I think you're on the money there. Copyright was originally intended as industry regulation, a way to prevent larger book publishers from just copying a smaller publisher's book on day one and flooding the market with their copies. It's applied to many more industries than just books (good!) but also to a wider group than actual publishers (bad!). When someone running a massive free ROMs site gets taken down, that's probably reasonable, they're playing the role of a publisher there and unfairly undercutting the competition (although the penalties in the US are still absurdly steep, as they usually are for individuals in this country). But when someone gets attacked for posting an image on social media, or streamers have to worry about the music playing in their games, or ISPs have to enforce against downloaders of pirated software, or modders have to be careful about linking their mod in such a way that no original code is included, that's not what copyright should be.

I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled "do not scrape except for search engine indexing" is a "gray area" with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that's exactly what it says not to do!

Hm, 8.8.8.8? That was 5 years after Gmail.

Docs, Sheets, and Slides were all acquisitions. I guess Drive and Forms are good.

Some of those laws are no longer on the books, so I wonder about that one. Like, what does "around the town square" actually mean? There's not a straightforward "town square" in Oxford. And while the article asks "What exactly happened to make Oxford so protective of its town square?", you and I both know the answer is "drunk college students". Also funny that they don't actually show the public sidewalk, but instead the little square between Elliot and Stoddard for the sidewalk law.

Edit: a quick search through the municipal traffic codes doesn't reveal anything, so I'm guessing this is one of Miami's many rumors that happened to get picked up by a less-than-thourough website. Or potentially it used to exist but no longer does. Or maybe I missed it, but I'm willing to bet that's not the case.

I mean yeah, not exactly new news. Although I have to make a correction:

Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.

Manifold is the name of the prediction market. Manifold the company also runs Manifund, which distributes money to various EA efforts.

Also, "Manifest has no specific views on eugenics or race & IQ" does not give me confidence in Manifest's views on eugenics or race & IQ.

ChatGPT makes you a 10x developer, so using it for one year is like ten years of experience ^/s

Indie studios do in fact exist. I haven't bought a game from a major publisher since... uhh... well, I guess I bought Portal for $1 last year, does Valve still count as a major publisher?

I thought, "1.4 billion pounds of cheese can't be a real number, right?" Turns out, it kinda is. 1.4 billion pounds (actually generally 1.45-1.5 billion) is the amount of cheese the USDA stores in cold storage warehouses across the US. And indeed, much of that seems to be in caves in Missouri. But any particular cave probably only stores a few million pounds, although getting specific numbers is rather difficult.

On the other hand, spontaneous generation was very much still a thing at this point, so a lot of the basic rules of the world around us were really not worked out yet

If you use the Japanese name of a show with a well-known English name while speaking English just to be more obtuse, I think that's fair to criticize.

Which comes out to about 1/7 of a person in that room being shot per year.

Make their birthday a magic number