Because historically (and for the most part today as well), it costs money.

Sure, today stuff like ChatGPT and the somewhat older Google Translate exists, but that doesn’t solve the cost issue. (And I’m skirting on the huge elephant in the room called quality for a bit of brevity).

There’s a huge chance someone paid a good chunk of money for all the books you find dirt-cheap at a flea market, check out at a library or happen to find in your own house.

Printing physical books is expensive. Publishers also want a margin, and a lot of authors want royalties.

In the end even if the publisher and author are both good souls demanding nothing, someone needs to foot the cost of printing. But before that, you’d need to go through non-trivial talks with most authors’ publishers and/or authors themselves.

Then you need to arange for translation, typesetting and printing if you’re not doing it yourself. That takes both time and money.

And if you were to do all that yourself, it’d be a huge time investment, with a potential lawsuit if you don’t do those damn talks. So most just don’t bother.

Businesses are incredibly inefficient, even though some are “successful” and have a lot of cash to burn. They need to pay workers, bills, buy and fix equipment, and of course, a cut needs to go to the top people. Usually the “golden” 80-20 rule applies to almost everything: 20% of books make 80% of money, 20% of employees make 80% of money, and a different 20% of people do 80% of the work, etc. And of course, in this world, it’s all about the money.

A translation is usually initiated by a publisher that has a manager who wants to get his section’s metrics up to go cry to his own manager about how good he is to get a raise or not get fired. This is a daily grind. Sometimes (but quite rarely), that leads the manager to the decision of publishing a new book. Usually such actions are guided by things like bestseller lists, reviews and personal biases of the manager and the company as a whole. Sometimes the publisher hires an agency to try to approximate the demand for such a book (even more money spent). Then they do the talks. This also costs money, and the result is also a cost of money (the royalties to be paid). Then comes translation, then printing, then distribution to bookstores, and finally advertising.

These are just the steps that come to mind. All cost money, and all the books you see for sale in a bookstore went through all of these steps. For a library, not as much (but still the vast majority) did.

Sure, not every situation is the same, so there are companies that specialize in providing translations of well-known works or companies whose manager at one point said they need to publish 25 translations yearly (instead of one individual one), so they kind of “flood” the market.

But sometimes it’s just the whim of a newspaper whose management thought printing classic works of shorter length and bundling them with their newspaper would drive up newspaper sales.

It’s incredible how each document (edition of a book or otherwise) has multiple stories (of the author, publisher, translator, seller, advertiser, buyer, worker in logistics/delivery driver,…) that shaped the life of it. Some lasted a few hours, and some took hundereds of man-hours. All of this somehow translates to money.

That’s the long answer.

The short one is: 80% the economy and 20% human laziness.

My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.

The other is that even if it were, it won’t just play, but rather send you to the shiniest new subscription service to subscribe.

It’s a both-ways situation.

They allow only the Fisher-Price version of phones so less-than-power-users don’t do something stupid.

They also allow only Fisher-Price so power users can’t beat Celebrite as easily.

Nor does it “read” its input. It doesn’t even process it.

It’s built/tuned using it. Or as AI techros would say, trained.

But a “backdoor” which is swung wide open if you don’t secure it isn’t really a backdoor. It’s more akin to an open window.

Wearing a pink blouse and skirt, complete with rainbow-colored nails.

One is too little.

Our Glorious Leader needs at least three.

Ideally, he’d retroactively get one for each year after his International Debut in Cinema (Home Alone 2)!

Yes.

Me and my buddies. And a lot of wilderness.

They should change their name to Antitethical then.

some sort of tracking of him was done that the feds don’t want people to know about

That “tracking” is all the work they did to find a suitable fake perp. If they had any real evidence and Luigi did do it, it would’ve been admitted almost immediately. They have very little to lose.

it was something that may be ruled unconstitutional and risk the case against him

And besides, if that were true and Luigi truly did it, don’t you think the current SCOTUS would use this great stroke of luck as a way of undoing some “dangerous” precedent?

Well…

CK did want guns readily accessible. CK did say gun violence deaths were a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Given the fact that Luigi might be pinned for the crime, it’s equaly likely that CK truly has had a larger share of responsibility in the killing at hand.

No. It’s more as if you had to pay for the pony to get it, and then:

If you want to ride the pony, that’s $2. The saddle has a coin slot to pay. It also has spikes poking both you and the pony if you don’t pay. Any time you get off, the spikes relock, requiring another payment to unlock.

This is the exact same situation minus the animal cruelty part and with money being swapped with time.

Until it gets a proper Guest mode like Chrome (which is basically a private window without the shame of using one), the only thing they did is add a cute little interface to an ancient feature.

Soon you cannot believe anything you read online.

That’s a bit too blanket of a statement.

There are, always were, and always will be reputable sources. Online or in print. Writteb or not.

What AI will do is increase the amount of slop disproportionately. What it won’t do is suddenly make the real, actual, reputable sources magically disappear. Finding may become harder, but people will find a way - as they always do. New search engines, curated indexes of sites. Maybe even something wholly novel.

.gov domains will be as reputable as the administration makes them - with or without AI.

Wikipedia, so widely hated in academia, is proven to be at least as factual as Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be harder for it to deal with spam than it was before, but it mostly won’t be phased.

Your local TV station will spout the same disinformation (or not) - with or without AI.

Using AI (or not) is a management-level decision. What use of AI is or isn’t allowed is as well.

AI, while undenkably a gamechanger, isn’t as big a gamechanger as it’s often sold as, and the parallels between the AI and the dot-com bubble are staggering, so bear with me for a bit:

Was dot-com (the advent of the corporate worldwide Internet) a gamechanger? Yes.

Did it hurt the publishing industry? Yes.

But is the publishing industry dead? No.

Swap “AI” for dot-com and “credible content” for the publishing industry and you have your boring, but realistic answer.

Books still exist. They may not be as popular, but they’re still a thing. CDs and vinyl as well. Not ubiquitous, but definitely chugging along just fine. Why should “credible content” die, when the disruption AI causes to the intellectual supply chain is so much smaller than suddenly needing a single computer and an Internet line instead of an entire large-scale printing setup?

No one mentioned, say, GPS or a similar technology. Therefore, if you can narrow down someone’s location in any way, you have location information.

Just like the citizens of the United States do not support the actions of the United States government

They do. Period.

If they didn’t, they’d complain. Louder and louder with each passing day, until the cause went away.

However, that’s not what’s happening.

Minding your own business means you support the current power structures and those in them. Silent support is still - support.

Italy is doing good on the complaining front: they disrupt the economy. Not enough so anything changes in essence, but just enough so some lines go down and alarm bells start ringing.

Most people, unfortunately, eat up the “antisemitic” and “Everyone I don’t like is Khamas” arguments. A good chunk not because they’re stupid amd can’t differentiate, but because it gives them an easy way of coping with what they’re seeing: truly bad stuff happening. Bad stuff they like.

the phone

So that’s it!

Seriously though, phones are terrible for file management. Probably because every file gets thrown… Somewhere. Most into Downloads, some into Documents, and then some apps have their own esoteric space.

All the file management UIs are equally terrible: made to look nice, but dysfunctional.

Nothing ever prompts you where to save your shiny new file.

And, to be fair, screen size doesn’t help.

I know a few artists and get their complaints against AI, but I feel they’ve been way too overblown.

I look at AI as what it is - a new technology. Everthing was one at some point.

For example - cameras. Do you think artists who learned painting were happy when cameras started displacing them?

Of course there was outrage. It’s natural to protect your interests. However, technology has to be allowed to progress and people’s rights have to be respected. Developments in technology such as photography or AI are a disruption of the existing legal framework, and the two sides’ rights (those of the users and if those displaced) must be balanced.

However, unlike photography, there’s a clear legal basis and precedent analogous to AI art - in most places recieving copyrighted material without permission isn’t punishable while distributing it to others is.

An AI model is in essence a retrieval system in the sense of the US DMCA. Most other places have substantially similar laws in spirit, and most places draw the distinction between distribution and “fair” uses of infinging material. A good rule of thumb is that selling access is a big no-no, distributing is a big risk, and merely using a much smaller one. All technically illegal (as are memes).

To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)

But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?

As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.

Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.

And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.

If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.

“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.

However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.

Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).

It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.

This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.