The one that is easier to develop for will likely get more features which leads to more users.

Not necessarily. It might get more developers at first when people think it’s going to be the Next Big Thing ™, but if nobody uses it, the devs might not feel their effort is worth it and might move on.

Why wouldn’t people use it, despite it having “more features”? Because social media is mostly driven by network effects. People go where other people go. All the people there create content which gives people a reason to go there. In the distant past, Facebook only grew because it was so easy to move from MySpace. And, it was easy to move from Friendster to MySpace, and so-on back to the origins of social media. Since then, the walls of the walled gardens have become much higher. Every social media company actively makes it difficult to move to other platforms because they want to keep any users they have. You might hate Facebook, but you like Aunt Jane, and she’s only on Facebook, so you stay on Facebook.

That’s like saying “Watch my new TV show, it’s better than the other shows because our scripts are printed on an Epson printer!”

It just feels disrespectful to contradict someone we don’t know about the reason she acts the way she does

Sure, if you have no other information, but we have other information. We know how much YouTubers obsess about their videos, and the ones that don’t are the ones who aren’t getting viral videos. We know how they pay attention to every aspect of their videos, from the titles to the thumbnails, to everything else. We also know that YouTube provides all kinds of tools to allow creators to see what part of their videos are most watched, etc. They also provide all kinds of information about who your audience is, including age and gender.

In Naomi Wu’s case, even without that analytics information, we know that one of her most popular videos is “See My Boob😜”, and if you open a typical video and look for the most replayed segments, it’s often a part of the video where she’s showing off the underside of her boobs for a second, or something.

So, it’s reasonable to assume that she’s aware of what her overwhelmingly male audience pays attention to in her videos. And it’s reasonable to assume that it plays a significant role in the decisions she makes. But, it seems to me that her explanation video tries to pretend that appealing to horny male viewers isn’t part of her goal at all. I believe her when she says that she’s into girls, and that her clothing choices are based on appearing feminine, and appealing to girls. But, I don’t believe that appealing to a male YouTube audience isn’t also part of the calculation.

the imagery of hyper masculine leather daddies

The point is, while they might dress up like that when going to a club, or while getting intimate with partners, they don’t tend to do that at their day jobs. And, if they did and their day job was presenting YouTube science / maker videos, I wouldn’t want to share their videos either.

She’s obviously free to do whatever she wants. Well… let me rephrase that. This article is about how she’s in China and has disappeared, so she’s obviously not free to do whatever she wants. But, as long as she’s within the margins of what’s acceptable on YouTube, she’s allowed to dress how she wants in her videos. Having said that, apparently she’s had videos demonetized for sexual content before. My point is just that as a potential consumer of her videos, I’d be more likely to watch and share them if what she wore wouldn’t result in HR violations in even the most freewheeling of tech startups.

It really doesn’t matter what her reasons for doing it are. Maybe it’s because she’s incredibly insecure about being seen as a boy. Maybe it’s because she’s a lesbian and part of a subculture that emphasizes a ridiculous take on the feminine form. Maybe she’s doing it because it attracts horny male viewers. It’s probably a mix of all those things, even if she doesn’t admit it. I wouldn’t want her kicked off YouTube, and don’t even think it’s reasonable to demonetize her content. But, personally, I’ll be watching and sharing other channels.

I watched the video, it’s unconvincing. I don’t think she’s lying per se, just that her justification for doing all her videos wearing skimpy clothing is pretty thin. She says she’s doing it because she’s a “dee”, but in the videos she shows, she’s the only one who looks remotely like that. She shows herself walking her dog in fairly normal clothing, but claims she can’t do that on her videos. She thinks that unless she’s wearing absolutely skimpy clothing that someone’s going to mistake her for a boy. Sure…

Yes and?

She really doesn’t. She claims that because she’s a “dee” she has to look like that, but in her videos with other “dees”, she’s the only one who looks remotely like that.

That might explain the ridiculous boobs, but not why she still chooses to wear incredibly skimpy outfits in her videos.

The theory is that you can get away with a bit more in China if you have a big western audience. She had a fairly big one and that was protecting her, but the audience is fickle (made more fickle by Musk ruining Twitter) and once her audience declined, she lost that protection.

I guess the real lesson is that if you’re Chinese and develop a Western audience, us that to escape China. Don’t stay behind in China because your big audience is painting a target on your back, and eventually the Chinese authorities are going to ruin your life.

As an aside, did anybody else find her vibe really offputting? I liked her content, but her enormous fake boobs and skimpy outfits were a distraction from otherwise interesting content. If I found a video of hers interesting, it made me not want to share that with anybody because they’d think I was watching it because of her body. I’m all for women’s empowerment, if someone wants to look and feel sexy that’s great. But, with her stuff, it was so extreme that it felt like exploitation. Maybe she was exploiting herself, but it still felt icky.

Yeah, it’s a bit confusing that the National Bank of Canada is not the national bank of Canada which is just the Bank of Canada.

The key graph to me, showing just how bad the housing situation is

For people who aren’t reading the article:

She was convicted, in absentia, of a crime in Russia. The crime related to the war special military operation in Ukraine. The law made it stops “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

Canada, quite reasonably, has rules that you don’t automatically / easily get citizenship if you have a criminal record in another country. But, it’s based on whether the thing you did would be a crime in Canada. So, if an immigrant from Sri Lanka has a conviction for taking a selfie with the Buddha, it doesn’t count because that law doesn’t exist in Canada.

What gets tricky is that Canada does have a law that prevents “wilfully [publishing] a statement, tale or news that [the person] knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief”. So, if you pretend that the legal system in Russia is fair, then what she did would be a crime in Canada.

I don’t know how they can reasonably handle this except on a case-by-case basis. Of course someone publishing an anti-war blog entry and getting convicted for it should not have that count against them when trying to get Canadian citizenship. But, a conviction for assault should be a blocker. OTOH, what if the “assault” is a trumped-up charge that the police used when arresting anti-war protesters?

So if a computer synthesizing Shakespeare is stealing

Copyright infringement is never stealing. But, as to whether it’s infringing copyright, the difference is that current laws were designed based on human capabilities. If memorizing hundreds of books word for word was a typical human ability, copyright would probably look very different. Instead, normal humans are only capable of memorizing short passages, but they’re capable of spotting patterns, understanding rhythms, and so-on.

The human brain contains something like 100 billion neurons, and many of them are dedicated to things like hearing, seeing, eating, walking, sex, etc. Only a tiny fraction are available for a task like learning to write like Shakespeare or Stephen King. GPT-4 contains about 2 trillion parameters, and every one of them is dedicated to “writing”. So, we have to think differently about whether what it’s storing is “fair” when it comes to infringing someone’s copyright.

Personally, I think copyright is currently more harmful than helpful, so I like that LLMs are challenging the system. OTOH, I can understand how it’s upsetting for an artist or a writer to see that SALAMI can reproduce their stuff almost exactly, or produce something in their style so well that it effectively makes them obsolete.

One could imagine a computer “thinking” of things the same “way” that we do.

One can imagine it, but that’s been the impossible nut to crack ever since the first computers. People were saying that artificial intelligence (what we now want to call AGI instead) was 5 years away since the 1970s, if not earlier.

The new generative systems seem intelligent, but they’re just really good at predicting the next word. There’s no consciousness there. As good as LLMs are, they can’t plan for the future. They don’t have goals.

The only interesting twist here is that consciousness / free will might not really exist, at least not in the form most people think of it. So, maybe LLMs are closer to being “thinking” computers not because they’re getting closer to consciousness / free will, but because we’re starting to realize free will was an illusion all along.

Generative AI is based on “predicting” and generating the next token. Tune it one way and it will regurgitate its training data exactly. Tune it the other way and the words it comes up with are nonsense. Tune it just right and it comes up with something that seems creative.

The problem is that the training data is always in there somewhere. It can’t generate something in the style of Shakespeare without containing Shakespeare as reference. That’s probably fine for Shakespeare which is out of copyright, but if it contains say Stephen King’s entire collected works, that’s another issue.

If a human writer read all of Stephen King’s books then tried to write in the style of King, that would be OK, but that’s because a human can’t memorize everything King has written word-for-word. When a human reads King, they don’t build up a database of “probable next word frequency”, instead they build heuristics having to do with how he approaches dialogue, how he reveals character, how he builds tension, etc. They may remember one especially memorable line or two, but the bits they remember, even if written down word-for-word would probably not be enough to be copyright infringing on their own.

I would bet that we’ve come too far to completely scrap generative AI. Too many billions have been invested, and the companies have too much political power. So, the question is whether there will be significant changes to copyright law. On one side of that fight will be the trillions of dollars behind the entertainment industry. On the other side of that fight will be the trillions of dollars behind the tech industry. Of course, individual artists will be trampled in the process.

Of all the new uses of Mickey we’re now seeing, one thing I really hope is to see Mickey showing up on murals in kindergartens and daycares. This is really what it means for the character to be entering the public domain. He’s has been a part of American, if not world culture for decades, but that part of the culture has been illegal for people to use.

Finally, after nearly a century of Disney getting absolute control, that cultural element finally belongs to everyone. Now parents and caregivers can paint images of Mickey and make kids happy without having to get permission from Disney.

It’s tricky. Sometimes changing things truly is a creative act. A big portion of Disney’s portfolio is from retelling European fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, etc. It would be hard to argue that they added nothing of value when they remade those fairy tales. In many cases, people wouldn’t recognize the original stories because Disney changed so much.

OTOH, it seems like bullshit when tiny elements are changed. For example, the Conan-Doyle estate has sued because although Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, they said that was only the stories where he was aloof and analytic. They said that in stories published in the 1920s he was more capable of empathy, so any depiction of Holmes where he was empathetic infringed on their copyright.

If I were on a jury deciding this sort of thing, I’d require that there be something brand new. For example, Beauty and The Beast is public domain, and as long as someone is making an animated movie based on that story the default assumption should be that they’re inventing new aspects based on the public domain story, not based on the Disney movie. OTOH if they have an animated candle / candelabra, it’s reasonable to assume that infringes on the new character created by Disney.

Bullshit, why even bother then?

Because being creative is enjoyable.

Thirty years from publication.

The original was 14 years renewable for another 14. I like that better. It means that abandonware goes into the public domain faster, but it’s easy to renew a copyright if it’s still being used.

No exceptions.

I disagree. Exceptions for sports and software: shorter. Sports is most relevant when it’s live, and copyright-holders for sports content are much more vicious when it comes to taking down tiny clips of goals or something. So, make a special category that gives them extra protection when it comes to tiny clips in exchange for much shorter copyright terms. For software, it’s essential to be able to maintain old equipment, especially old industrial equipment. That soft of software could be used in power plants, medical equipment, water purification plants, etc. Companies are notoriously bad at keeping that stuff safe especially decades later. Instead, make it public domain faster.

If UFC wants to change the laws to make takedowns quicker and easier, they should be fine with a compromise where copyright for live sports lasts only a few weeks not a century, right?