I’d say content is trivial, but having the sheer variety of content that youtube has is not. Odysee has some decent stuff on there- even some decent original stuff that isn’t just a mirror of someone’s youtube channel. But it’s not going to have the same niche, specific content I might look up on youtube.

I really like their business model, but unfortunately did not really use curiositystream in the month I tried out the superbundle. Some of the documentaries were alright, but it wasn’t really my thing. I may return to nebula if google figures out a way to axe adblockers for good, though

Yep. I doubt there were that many people using adblockers back when you only had one skippable 15 second ad at the beginning of a video. But when you have 1-2 ads every 10 minutes, on top off all the premium popups, it’s just unbearable.

I think the main difference between derivative/inspired works created by humans and those created by AI is the presence of “creative effort.” This is something that humans can do, but narrow AI cannot.

Even bland statements humans make about nonfiction facts have some creativity in them, even if the ideas are non-copyrightable (e.g., I cannot copyright the fact that the declaration of independence was signed in 1776. However, the exact way I present this fact can be copyrightable- a timeline, chart, table, passage of text, etc. could all be copyrightable).

“Creative effort” is a hard thing to pin down, since “effort” alone does not qualify (e.g., I can’t copyright a phone directory even if I spent a lot of effort collecting names/numbers, since simply putting names and numbers alongside each other in alphabetical isn’t particularly creative or original). I don’t think there’s really a bright line test for what constitutes as “creative,” but it doesn’t take a lot. Randomness doesn’t qualify either (e.g., I can’t just pick a random stone out of a stream and declare copyright on it, even if it’s a very unique-looking rock).

Narrow AI is ultimately just a very complex algorithm created based on training data. This is oversimplifying a lot of steps involved, but there isn’t anything “creative” or “subjective” involved in how an LLM creates passages of text. At most, I think you could say that the developers of the AI have copyright over the initial code used to make that AI. I think that the outputs of some functional AI could be copyrightable by its developers, but I don’t think any machine-learning AI would really qualify if it’s the sole source of the work.

Personally, I think that the results of what an AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT creates would fall under public domain. Most of the time, it’s removed enough from the source material that it’s not really derivative anymore. However, I think if someone were to prompt one of these AI to create a work that explicitly mimics that of an author or artist, that could be infringement.

IANAL, this is just one random internet user’s opinion.

This is true, and I’m not against “alternative” sources for ebooks (having used them myself), but it’s always better for the libraries and authors if there’s foot traffic to the libraries, since that drives tax dollars which in turn makes its way back to the authors. It’s less than pennies on the dollar, but it’s important.

Ahh, right. “Free shipping within USA” is what it says for me. Sorry about that, hope you’re able to find a copy!

I can’t find a scan anywhere of anything 4a or higher, but if you are willing to pay for a physical copy there are a few sellers on AbeBooks selling “Reach Higher Student’s Book 4A”.

For free textbooks outside of that series:

BCcampus Open Publishing: They provide a ton of free courses and textbooks on a variety of topics. This isn’t really piracy, but it’s got a ton of good information.

I did find one site that seems to have all the PDFs for sale, but I can’t tell if it’s a scam or not. I would recommend looking at some of the free resources available on BCcampus before attempting this.

I think it’s important to provide children with a variety of potential careers ;)

Because everyone knows if a 14 year old reads Nora Roberts (or that one penguin children’s book) society will fall apart.

Because everyone knows if a 17 year old reads Nora Roberts (or that one penguin children’s book) society will fall apart.

You seem to be stretching the definition of the “paradox of tolerance” in new and amazing ways. How exactly does the “paradox of tolerance” relate to defederating from instances that haven’t explicitly blocked Threads?

This is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Most of the activity on any given instance or community comes from outside of the instance. If you start cutting off instances because they are sharing their own stuff with Meta, then you will also be negatively impacting your own communities since the amount of active users will go down.

Most users won’t react to something like this by joining your instance or an instance that you approve of (or, at least, currently approve of). They’ll either find another community on an instance they’re federated with or they’ll switch to another social media platform. The latter becomes more likely depending on how many instances end up on either “side” of the issue. Although most user accounts are relatively new, it’s still a pain to switch over to something else once you’ve gotten used to something.

The scale of defederation you propose, especially this early in the fediverse, would be enough to turn off a lot of folks from federation. If admins are just going to defederate from each other at the first sign of disagreement, that weakens my faith in the fediverse.

I absolutely believe that instances should not federate with meta’s stuff. The largest servers had enough issues when we were getting new users in the thousands. Meta will likely bring in users in the millions. However, it makes no difference to me if another instance federates with Meta.

In fairness, privacy issues have been a bit like a “frog in boiling water”. Unless you pay a lot of attention to these things or are completely out of the loop, the average person won’t see the issue.

At least my grandmother’s vindicated now for not wanting to get on Facebook and share those sorts of things

I wonder if this will go differently from Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. ChatGPT likely qualifies as “transformative”, but I’m uncertain if it qualifies as a “public service” or not given that it has a paid tier. How privacy/personal information ties into this should also be interesting.

Yeah, I’m glad at least a few YouTubers are starting to mirror content on sites like Odysee though (Such as Louis Rossman). I think that, like Lemmy, it just needs to reach a critical mass of users before it’s viable

Good Wired article on this (in case you are somehow out-of-the-loop): https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-api-changes-ai-labor/

If you’re learning a language, netflix has good tie-ins with language reactor… but if the $9.99 option goes away, I’ll just switch to the beta video + subtitle file upload for that

I kind of hate that you’re right

I tend to agree. Something federated like PeerTube seems ideal for curating what kinds of content you want, but the data requirements for that are going to be much higher than mostly text and image-based things like lemmy or mastodon

I guess this is the kick in the pants to go over to odysee or somewhere else, huh