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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general

    That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing.

    For example, “Marey” is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically.

    Another is Adobe Firefly, where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar.

    StabilityAI is also doing something similar with Stable Audio 2.0, where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc…

    I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least.

    One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry.

    Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this.

    I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits.

    I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.



  • Depends on your e-reader! If you have a Kindle, Kobo, or Nook, yes, that’s true. However:

    Boox has e-readers that run Android and you can install Hoopla. The Palma 2 is phone sized which is great. The Page, Leaf2, and Go 7 are all in the 7” form factor, plus they have 6” versions. And they have tablet sizes, too. They have both traditional black&white and color e-ink displays.

    I have the Boox Air 3C and the original Palma and both are great. I’ll likely get a Boox as my next standard sized e-reader, too (whenever I replace my Kindle Oasis). Though unless the technology drastically improves before then, it’ll be one with a black and white screen. (The color is nice in the tablet sizes, though, especially for comics from Hoopla.)

    Some other options that I’m less familiar with include:

    • Bigme has Android 7” color e-readers, as well as tablets and e-ink smartphones.
    • Meebook has e-readers that run Android (and Android e-ink tablets)
    • The MuSnap Aura C is a 10” Android e-ink tablet
    • XPPen has an 11” Android e-ink tablet


  • Copyright applies to unfinished works, too. There are many reasons it might not protect an unfinished work, but those reasons are still relevant even for finished works.

    If someone steals your physical drawing, that’s theft. If they take a picture of it, then use the picture - or your picture + modifications - without your permission, particularly in a commercial work, then that’s copyright infringement, but not theft. If they steal your physical drawing and then take a picture and so on, then it’s both theft and copyright infringement.

    Most likely this wasn’t considered copyright infringement because the allegedly copied art isn’t copyrightable, e.g., game mechanics; or the plaintiff didn’t own the copyrights themselves and thus couldn’t sue (possibly the arts were still copyrighted by the original artists, having never been purchased; possibly they were stock assets that were re-purchased by the defendant). There are any number of reasons. However, “the work wasn’t published” isn’t one of them.

    On the other hand, it’s quite likely they were able to sue for theft of trade secrets for that very reason. And they might have chosen to do that simply because proving copyright infringement is much more difficult.








  • Your comment wasn’t in a meta discussion; it was on a post where they were venting about people complaining about them having a women’s only space. There was certainly no indication that the regular community rules didn’t apply, nor any invitation for men to comment.

    Commenting that it’s hostile for them to have a women’s only space might be ironic, but couldn’t possibly be good faith, in that context. And if the same mod banned you from multiple communities, then either it was out of line and you could appeal it, or it was warranted due to the perceived likelihood of you causing problems in those other communities and the perceived low likelihood of you contributing anything of value to them.

    Even now, you’re acting like the mod(s) banned you because of her / their emotions. You don’t see how that’s misogynistic?

    It makes logical sense for bad actors to be preemptively banned. Emotions have nothing to do with it.


  • I think the best way to handle this would be to just encode everything and upload all files. If I wanted some amount of history, I’d use some file system with automatic snapshots, like ZFS.

    If I wanted to do what you’ve outlined, I would probably use rclone with filtering for the extension types or something along those lines.

    If I wanted to do this with Git specifically, though, this is what I would try first:

    First, add lossless extensions (*.flac, *.wav) to my repo’s .gitignore

    Second, schedule a job on my local machine that:

    1. Watches for changes to the local file system (e.g., with inotifywait or fswatch)
    2. For any new lossless files, if there isn’t already an accompanying lossy files (i.e., identified by being collocated, having the exact same filename, sans extension, with an accepted extension, e.g., .mp3, .ogg - possibly also with a confirmation that the codec is up to my standards with a call to ffprobe, avprobe, mediainfo, exiftool, or something similar), it encodes the file to your preferred lossy format.
    3. Use git status --porcelain to if there have been any changes.
    4. If so, run git add --all && git commit --message "Automatic commit" && git push
    5. Optionally, automatically craft a better commit message by checking which files have been changed, generating text like Added album: "Satin Panthers - EP" by Hudson Mohawke or Removed album: "Brat" by Charli XCX; Added album "Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not" by Charli XCX

    Third, schedule a job on my remote machine server that runs git pull at regular intervals.

    One issue with this approach is that if you delete a file (as opposed to moving it), the space is not recovered on your local or your server. If space on your server is a concern, you could work around that by running something like the answer here (adjusting the depth to an appropriate amount for your use case):

    git fetch --depth=1
    git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now --all
    git gc --aggressive --prune=all
    

    Another potential issue is that what I described above involves having an intermediary git to push to and pull from, e.g., running on a hosted Git forge, like GitHub, Codeberg, etc… This could result in getting copyright complaints or something along those lines, though.

    Alternatively, you could use your server as the git server (or check out forgejo if you want a Git forge as well), but then you can’t use the above trick to prune file history and save space from deleted files (on the server, at least - you could on your local, I think). If you then check out your working copy in a way such that Git can use hard links, you should at least be able to avoid needing to store two copies on your server.

    The other thing to check out, if you take this approach, is git lfs. EDIT: Actually, I take that back - you probably don’t want to use Git LFS.