That is a reason for arguing that people don’t always make smart choices. It is however not an argument for claiming how people vote does not show what their preference is at the time of voting, which is what is relevant here.

It’s perfectly fine to argue you think it’s stupid of people to want to read about Musk, but the votes clearly show they do in fact want to.

No, the antics of a tech company owner are not relevant to a technology sub.

The votes prove you wrong, no matter what your opinion on it is. You’re free to disagree, but the notion that the people who make up this community are not the arbiters of what is and is not relevant to a community flies directly in the face of the very foundation Lemmy is built on.

How he picks his nose doesn’t matter. How he runs a tech company and how he affects people working in tech does.

And the popular answer does equal the right answer when the question is “does this community think this question is relevant to this community?” The votes are literally this community telling you whether or not it thinks that is true.

Or, you know, seeing as you guys are the ones being downvoted into the negative, you could take your own advice and start your own Elon-free tech community. Nothing is stopping you.

Removed by mod

The reality of course, is that the reason they want to go after the IRS is because they don’t wan’t them to be able to afford to go after the big fish.

Labeling media with their significant owners and affiliations of board members would be a great thing. As long as it’d be uniformly applied… And as you’ve implied, that would certainly be unlikely to happen…

It’s wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.

Convincing “regular people” to move is the hard part.

Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.

That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

Other sources that are public domain or “cheap enough” for OpenAI to simply buy them. Hence my point that OpenAI is already worth enough that they could make a takeover offer for Reuters.

The thing, is realistically it won’t make a difference at all, because there are vast amounts of public domain data that remain untapped, so the main “problematic” need for OpenAI is new content that represents up to data language and up to date facts, and my point with the share price of Thomson Reuters is to illustrate that OpenAI is already getting large enough that they can afford to outright buy some of the largest channels of up-to-the-minute content in the world.

As for authors, it might wipe a few works by a few famous authors from the dataset, but they contribute very little to the quality of an LLM, because the LLM can’t easily judge during training unless you intentionally reinforce specific works. There are several million books published every year. Most of them make <$100 in royalties for their authors (an average book sell ~200 copies). Want to bet how cheap it’d be to buy a fully licensed set of a few million books? You don’t need bestsellers, you need many books that are merely sufficiently good to drag the overall quality of the total dataset up.

The irony is that the largest benefactor of content sources taking a strict view of LLMs will be OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the few others large enough to basically buy datasets or buy companies that own datasets because this creates a moat for those who can’t afford to obtain licensed datasets.

The biggest problem won’t be for OpenAI, but for people trying to build open models on the cheap.

It won’t really matter, because there will continue to be other sources.

Taken to an extreme, there are indications OpenAI’s market cap is already higher than Tomson Reuters ($80bn-$90bn vs <$60bn), and it will go far higher. Getty, also mentioned, has a market cap of “only” $2.4bn. In other words: If enough important sources of content starts blocking OpenAI, they will start buying access, up to and including if necessary buying original content creators.

As it is, while BBC is clearly not, some of these other content providers are just playing hard to get and hoping for a big enough cash offer either for a license or to get bought out.

The cat is out of the bag, whatever people think about it, and sources that block themselves off from AI entirely (to the point of being unwilling to sell licenses or sell themselves) will just lose influence accordingly.

This also presumes OpenAI remains the only contender, which is clearly not the case in the long run given the rise of alternative models that while mostly still not good enough, are good enough that it’s equally clearly just a matter of time before anyone (at least, for the time being, for sufficiently rich instances of “anyone”, with the cost threshold dropping rapidly) can fine-tune their own models using their own scraped data.

In other words, it may make them feel better, but in the long run it’s a meaningless move.

EDIT: What a weird thing to downvote without replying to. I’ve taken no stance on whether BBC’s decision is morally right or not, just addressed that it’s unlikely to have any effect, and you can dislike that it won’t have any effect but thinking it will is naive.

My first “paid” programming project (I was paid in a used 20MB harddrive, which was equivalent to quite a bit of money for me at the time):

Automate a horse-race betting “system” that it was blatantly obvious to me even at the time, at 14 or so, was total bullshit and would just lose him money. I told the guy who hired me as much. He still wanted it, and I figured since I’d warned him it was utter bunk it was his problem.

It started before that. In '98 I remember having dinner with someone who worked at Netscape before then who told me about how a co-worker had just been fired for living in the office, something they’d apparently decided to do in the first place because they already then had all of these perks designed to keep them in the office.

The Google, Apple etc. collusion certainly was a huge step up in abusive practices, though.

Having worked at, and co-founded, multiple startups over a period of 28 years: Sure. But why are you choosing that?

The reality is that the moment I started standing up to employers or investors and expecting decent standards, they folded and I was able to have a good work-life balance and get paid market rates and still get to work on cool startups and get shares.

These companies prey on most people never thinking to negotiate (and having been on the other side of the table, and tried to be decent: most people never negotiate, even though we almost always have space to do so)

When they say “can’t be blocked” I presume they mean “can’t be blocked with the block function in X/Twitter”. They also say it can’t be liked or retweeted.

So far ads have been treated as sort-of regular posts that are just shown according to the ad rules rather than because they belong in the timeline under normal criteria, and you could like, retweet and block them just like any other post.

So this is basically them treating ads as a fully separate thing rather than just a different post type.

Though the article suggests they’ll still try to make them look mostly like posts, except without showing a handle etc. though, which is extra scummy

Still many who don’t, though, and they’re the main reason I still occasionally go back.

Took this in London the other day.

It’s too common a symbol for X.org to have much of a shot because they’re not competitors. This “X Social Media” might have a stronger claim if they’ve actually used and defended a trademark specifically in the social space.