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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Being able to summarize and answer questions about a specific corpus of text was a use case I was excited for even knowing that LLMs can’t really answer general questions or logically reason.

    But if Google search summaries are any indication they can’t even do that. And I’m not just talking about the screenshots people post, this is my own experience with it.

    Maybe if you could run the LLM in an entirely different way such that you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that’s irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.

    Even then I’m not sure the huge computational requirements make it worth it over ctrl-f or a slightly more sophisticated search algorithm.







  • I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything

    The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job.

    This is my experience in the US as well. Also nobody knows anything about anything.

    Doctor A puts you on a medication, doctor B doesn’t know until you tell them and then he says “he put you on that!? You shouldn’t be on that, I’m taking you off it.”

    You go to have a surgery and say “hey guys, did you know that I’m difficult to intubate? Because I could die if you don’t take that into account”, they didn’t know.

    “Hey guys, I have reason to believe that the insurance card I was issued in the mail isn’t completely correct, can anyone help me with this?”, 4 different people at the company that issued the card have no idea what’s going on, don’t even know about the policy tied to the card in question and think you must have accidentally called the wrong company (you didn’t).

    “Hey guys how much is this going to cost?” it is literally impossible to say.


  • Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

    “Prepare derivative works” means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

    https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

    Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

    Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. “Entertainment” or “because I like the series and these characters” are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

    What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

    This is not how “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work” part of fair use works.

    A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

    Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn’t matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word “potential” in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

    A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said “no”. Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

    Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

    EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.












  • There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

    “We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
    -James Connolly

    How about we look forwards, instead?

    How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

    You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

    Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.