It really doesn't have to be a "fact of life", and it isn't in many places, such as Australia and England -- nations with very similar degrees of economic prosperity, and very similar cultures, to the USA.

The Looker is fantastic. I was particularly disappointed to learn that Blow took it as an insult, though.

Good stuff, Georgia. Especially with it being unanimous. Though given Trump's demonstrated typical approach, I can't imagine the rebuke from the court will prevent him from making similar attempts in the future.

Realistically? Something a lot like what we currently have, but with everyone having access to prompt healthcare, living in comfort. A focus on community and cooperation being more dominant in the culture, rather than competition and comparison.

Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.

With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.

I just learned to accept that I am weird and filthy.

Also, neural network weights are just a bunch of numbers, and I'm pretty sure data can't be copyrighted.

Just being "a bunch of numbers" doesn't stop it from being a work, it doesn't stop it from being a derivative work, and you absolutely can copyright data -- all digitally encoded works are "just data".

A trained AI is not a measurement of the natural world. It is a thing that has been created from the processing of other things -- in the common sense of it the word, it is derivative of those works. What remains, IMO, is the question of if it would be a work, or something else, and if that something else would be distinct enough from being a work to matter.

No? No. Not all work is analogous to training a generative model. That's a really bizarre thing to say, and I'm shocked to hear it from you.

The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn't contain any identifiable "copies" of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.

That's a HUGE assumption you've made, and certainly not something that has been tested in court, let alone found to be true.

In the context of existing legal precedent, there's an argument to be made that the resulting model is itself a derivative work of the copyright-protected works, even if it does not literally contain an identifiable copy, as it is a derivative of the work in the common meaning of the term.

If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.

A key distinction here is that a human brain is not a work, and in that sense, a human brain learning things is not a derivative work.

You're absolutely right. Heliocentrism and geocentrism aren't "questions of reference frame", they're cosmological models.

Nobody is using a geocentric model when they launch satellites, as any geocentric model that works with our existing observations of the universe ultimately does not have a functional understanding of gravity. And it will be remarkably difficult to keep a satellite in orbit if you disagree with the universe about how gravity works.

Urgh. He's seriously trying make a comeback after Godus? You'd think he'd have thrown the towel in and retired.

NTA. Your agent should have waited, or clarified, or even just communicated in any way, in order to continue inspecting the property. And even if it's such a huge problem that they missed one room, it's within their capacity as a functioning adult to come back another day to make sure the room isn't somehow in a terrible condition that isn't already reflected by the rest of the property.

But they're not the asshole either. Your housemate is, assuming they're stressing you out about this and making you worried that you're going to make him homeless. It sounds like his housing is a source of anxiety for him, but he shouldn't be putting that on you.