They have 38,000 kiosks. So that’s ~$10k/kiosk.

Honestly, that may be a fair price, assuming these machines are profitable. Vending machines make $4-10k revenue/year. Assuming that holds for RedBox, that should make >$2k profit per year, which would make aquisition reasonable. The question is, is that what they’re getting?

If I were in their shoes, I’d expand the options at the kiosks to include console games, and maybe a limited selection of snacks (e.g. popcorn), if it can be retrofitted.

Do you really need a custom kernel for the surface devices?

I’ve kept Windows installed on a spare drive for years now. I don’t remember when I last booted into it on purpose, it was certainly more than a year ago, and was just to install Minecraft Bedrock to play with his friends (his friends bailed). My kids have only ever used Linux. :)

I could probably install Linux on my work MBP, but my boss would make me test on macOS, so it would kind of defeat the point.

At home, everything is Linux except my SO’s desktop, and that’s a job I’m unwilling to be fired from.

People think I’m nuts when I say Win2k was my favorite Windows. I switched to Linux before Vista came out. People say WinXP was good, but really, it was just tolerable.

Exactly.

Fortunately, my company doesn’t put ads in our product because it’s essentially a B2B product and customers pay a lot to use it, and our product being unusable could cost individual customers potentially millions if it blocks their day-to-day activities (we deal with regulations). We do use spyware though (e.g. fullstory), which makes sense given that lens, since being able to solve problems before they report them has a lot of value for our customers. If we did anything unethical, I would push back and potentially quit, since I’m not interested at all in manipulating customers (ads, dark patterns, etc).

I don’t think the tools we use to catch issues in the field make ethical sense in other contexts though. So yeah, I block a lot of the stuff we use in our product, and we don’t do anything to actively counter blocking in our app either (if you block it, you don’t get the pre-emptive bug-fixing).

So are you volunteering to install Linux on everyone’s machines when they get a new computer? And answer their tech support questions when they inevitably need that one program?

What’s there to control? It’s a completely open format. No royalties, no control, nothing.

Nah, just a workaholic IMO.

Exactly. Apple only cares about the bigger fish, like big YouTube reviewers and their own presentation. They let their fanbase take care of the rest.

Idk, I think his tech knowledge is fine. He knows far more about cameras than I ever will (largely because I don’t care), and I honestly haven’t seen anything where he’s lacking on the tech knowledge front. His reviews, when critical, are usually quite comprehensive. For his audience and the products he reviews, he’s plenty tech savvy and probably more tech savvy than most of his audience. He just doesn’t put that on display unless it’s relevant to the video.

His channel is all about “hey, check out this cool tech gadget,” and not “let’s deep dive into this particular tech niche.” Do you want to know how a given EV is to drive? MKBHD got you. Are you trying to decide between EVs? Comparing MKBHD’s videos may help narrow it down, but probably isn’t sufficient. Do you want a teardown of an EV to repair something? Look elsewhere.

I occasionally watch his videos, but not enough to sub. I like his presentation style and his critical videos are generally pretty insightful.

Exactly. Violation of copyright may be an ethical or unethical act, but that doesn’t change the fact that copyright law was violated.

I’m not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I’m also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).

I think a lot of people here on lemmy who are “in favor of piracy” just hate our current copyright system, and that’s quite understandable and I totally agree with them. Having a work protected for your entire lifetime sucks.

Derivative works are not copyright infringement

They absolutely are, unless it’s covered by “fair use.” A “derivative work” doesn’t mean you created something that’s inspired by a work, but that you’ve modified the the work and then distributed the modified version.

That depends, do you copy verbatim? Or do you process and understand concepts, and then create new works based on that understanding? If you copy verbatim, that’s plagiarism and you’re a thief. If you create your own answer, it’s not.

Current AI doesn’t actually “understand” anything, and “learning” is just grabbing input data. If you ask it a question, it’s not understanding anything, it just matches search terms to the part of the training data that matches, and regurgitates a mix of it, and usually omits the sources. That’s it.

It’s a tricky line in journalism since so much of it is borrowed, and it’s likewise tricky w/ AI, but the main difference IMO is attribution, good journalists cite sources, AI rarely does.

Yup, I drive a Toyota Prius and am looking at Nissan Leafs. My wife and I hate all the smart crap in cars, and it’s pretty much everywhere now…

Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that’s all it retains after crawling a site. It’s not producing any derivative works, it’s merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.

An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it’s based on and how much of those works it uses. So it’s complicated, but there’s very much a copyright argument there.

And this is why I hate those laws that are intended to protect kids. Yeah, it would be nice if kids couldn’t see stuff they shouldn’t, but it’s even better if my PII isn’t stolen. I’d rather my kids accidentally see porn once in a while than for their identity to be stolen.

I just watched this on Audit the Audit, so good on this guy for following up. The video was incredibly obvious that the cop was in the wrong. Basically, the video went like this:

1. Cop pulls Greg over for allegedly giving the middle finger, and the cop terms it a “welfare check” (no other violation); after the stop, Greg allegedly cussed at the trooper as he left (not loud enough to be picked up on body cam)
2. Greg pulls away and it’s obvious from cop dashcam footage that he’s not impeding traffic in any way; cop then pulls Greg over again for impeding traffic
3. Cop orders him out of the car, apparently has called backup, and arrests Greg for obstruction (Greg repeatedly asks what crime he committed, and is not told about impeding traffic)

The first may have been retaliatory (not clear, cop may have been able to defend it as a welfare stop), but the second absolutely was retaliatory and blatantly illegal. I’m surprised the award was only $175k and nothing more happened because it was a clear violation of Greg’s constitutional rights, which have been clearly defined through case law to include criticism of the police.

Screw this cop and the entire department that allows this nonsense. This was also on Christmas, which makes it so much worse…

“I was disrespectful,” Bombard conceded of that cold day in 2018. “I don’t think I should have been arrested for it, though.”

Disrespect is protected speech and has been enshrined in case law, and police are expected (again, in case law) to be held to a higher standard than the average citizen. So middle fingers and profanity are absolutely protected speech, just don’t commit any actual crimes while expressing yourself because the police will look for a way to arrest you if you’re doing that. And there are a lot of technicalities (e.g. when you need to identify yourself, what constitutes a “lawful order,” and what “disturbing the peace” means). So if you’re driving, drive the speed limit, keep your plates updated, etc if you plan to give police the bird.

I disagree that it needs to be explicit. The current law is the fair use doctrine, which generally has more to do with the intended use than specific amounts of the text/media. The point is that humans should know where that limit is and when they’ve crossed it, with motive being a huge part of it.

I think machines and algorithms should have to abide by a much narrower understanding of “fair use” because they don’t have motive or the ability to Intuit when they’ve crossed the line. So scraping copyrighted works to produce an LLM should probably generally be illegal, imo.

That said, our current copyright system is busted and desperately needs reform. We should be limiting copyright to 14 years (as in the original copyright act of 1790), with an option to explicitly extend for another 14 years. That way LLMs can scrape comment published >28 years ago with no concerns, and most content produced >14 years (esp. forums and social media where copyright extension is incredibly unlikely). That would be reasonable IMO and sidestep most of the issues people have with LLMs.