

Your fundamental premises are wrong. This renders a lot of your argumentation invalid.

Finally to address this bit;

But as a principal, capital has to be attracted based on a risk/return proposition. I don't know where or how to draw the line for profits vs. incentives.

That calculation has been performed a great many times - in fact, there was a time when the US was the frontrunner of price capping and regulation. I advise you look at what is today called a golden era of the US - postwar america, under FDR. Taxes were at 90% at the highest bracket. Social services, minimum wage, unionization...all at the peak. As was the booming economy.

As those - by any reckoning, incredibly socialist - measures were gradually dismantled the result became one of wealth concentration. Leading, in the end, to the dystopian shitpit you're in now where the average american, even the erudite one, takes for granted that you need to bribe the already wealthy with the guarantee of outrageous roi's unless they threaten to take their money and leave.
And what led y'all to this point was the tacit assumption that billionaires, banks and hedge fund managers being allowed to plunder the public purse unhindered is the only way you can gain prosperity. It's not, as your own past proves conclusively.

If you tell every investor they get to look at a 2:1 or 3:1 roi instead of a 10:1 or 20:1, do you think they'll stop investing? Stop making money even if the money earned is less?
Other investors will. The market should apply in the investment sector as well - yet it doesn't, right now.
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The Fall of a Republic? Perpetual French Political thread

Classic divide and conquer strategy. Allow the far-right to get their foot in the door, which terrifies the far-left toward the centre. The centre must hold. Scary purple surge on the right….

View attachment 84328

Piketty predicted these shifts (that voters would be increasingly attracted to political extremes with support collapsing for the centrist middle).

Looking like Hari Seldon right now.

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