shiri

@nichtsowichtig @teraflopsweat “Scripting” is a common tool for us, though in most cases it’s just rehearsing lines and establishing conversation patterns and flows.

Groups like this are also great places to get together and workshop communication ideas, from figuring out something accessible to say to get your needs met to other forms of communication, or even just validation when there isn’t a reasonable way forward.

@Harrison ::face palm:: thank you for calling that out, I’m so used to correcting fellow americans on copyright

@fwygon all questions of how AI learns aside, it’s not legally theft but philosophically the topic is debatable and very hot button.

I can however comment pretty well on your copyright comments which are halfway there, but have a lot of popular inaccuracies.

Fair use is a very vague topic, and they explicitly chose to not make explicit terms on what is allowed but rather the intents of what is to be allowed. We’ve got some firm ones not because of specific laws but from abundance of case evidence.

* Educational; so long as it is taught as a part of a recognized class and within curriculum.
* Informational; so long as it is being distributed to inform the public about valid, reasonable public interests. This is far broader than some would like; but it is legal.
* Narrative or Commentary purposes; so long as you’re not copying a significant amount of the whole content and passing it off as your own. Short clips with narration and lots of commentary interwoven between them is typically protected. Copyright is not intended to be used to silence free speech. This also tends to include satire; as long as it doesn’t tread into defamation territory.

These are basically all the same category and includes some misinformation about what it does and does not cover. It’s permitted to make copies for purely informational, public interest (ie. journalistic) purposes. This would include things like showing a clip of a movie or a trailer to make commentary on it.

Education doesn’t get any special treatment here, but research might (ie. making copies that are kept to a restricted environment, and only used for research purposes, this is largely the protection that AI models currently fall under because the training data uses copyrighted data but the resulting model does not).

* Transformative; so long as the content is being modified in a substantial enough manner that it is an entirely new work that is not easily confused for the original. This too, is far broader than some would like; but it still is legal.

“Easily confused” is a rule from Trademark Law, not copyright. Copyright doesn’t care about consumer confusion, but does care about substitution. That is, if the content could be a substitute for the original (ie. copying someone else’s specific painting is going to be a violation up until the point where it can only be described as “inspired by” the painting)

* Reasonable, ‘Non-Profit Seeking or Motivated’ Personal Use; People are generally allowed to share things amongst themselves and their friends and other acquaintances. Reasonable backup copies, loaning of copies, and even reproduction and presentation of things are generally considered fair use.

This is a very very common myth that gets a lot of people in trouble. Copyright doesn’t care about whether you profit from it, more about potential lost profits.

Loaning is completely disconnected from copyright because no copies are being made (“digital loaning” is a nonsense attempt to claiming loaning, but is just “temporary” copying which is a violation).

Personal copies are permitted so long as you keep the original copy (or the original copy is explicitly irrecoverably lost or destroyed) as you already acquired it and multiple copies largely are just backups or conversions to different formats. The basic gist is that you are free to make copies so long as you don’t give any of them to anyone else (if you copy a DVD and give either the original or copy to a friend, even as a loan, it’s illegal).

It’s not good to rely on it being “non-profit” as a copyright excuse, as that’s more just an area of leniency than a hard line. People far too often thing that allows them to get away with copying things, it’s really just for topics like making backups of your movies or copying your CDs to mp3s.

… All that said, fun fact: AI works are not covered by copyright law.

To be copyrighted a human being must actively create the work. You can copyright things made with AI art, but not the AI art itself (ie. a comic book made with AI art is copyrighted, but the AI art in the panels is not, functioning much like if you made a comic book out of public domain images). Prompts and set up are not considered enough to allow for copyright (example case was a monkey picking up a camera and taking pictures, those pictures were deemed unable to be copyrighted because despite the photographer placing the camera… it was the monkey taking the photos).

@jarfil @Shialac “How are you?” “Forever hating that question, you?”

@BilboBargains @MadgePickles … I kinda want to steal that one because it’s brutal and beautiful

@Caesium @MadgePickles Taking calls for my job I’ve developed “I’m doing alright, how can I help you?”… internally it’s my own “fuck your formality, get to the point”

@apophis @Zeth0s @Worx but the fact that we even have to think that much to establish the patterns like that… oof

But also very similar to my answers as well

@Zeth0s @SRo it’s because we fundamentally process language and interactions in a different way, our brains aren’t wired for “small talk” or non-meaningful communication. Also the example earlier of context mattering where sometimes they might be asking with sincere interest and it can be catastrophic to fall back on a pattern like that.

And that’s simply because we’re either following an unnatural pattern that we’ve jury-rigged together from years of painful trial and error or we’re thinking much harder about the words being said than you are.

We call this masking and it’s a severe drain on our mental resources every single day and it’s why it’s claimed that we have a social problems (claimed because those problems completely disappear when interacting with fellow autistics, they’re considered problems only because the majority expect us to do all the work of accommodating them and none of the work themselves).

Also, hi/hello are different from “what’s up?” and “how’re you?” despite being used the same by allistics (non-autistics). Hello is purely an acknowledgement, it doesn’t even need to lead to a conversation, it’s just basically saying “I know you are there and recognize you as a person”.

Think of it like this: if you’re in a dark house and hear a sound… do you say “what’s up?” or “Hello?”

The others are formalities, evolved originally from real interest eventually into empty phrases. It has a lot to do with how allistics connect socially vs autistics.

We’ve recently begun to unravel the fact that allistics connect their social interactions and relationships to their identity while autistics connect values and actions. Because of that, I believe allistics put a lot more meaning into the form of an interaction than into the actual things accomplished in it.

“How’re you?” was originally an expression genuinely asking someone about their day, a genuine expression of caring. However, since it became associated with caring it eventually became a formality, a shape of conversation in which “Hello” became seen as cold and uncaring… so everyone changed their patterns of speech for it and felt it much warmer… despite dropping what actually made it warm.

Us autistics however, we often struggle with casual lying because we care intrinsically about our actions, even the small perceived as meaningless ones. When we ask how someone is, we have the intent of asking that question.

Small talk is all about the “form” of the interaction. It’s tied to allistic identity in that allistics typically seem to define themselves by the forms of their interactions. Autistics however couldn’t care less about the form if nothing actually happens in it because we tie our identity to the actual things happening.

An allistic might consider themselves caring if their interactions take a caring tone and form… and they’re often right (but not always, there’s always that person everyone humors but can’t stand). An autistic however might consider themselves caring based on the individual elements of the conversation, what was actually talked about and what happened during the conversation (ie. the person opened up, became less stressed, you got an update on what was going on, you were able to share inspiration, etc)

@SuddenDownpour Pathologizing aside, this matches up with another thing I’ve seen pointed out as an autistic trait that backs this up: value based identity vs group based identity.

Allistics typically tie their identity up in the groups they’re a part of: family, work, church, town/city/state, etc

Autistics tie our identity up in our values: what we do, impacts we’ve made, accomplishments tied to our values

This is why you hear things like “snitches get stitches” because group loyalty is considered more critically important than values, or how we’re seen as turning on the group when we call out how the group could be improved.

This would especially make sense in the mentioned study because when you take away the group it takes away the impact to their identity while our identities don’t care if someone is watching.

@dark_stang @seasonone as someone who uses both: abstraction is mostly about (a) cross-compatibility (making one command work across multiple different database backends) and (b) interfacing more naturally with code to reduce the work needed to make changes

@mudeth @pglpm The grey area is all down to personal choices and how “fascist” your admin is (which goes on to which instance is best for you?)

Defederation is a double-edged sword, because if you defederate constantly for frivolous reasons all you do is isolate your node. This is also why it’s the *final* step in moderation.

The reality is that it’s a whole bunch of entirely separate environments and we’ve walked this path well with email (the granddaddy of federated social networks). The only moderation we can perform outside of our own instance is to defederate, everything else is just typical blocking you can do yourself.

The process here on Mastodon is to decide for yourself what is worth taking action on. If it’s not your instance, you report it to the admin of that instance and they decide if they want to take action and what action to take. And if they decide it’s acceptable, you decide whether or not this is a personal problem (just block the user or domain on in your user account but leave it federating) or if it’s a problem for your whole server (in which case you defederate to protect your users).

Automated action is bad because there’s no automated identity verification here and it’s an open door to denial of service attacks (harasser generates a bunch of different accounts, uses them all the report a user until that user is auto-suspended).

The backlog problem however is an intrinsic problem to moderation that every platform struggles with. You can automate moderation, but then that gets abused and has countless cases of it taking action on harmless content, and you can farm out moderation but then you get sloppiness.

The fediverse actually helps in moderation because each admin is responsible for a group of users and the rest of the fediverse basically decides whether they’re doing their job acceptably via federation and defederation (ie. if you show that you have no issue with open Nazis on your platform, then most other instances aren’t going to want to connect to you)

@mudeth @pglpm you really don’t beyond our current tools and reporting to authorities.

This is not a single monolithic platform, it’s like attributing the bad behavior of some websites to HTTP.

Our existing moderation tools are already remarkably robust and defederating is absolutely how this is approached. If a server shares content that’s illegal in your country (or otherwise just objectionable) and they have no interest in self-moderating, you stop federating with them.

Moderation is not about stamping out the existence of these things, it’s about protecting your users from them.

If they’re not willing to take action against this material on their servers, then the only thing further that can be done is reporting it to the authorities or the court of public opinion.

@MrD We typically just need support, care, and understanding to excel! So few understand that and think we’re “broken”.

@scrubbles My favorite early moment was him firing people based on lines of code written… which of course meant he fired all of his best because the worst programmers write many lines that do less while great programmers write few lines that do more.

@shortwavesurfer The propulsion is absolutely linear, the perk of an ion drive is that it’s mostly electrical with minimal fuel consumption.

It’s also something we’re already using, the first one actually launched was in 1964, though for some reason we never stopped hyping it.

An ion engine would absolutely make the trip take *longer* as you’d have to wait for better transfer windows (9 months is the timeframe *after* we wait for a good transfer window), we’d have to wait even longer for one with an ion drive and it absolutely wouldn’t be a shorter window.

@shortwavesurfer @InquisitiveApathy ion drives really don’t solve any of these problems.

Orbital dynamics are *weird* and “more speed” isn’t a solution. With orbital dynamics your relative position and speed are directly related, so moving faster basically means changing direction. Once you’re in microgravity thrust power is more about how quickly you can steer and fuel quantity is how many maneuvers you can do. Ion drives can do a lot of maneuvers, but every maneuver is very slow (which also makes them more complicated because you need to account for the changes that happen over the course of the maneuver).

We don’t travel to orbital bodies in a straight line because it goes beyond an absurd quantity of fuel to do so (ion drives don’t even scratch the surface of the amount needed, let alone the complexity they add due to slow acceleration).

Right now we don’t have much to improve the speed of getting places and not much on the horizon there either, so we’re focusing on questions like how to survive getting there.

@saba @Recant We’re definitely not going to have a moon colony in our lifetime, and a manned mars mission would only be a disaster.

The reason we haven’t really gone back to the moon and don’t have a colony there is because it’s much more expensive to access and offers no real benefit over space stations. It’s perk is low gravity instead of microgravity, but it trades off in massively increased fuel and time costs as well as the inability to “dodge” hazards. The moon has no special resources, no capacity for terraforming, and if we were wanting to build enclosed habitats we could do that more easily in a space station.

Mars is kinda worse because as far as I can tell we’re finding problems faster than we’re finding solutions. My favorite recent example of this is that we discovered anyone we sent would go blind before reaching the planet (microgravity destroys your vision over time, it took us forever to find out because the astronauts were hiding it so they wouldn’t be disqualified from future flights).