patatahooligan

Both su and sudo originally meant "superuser" because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to "switch user" because this functionality was added later.

It's not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU

No, the intent and the consequences of an action are generally taken into consideration in discussions of ethins and in legislation. Additionally, this is not just a matter of ToS. What OpenAI does is create and distribute illegitimate derivative works. They are relying on the argument that what they do is transformative use, which is not really congruent with what "transformative use" has meant historically. We will see in time what the courts have to say about this. But in any case, it will not be judged the same way as a person using a tool just to skip ads. And Revanced is different to both the above because it is a non-commercial service.

It's definitely not "draconian" to make enshittification illegal. But you don't regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.

We've essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.

According to The Guardian he got $60M in stock and pension for being fired. Also it seems that stock price didn't fall much after the crashes and the grounding. It is only after COVID hit that Boeing's price plummeted. So it might be only by pure luck that he lost anything of value at all.

Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else's "style" because you know that "style" is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying "style", but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney's drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We've seen countless examples of AI's copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse's character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It's not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI's only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can't generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

• "Innocent until proven guilty" is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
• We care about peoples' well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
• Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that's hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

The source code in this torrent is a clone of the git repo. I don't know if there are missing branches but it should have the entirety of the master branch history at least.

I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it's not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP's copy). I can verify:

• that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies
• after that commit, OP's copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant

So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github!

Clarifications:

• This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally
• I did not check branches other than master (yet?)
• I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo
• You don't have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP... It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies.

I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.

If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.

Exactly! Copyright law is terrible. We need to hold AI companies to the same standard that everyone else is held. Then we might actually get big corporations lobbying to improve copyright law for once. Giving them a free pass right now would be a terrible waste of an opportunity in addition to being an injustice.

First time I've heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That's what they're trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they'll get away with it.

The general public doesn't have to understand anything about how it works as long as they get a clear "verified by ..." statement in the UI.