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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • oo1@lemmings.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldBadminton
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    23 hours ago

    Yes, people confuse “free” (unregulated) with “competetive market” all the time.

    If “free” means “no barriers to market entry or exit and even distribution of market power” then they’re similar.

    But if free means “no regulation” then it’ll just be a race to accumulate the most market power (and political and military force) and use that to suppress competition. Features like slavey and indentured debtors has commonly occurred in ‘free’ (unregulated) markets, but it is just about the complete opposite of ‘no barriers and even market power’.

    ‘Free’ is a not a great word in this context.



  • It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.

    You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.

    I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I’m not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we’ll see.

    Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you’d have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.


  • Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

    It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

    Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

    Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.



  • If sellers can fix prices so easily they’re a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.

    Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn’t work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.

    Now, if you’d picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.

    I’d love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it’s someone’s perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.


  • Struggled to find beer that I like in usa- I’ve not been there much though.

    It’s increasingly hard here though (UK).

    Shitty lager, or hipster-grapefruit-jizz or guiness is the normal choice in most pubs, and even in many so called “real ale” pubs, those of them still left. A decent pint of bitter is hen’s teeth these days. I guess fashions change and there’s no money in old style beers that I prefer. You can’t argue with the bottom line.

    I find shitty lager in US is not as nice as shitty european lager - it just seems to have an odd taste - but it’s not what i want to drink… I guess german/czech lager is about as good as it gets, for lager/pils - but still not very flavourful.

    Belgium is good, but not really for a session beer. It’s for a different type of drinking.




  • Historically it’s not miracles that brought banking regulation (unless you believe that bit abut Jesus in the temple), it’s trajedy, like 1929 and WW2.

    it probably won’t get that bad though because these days they’ll keep bailing them out, their failures paid for by your economic future - gradually enough so that it’s not as bad in concentration as 1929, just spread it out into long term inflation so that it’s harder to notice. All the whiile people can keep tightening their belts.

    And, I’m not saying people shouldn’t; being frugal is good, but, once you’ve switched to your frugal lifetyle, it’s increasingly hard to make the next round of cuts, and the next one and the next . . .





  • You’ve probably not infringed the copyright, only the court can decide though; if you were to be challenged by the rights holder.

    I think there are lots of factors in your defence:

    • you’re not selling it , your use is an example for education
    • I don’t think you’re reducing the market value for the original(s) in any way
    • you’ve not included substantial verbaitim sections of the original works , but I think you have used more than just facts and ideas (not sure though).

    But add in some more quotes, flesh it out, and then try to sell it . . . each step weakens the ‘fair use’ defence.

    This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit, then eventually the collective derived works might add up to commercial, substantial reuse, and might include enough to have copied a substantial portion of the original. Very hard to determine I’d think. Each individual use might be fair, but did the LLM itself go too far at some point?

    Copyright holder probably struggles to challenge the LLM on the basis of all the things infinite mokeys might use it for in future.





  • cool, that actually looks like a good idea. Interesting for sync uses too , say, in film as i think so long as you re-performed the melody (not the “song”) you’d be royalty free. I do think it’d be funny to hear the Joni Mitchell paved paradise melody in a car commercial - but that’s still creative freedom. Interesting stuff.