The problem is that the producer’s business model is based on making and selling copies

This is all too vague to actually understand the effect of piracy. The economic impact depends how much piracy replaces actual purchases.

When I was a teenager, I would pirate a lot of music. At the time, I had very little money to spend. This copying did not replace any purchases. On the other hand, me not buying music right now is a lost purchase since I could spend money. That’s why I spend some money every month actually buying music from bandcamp or whatever, which offsets the revenue that the musicians would otherwise lose.

Also, if the artist has other revenue streams, it doesn’t matter as much. Musicians for example don’t make a lot of money off of streaming nowadays, and a lot of their revenue comes from merch and concert tickets etc. So if you spend money there, copying doesn’t really bankrupt the artist.

Of course each type of media has slightly different mechanics, but in general there are a lot of ways you can do piracy without really undermining the business model of the artists. And very rarely are the effects the same as for theft.

Since 720p downloading isn’t really available on yt-dlp anymore, I made an alias for it

alias yt720p="yt-dlp -S vcodec:h264,fps,res:720,acodec:m4a"

let them fight

It’s never been so easy to download music. Soulseek, yt-dlp, torrents for older stuff, spotify downloader websites etc. I still have spotify but I started growing my local music collection a few years ago. Considering canceling my spotify subscription.

Modern thought not only relies on thought built upon other people, it relies on trusting textbooks, data aggregators like weather apps, google search results, bus route apps, wikipedia, forum posts, etc. etc.

I don’t think it’s ungenerous at all to question whether are LLMs really any different in this regard. You take in information from an imperfect automated source, just as we’ve done for a really long time, depending on the definition.

The no thought is truly independent is also a bit of a strawman. The point was, the more complex technology you have, the more the same ideas spread and thought is harmonized (which is good in some ways, standardization makes things easier).

Well, I do consider this post, as a rephrasing of

thinking through a chain of logic instead of accepting and regurgitating the conclusions of others without any of one’s own reasoning

not made in good faith. You don’t engage with the point I’m making at all. Instead, you pivot from understanding the logic to making sure the sources are trustworthy. Which is a fair standard for critical thought or whatever, but definitely not what the original contention of the first commenter was. Which was heavily upvoted (=a popular opinition?), and which originally I replied to.

Also, hearing “How so? What’s your alternative assertion” after ten comments worth of people going out their way to misunderstand my point, presumably because they dislike AI, is not motivating.

Well I first replied to that first comment. Then people started making completely different claims and the point got lost in the sauce.

Edit: why should I take the time to formulate my thoughts well if you have demonstrated that you don’t give even the slightest hint of good faith to understand what I’m saying?

think for themselves and create for themselves without leaning on a glorified Markov chain

If you think your comment and this are the same thing, then I don’t know what to say.

This has very little to do with the criticism given by the first commenter. And you can use AI and do this, they are not in any way exclusive.

Yeah but that’s not what we are expecting people to do.

In our extremely complicated world, most thinking relies on trusting sources. You can’t independently study and derive most things.

Otherwise everybody should do their own research about vaccines. But the reasonable thing is to trust a lot of other, more knowledgeable people.

Yeah sure buddy.

Have you tried to shoehorn real life stuff into mathematical notation? It is restrictive. You have pre-defined strict boxes that don’t have blurry lines. Free form thoughts are a lot more flexible than that.

Consistency is restrictive. I don’t know why you take issue with that.

Things are weirder than they seem on the surface.

A math professor collegue of mine calls extremely restrictive use of language ”rigor”, for example.

Independent thought? All relevant thought is highly dependent of other people and their thoughts.

That’s exactly why I bring this up. Having systems that teach people to think in a similar way enable us to build complex stuff and have a modern society.

That’s why it’s really weird to hear this ”people should think for themselves” criticism of AI. It’s a similar justification to antivaxxers saying you ”should do your own research”.

Surely there are better reasons to oppose AI?

People haven’t ”thought for themselves” since the printing press was invented. You gotta be more specific than that.

Some of the more complex proofs might be wrong just because so few understand them, and the ones who do might have made mistakes.

Hell, I’ll trust a math result much more if it’s backed up by empirical evidence from eg. engineering or physics.

Don’t know if that counts as being ”in math” by OPs definition.

That’s what the wikipedia article might say but there are definitely studies on the long term effects of cannabis use: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fi&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=long+term+effects+of+cannabis

There are very few cons, all the negative effects of cannabis can be better handled when it’s legal.

Yes? What the hell are you talking about

For small-scale stuff like that it will surely work. It’s unclear if it scales to youtube volumes. Maybe it doesn’t have to though, small scale stuff is valuable too.