I think the easiest solution to this is just not to have all the ”smart” features in the first place.
In regards to reducing emissions, I get that these smart features can increase efficiency, but, does that offset the emissions of manufacturing the additional hardware needed? most people won’t set up things like load shifting, or live in areas where variable priced power just isn’t a thing, so that efficiency is only really realized by a fraction of the units.
Things like heat pump heaters are incredibly efficient systems, even without the smart features. I think we would be better served by focusing on getting these made as efficiently, repairably, and cheaply as possible. And then getting them in to as many hands as possible. Packing them full of smart features will just diminish the longevity of the equipment, increase the cost per unit, and make them less accessible to the average person.
The problem is, this isn’t really up to consumers or even companies, as alluded to in blog post. Investors push for the inclusion of such features because they’re ether convinced it’s what must be done to compete, opens avenues for future subscription fees, or just because they’re invested in the company that makes the parts that enable the features.
It’s a structural issue in how investment and funding is done, and regulation will only do so much to counter the natural tendencies of the business world. We need different ways to get investment in to the production of these kinds of products.
Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes...
But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.
The author focuses on the danger of startups dying out and therefore bricking your devices, but another major problem with startups is that they are VC-backed, and those VC investors are expecting the exact same unsustainable growth that the incumbent "market leaders" are chasing in their enshittification journeys. When the startups don't die, they will also 'have' to enshittify, to satisfy investors.
It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.
Sadly, this is the impossible part. Policymakers (at least in the US) will never prioritize consumers over companies.
Honestly, the best we can ever hope for is a law mandating that it's no longer illegal to modify your tech if the company who operates it dies, or shuts down the backend server infra, but this will be opposed by basically every company out there (including if not especially video game companies, who won't want to potentially have to allow people to develop and operate private servers for defunct MMOs).
I was in court the other day and it turns out that while they send us the evidence videos encrypted (and never give us the right password), the government's lawyer had it all on onedrive 🫠
I have really mixed feelings about this. My stance is that I don’t you should need permission to train on somebody else’s work since that is far too restrictive on what people can do with the music (or anything else) they paid for. This assumes it was obtained fairly: buying the tracks of iTunes or similar and not torrenting them or dumping the library from a streaming service. Of course, this can change if a song it taken down from stores (you can’t buy it) or the price is so high that a normal person buying a small amount of songs could not afford them (say 50 USD a track). Same goes for non-commercial remixing and distribution. This is why I thinking judging these models and services on output is fairer: as long as you don’t reproduce the work you trained on I think that should be fine. Now this needs some exceptions: producing a summary, parody, heavily-changed version/sample (of these, I think this is the only one that is not protected already despite widespread use in music already).
So putting this all together: the AIs mentioned seem to have re-produced partial copies of some of their training data, but it required fairly tortured prompts (I think some even provided lyrics in the prompt to get there) to do so since there are protections in place to prevent 1:1 reproductions; in my experience Suno rejects requests that involve artist names and one of the examples puts spaces between the letters of “Mariah”. But the AIs did do it. I’m not sure what to do with this. There have been lawsuits over samples and melodies so this is at least even handed Human vs AI wise. I’ve seen some pretty egregious copies of melodies too outside remixed and bootlegs to so these protections aren’t useless. I don’t know if maybe more work can be done to essentially Content ID AI output first to try and reduce this in the future? That said, if you wanted to just avoid paying for a song there are much easier ways to do it than getting a commercial AI service to make a poor quality replica. The lawsuit has some merit in that the AI produced replicas it shouldn’t have, but much of this wreaks of the kind of overreach that drives people to torrents in the first place.
My take is that you can train AI on whatever you want for research purposes, but if you brazenly distribute models trained on other people's content, you should be liable for theft, especially if you are profiting off of it.
Just because AI has so much potential doesn't mean we should be reckless and abusive with it. Just because we can build a plagiarism machine capable of reproducing facsimiles of humanity doesn't mean that how we are building that is ethical or legal.
Copyright infringement becomes theft when you make money off of someone else's work, which is the goal of every one of these AI companies. I 100% mean theft.
Damaging an aircraft is a serious felony, and you don't own the airspace above your house so you legally can't interfere with them. You think the people at Amazon haven't thought about this? That thing will be covered in cameras and microphones, you won't be able to touch it without being charged.
I thought for sure that this was a joke, or that the gif of the drone sort of....pooping out that package was fake. But I found the same gif on Amazon's PR website. This has got to be the dumbest possible way to get a package delivered...
If it did it from a bit lower altitude, it wouldn't be that bad... at least for some AA batteries. And look, the package even landed with the ⬆️⬆️ arrows the right side up! (/jk)
WTF. Is the abstract concept of "competition" more important than weaning out of fossil fuels in order to keep Earth habitable for humans?
I find this mindset doubly crazy because the USA grants a ton of subsidies to oil companies.
China's government is horrible for a myriad reasons but this instance of concern trolling is just blatant pro-oil and pro-capital propaganda. The USA is antagonizing China for the wrong reasons and from the outside, their alleged motivations look stupid and petty.
It's immensely disheartening to see the supposed "leader of the free world" acting in such a dumb way in the face of an impending catastrophe.
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