To expound on this, AI models are extremely narrow in scope. One which reproduces audio it is trained on is entirely different from one that understands what is being said. As Mr. Turkalino mentioned, the transcription AIs are built on a combination of speech recognition and incredibly specialized text data that is narrowly defined by your industry (medical in this case). In fact, they may have tuned specific models for separate disciplines. This included thousands of documents ranging from textbooks to scholarly journals along with thousands of recordings of professionals saying the words in a variety of accents and dialects so it can understand the difference between very important and very different sounding words, my wife is pregnant, so amnioitis and amniocentesis come to mind. They are close enough sounding that a general model might mistake them, and that being transcribed wrong could spell real problems when others may look at the patients chart if there are complications.

Also, most models are run in the cloud because the calculations can he very taxing. I run Stable Diffusion and other AIs locally on my beast of a machine and it struggles at times. Realistically, the cloud machines are just bugger than you can get as a desktop. Also, under the most ideal circumstances, the audio of your notes does not live in the servers, it is transmitted, stored on a virtual machine (VM) while it is being processed, then after the results are completed the VM is destroyed and the audio recording goes with it. Nothing is kept. Of course, that is where you need to be sure to do the work, making sure that your situation is “ideal”. One of the biggest controversies in with AI right now is that data is being stored for doing reinforcement training on the AI models. Example, you send your recordings and the AI returns the transcript. You mark any corrections and go on with your day. The company takes those recordings and feeds them back into the general model with the corrections you made and tries to tell the AI what it got wrong. You are going to want to be sure that you are allowed to opt-out of your data being allowed to be used as training data (beyond the fine-tuning to help it learn your voice).

I know, is sad. Would love to see them converting the JPG to PNG. I do see a lot of images coming off here as GIF though, which Facebook doesn’t let me send to people because fuck Facebook.

Point of order, gaming companies have been pulling this shit since before digital sales. The first time I encountered it was a developer suing a homeowner for selling a game at a garage sale that had the EULA/TOS clauses that it was a license, not an ownership. I was dumbfounded because I had always believed that personal property law trumped copyright, but this was not the case. I have actually heard some old stories about book publishers trying to pull the same shit, but I think ownership did win in those cases.

Because crypto is a joke and NFTs are vaporware. The concept is honestly laughable. Perfect example for NFTs, my company wanted to advertise that our service could help with the production of NFTs and my boss had put together the ad for it. I advised against it considering the BS and controversy associated with it. It became doubly apparent when I looked at the ad and saw that he had included several of the (in)famous NFTs that had been sold. I point blankly asked him if he had gotten permission to use them. He said no. Then I pointed out that the fact he was able to put them in the ad without asking and paying for the right to to the person who had spent millions on the NFT was exactly my point. NFTs are a scam. Thankfully he saw the light and dropped the whole nonsense.

As for the blockchain in general, it is unsustainable. It requires enormous amounts of power and computing cycles to maintain which gives it a massive eco-footprint and sucks resources needed by actual industries and individuals to support. If you started attributing it to all digital purchases, including resales, it would expand exponentially. It is fine in concept, and if it could function in a passive state somehow it might see usefulness as a purchase and resale history for digital media, but it can’t. It requires many computers maintaining identical records in active communication with each other.

Just a small point on the first comment (and I wish I could find the article to refer to, but the internet is a giant void that buries things faster than a mudslide). There was a case where a game developer sued, and I believe won, against a homeowner who was selling one of their games at a garage sale because, even though they had the physical media, the EULA explicitly revoked transferral of possession and was, in fact, just a license, not ownership. I remember it vividly because it was the first time I had ever heard of someone claiming that someone did not own a physical object that they purchased in a store. Afterward, I discussed it with some of the used game retailers and found out that there were some games that they were specifically prohibited from accepting as trades for this very reason.

Since when, you can do a perfect rip of a CD and burn an exact image of the disk loslessly thousands of times. Same for DVD and Blu-rays. If you are talking about a physical book, then yes, making lossless copies is more involved, but still technically possible with the proper equipment and knowledge.

Eh, technically it is only criminal if he distributed it. US (and I think international) copyright laws has provisions for “personal backups” of media you have purchased. There is nothing illegal about ripping a copy of a CD to your computer or burning an image of a game disc, only if you allow the copy to leave your personal possession. It is so you can keep a copy in a fireproof safe and not lose access to your property in the event of a disaster.

Not that you needed to be told and I get the sarcasm; I am just a habitual pedant and felt the need to utilize the opportunity for a PSA.

This is why you use PNG or GIF formats. Lossless compression on the PNG side and a LUT on the GIF side. Nothing to get compressed since it is literally just a grid of numbers and a table with the hex codes.

I really wish the social media companies and phone manufacturers would switch to PNG. So much better than JPG.

Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn’t use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don’t have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.