Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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I’m still watching today’s episode but just to let you know; I’m not currently a Club TWiT member, but if you end up getting those stickers 
Regarding Threads: I’m pretty happy with it so far, I hope they do end up adopting ActivityPub as planned. However one analogy I heard from The Verge which really made sense to me is that Threads will be the blue bubble of the Fediverse.
While other instances in the Fediverse might end up being able to follow Threads users, the UX might make you the equivalent to a green bubble. Threads may end up the new iMessage.
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@JeffJarvis how do you not know your tyres are nearly bald?
In Germany, we have minimum tread depths (1.5mm for summer tyres and 4mm for winter tyres) and you need to check them regularly. Driving below the minimum tread depth gets you points and a fine per tyre, if all 4 are under the minimum depth, you can actually lose your license in one traffic stop. You are also automatically at fault, if you are involved in an accident.
Winter is similar, if you are driving in snow or icy conditions with summer tyres, you get a fine and points, possibly charged for blocking traffic, if you get stuck, and, again automatically at fault in the case of an accident.
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I have to echo Stacey’s comment about people simply not caring about the amount of personal info that Threads gobbles up. (I was surprised that she didn’t realize that WhatsApp did the same thing.) There is a definite disconnect between those in the tech reviewing/writing/podcasting/etc. community when it comes to caring about the privacy of say, iPhones & then using Meta products, or for that matter Google products. I mean, doesn’t Google collect about the same amount of your info that Meta does? Yet, it seems most every tech person seems to use Google search, docs, calendar, mail, etc.
I think the average person just uses what works for them, figuring all their info is out there already. The tech community seem, at times, preoccupied with privacy, yet their actions seem to defy their concerns.
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Posted something similar recently; most apps are tracking tons of stuff via your device Andrew Melder: "Those who are shouting about Threads/Meta data co…" - Mastodon
It’s good that the hosts don’t anthropomorphize models. My prediction is that the real threat to human society is that a small influential percentage of the population asserts that these black boxes have consciousness. I’m not sure if the people who are convinced we will see AGI have any way to prove themselves wrong. On the other end you’ll have people like me, who assert that there is little fundamentally different between what “AI” is doing and what statisticians and data scientists have been doing for centuries. If there is little difference at a fundamental level between the two, but “AI” works on tokens while “regression models” works on air pollution data, how can we claim that one model is superior to the other?
I don’t think the copyright claims are as open and shut as they are made out to be. Fair use has always been an exclusion for transformative work that doesn’t compete with the original. When people were scraping the internet for research purposes, I think you could argue fair use. But as soon as you suck in copyrighted content to automagically produce infinite amounts of similar content, the fair use claim stands on uncertain ground. It’s good that these companies are challenged.
Just look at music: sampling another artist’s work is has a long history, but it is decidedly not fair use. Artists pay royalties on the songs they sample.
The argument for fair use IMO stems from treating the LLM like a human. “If you read a book and then made new books using previous books you read, that wouldn’t violate copyright.” This is true, but a human reading every book in the world and writing a new one doesn’t risk putting an industry out of business. Given that the purpose of copyright is theoretically to protect creators (as enshrined in the noncompetition of fair use), I think there is plenty of room for judges to move on either side of this issue.
Finally: yes, I will join the club for Stacey stickers.
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Staying offline seems to be the only way to escape this. But then, you swipe that money saver card at the grocery store…
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This.
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