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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.

    I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.

    It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”






  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlShare a script/alias you use a lot
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    8 days ago

    I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

    What to do?

    Render an image instead, of course!

    curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

    It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

    #!/usr/bin/env zsh
    
    stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
    curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
    exitcode=$?
    
    if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
      statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )
    
      if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
        curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
      fi
    
      imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
    fi
    
    cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1
    
    exit $exitcode
    

    Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.







  • I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)

    But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.

    Take archive.org for example:

    It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

    I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.

    But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

    Edit: And to be clear, when I say it’s fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don’t mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.


  • I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

    AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

    I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

    Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

    They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

    Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

    Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.