I had just heard the expression: “It helps the general effort.” It was in a Discworld audiobook. It made me think: “Yeah, I could use some help right now.” That was still rattling around in my head when I had to come up with a username. I don’t remember what I was having trouble with, so I guess that worked out.

There’s that episode of The Orville where social media is the law.

https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule

Maybe I’m talking more about enforcement than actual law,

Probably. Different countries in Europe have very different traditions there. I think the former socialist countries are still more relaxed. But the EU-line is rather dominated by countries like Germany.

Come to think of it. Switzerland officially takes a very lenient approach. It’s legal to download media files for personal use. But as you can see here, that leaves research and business hanging.

I don’t know any European country that has anything like the copyright clause in the US Constitution, or anything close to Fair Use. I don’t see the argument.

There’s a good chance that European AI companies like Mistral are breaking the law. We will have to see how it eventually goes in court. Recently, there was a decision in a Munich court against OpenAI. By that standard, even Apertus might be in trouble. But I doubt that decision will stand.

Plutonium-238’s half-life is 87.7 years, Americium-241 is 432.6 years. Which… is almost 5 times longer, so… not sure why that’s cringe?

What’s cringe is the word “staggering”. Natural radioactive isotopes have half-lives on the order of billions of years. All elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae. Billions of years have passed since the novae that created that heavy elements now on earth. Anything with shorter half-lives is no longer around. (More correctly, one should talk decay chains.)

What’s staggering is that these isotopes are available at all. They are artificially created in nuclear reactors. Mass production of Pl-238 began only during WW2 for bombs. That’s almost a half-life ago. The shorter half-life makes the availability of Pl-238 much more impressive.

I believe they’re referring to the fact that it’s not an element of major topic. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

There are over 100 named elements. I don’t think I could name half of them. Americium is relatively prominent because of it’s use in smoke detectors. And while I’m at it: Americium is the element. Americium-241 is a specific isotope; a specific variant, chemically identical to other variants but with slightly different physical properties.

There are a number of isotopes suitable for RTGs. It’s a matter of trade-offs. There’s half-life, which is basically how fast the properties of the material change. There’s also energy density and how bad the radiation is for the device. And always, there’s cost. Fun fact, in Chernobyl they did try robots, but the electronics could not withstand the radiation. People don’t withstand it either, but there’s a lot of them.

Badly. This was released almost 3 months ago and completely failed to make a splash, just like the other European models you have never heard of.

There’s a lot of denial about this, but you just can’t make such models competitive in Europe. The copyright industry is too strong. This combines with a general culture of data ownership and control. Case in point, the copyright industry is especially strong in Denmark, and they are also champions of chat control.

Yes.

Shout-out for The Radioactive Boy Scout. (RIP)

Yes. And also:

Its half-life is a staggering 432 years, five times longer than plutonium-238.

Cringe…

AI slop?

GEMA’s social media game is certainly top. Nice to see the money being put to good use.

If all seats are filled,

Sure. Everyone’s Taylor Swift. Let’s just assume that.

The actual truth is that if you do not play GEMA music, you have to provide evidence of that to GEMA. Young musicians who foolishly reason that they don’t have anything to do with GEMA will be dragged through court.

Fair Use exists only in the US. I believe it is part of the reason why the US became so culturally dominant. It certainly is why the internet is US dominated. European copyright laws are stifling.

GEMA was created by the Nazis to take over pop culture. There’s a certain logic there.

Of course, under the Nazis you could be sent to camp if you belonged to the wrong subculture. So there is a difference. The rebels of the time listened to jazz, to swing. “Negro music” was the social media of that age, corrupting the youth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

It wouldn’t be so easy. Such restrictions would have to be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.

Yes. I think the last time I heard of Montana was in The Hunt for Red October.

I wonder if this would make it illegal to cut off someone’s internet if they are accused of piracy. Probably that sort of thing still goes.

It might provide a protection against anti-circumvention laws and such; laws that make it criminal to mess with hardware DRM on your devices.

Copyright is the bigger problem. The lack of a sensible Fair Use equivalent makes a lot of “tech” impossible. GDPR is a problem, too, but for AI it is the smaller problem. The media sees itself as benefitting from the broken copyright laws, while GDPR cuts into their profits. So that’s why the public discussion is completely skewed.

It’s a given that the EU’s reliance on foreign IT companies will increase. Europe is deeply committed to this copyright ideology, that demands limiting and controlling the sharing of information. It’s not just a legal but a cultural commitment, as can be seen in these discussions on Lemmy. Look for reforms to the Data Act. That’s the latest expansion of this anti-enlightenment nonsense and it really has the potential to turbocharge the damage to the existing industry.

Though, to be fair, following the logic of the word cupboard, a fridge should be a cheesegrill. That’s not something anyone could want. Goddammit English.

English is so pathetic. A Cupboard is not a board and it’s not just for cups. Then they add insult to injury by just failing to coin the word chillgrill.

Nice try. But this is explicitly the “Authors’ Guild” and others.

Interesting to see the reactions here; how they differ from other lawsuits that pit “authors” and “artists” against tech companies.