From description of the Great Old One pact:

The Great Old One might be unaware of your existence or entirely indifferent to you, but the secrets you have learned allow you to draw your magic from it

Patrons can have whatever motivation or lack of motivation the DM wants. I personally like there being some kind of RPing effect. Maybe some task you have to complete, punishment for acting against your patron, slowly eroding sanity. But none of that is necessary.

They are just AC units in reverse. The biggest effect humidity is going to have is on how much condensation is going to form on the exterior radiator. That’ll form frost that’ll have to be melted in a defrosting cycle. That’ll decrease performance and efficacy. Low humidity should keep that to a minimum.

How are you tracking them to other sites? There’s not really anything that links a user account to an actual person in the data that gets federated.

I’m wondering how that got there. Teenager painting it on the floor and the parents failing to remove it properly? Or something older?

Here’s the goodreads page for it. It looks like it’ll either be extremely good or just fail horribly. I’m definitely going try to read it now.

Yes, why waste so much time trying to prosecute obviously protected expression?

If you want to see how weird it can get look at blightsight. Your consciousness can be blind but your body can still react to visual stimulus.

You are kind of hitting on one of the issues I see. The model and the works created by the model may b considered two separate things. The model itself may not be infringing in of itself. It’s not actually substantially similar to any of the individual training data. I don’t think anyone can point to part of it and say this is a copy of a given work. But the model may be able to create works that are infringing.

That is not actually one of the criteria for fair use in the US right now. Maybe that’ll change but it’ll take a court case or legislation to do.

NPR reported that a “top concern” is that ChatGPT could use The Times’ content to become a “competitor” by “creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper’s staff.”

That’s something that can currently be done by a human and is generally considered fair use. All a language model really does is drive the cost of doing that from tens or hundreds of dollars down to pennies.

To defend its AI training models, OpenAI would likely have to claim “fair use” of all the web content the company sucked up to train tools like ChatGPT. In the potential New York Times case, that would mean proving that copying the Times’ content to craft ChatGPT responses would not compete with the Times.

A fair use defense does not have to include noncompetition. That’s just one factor in a fair use defense and the other factors may be enyon their own.

I think it’ll come down to how “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes” and “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;” are interpreted by the courts. Do we judge if a language model by the model itself or by the output itself? Can a model itself be uninfringing and it still be able to potentially produce infringing content?

I think women’s leagues have their place still. Or some kind of system to encourage more women into chess. There’s currently 15.7k men with titles and only 4k women with titles. Until those numbers get closer I would want to see some kind of action taken.

If you want to get radical with women’s league you can just have the requirement for them to declare that you are a woman. It can quite literally be a checkbox on a forum when registering. Social pressure will take care of most of the issues. The edge case of men regesterioin bad faith can be handled on a case by case basis.

The gendered leagues exist to promote women in chess. They need to do this because women have historically been discriminated against. These new rules feel like they are asking trans women to prove they are oppressed enough to deserve to play in women’s leagues.

Some of the requirements for the change in status is problematic as well.

the National Rating Officer should require from the player sufficient proof of a gender change that complies with their national laws and regulations.

That is a hard requirement to meet in large chunks of the world. Many countries don’t legally recognize gender change so it may be quite literally impossible to comply with “national laws and regulations.” There’s some carve out for asylum and refugee status. But it is possible to be a trans woman in a country, not be able to legally change your gender, and not feel unsafe enough to seek asylum.

I’m reading more on the titles now. So from the actual FIDE document:

If a player holds any of the women titles, but the gender has been changed to a man, the women titles are to be abolished. Those can be renewed if the person changes the gender back to a woman and can prove the ownership of the respective FIDE ID that holds the title. The abolished women title may be transferred into a general title of the same or lower level (e.g., WGM may be transferred into FM, WIM into CM, etc.).

And from what [FIDE titles]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles) are on Wikipedia. It seems there is an underlying misogyny in how women’s titles work. It seems to me the proper solution is to get rid of the separate title requirements.

analysis of individual cases that could take up to two years.

They are already getting ready to drag their feet. The other policies announced here aren’t much better. In particular:

Holders of women’s titles who change their genders to male would see those titles “abolished,” the federation said

There’s no reason for that. What does transitioning have to do with past titles. It all reeks of transphobia.

Ah, in that case we need something like MTFDS, make the fucking discord searchable.

I think you mean RTFM. But in this case it’s WTFM so I can RTFM.

Running through Google translate and reading the article

An experimental team from Anhui has worked for more than ten hours and is trying to reproduce the results. They updated the latest progress tens of minutes ago. The results will come out in about three days. Perhaps soon, we will be able to witness the gold content of room temperature superconductivity.

It seems they are in the middle of replicating the results. Not that they have already completed replicated the results.

The actual article title is:

The first room-temperature and atmospheric-pressure superconductor has sparked global enthusiasm, and tens of thousands of people are watching the progress of the Chinese team’s reappearance

when I translated it.

I don’t think you have to prove loss sales for trademark disputes. Just a likelihood of confusion. And from the article:

As part of its marketing for the movie, Lucasfilm authorized Filson to run a cobranded campaign to promote the movie and the clothing company’s products, according to the suit. “Lucasfilm and Filson produced a 60 second commercial prominently featuring video clips from the Indiana Jones 5 film intertwined with video clips of actors using Filson’s own products,” writes Devin McRae, a lawyer for Frost River, in the complaint. “Shockingly, one of the intertwined video clips was one from Indiana Jones 5 featuring Frost River’s Geologist Pack.”

I think they might actually have a case. Use of one of their bags used in a lookalike competitors marketing campaign without clearly showing that it’s theirs is probably infringement.

Lack of sales might be an argument to be made if we get to damages but I think this will probably be settled out of court for a nondisclosured amount. It’ll probably be cheaper for both parties that way.

That’s Greg Egan for you. I recommend Diaspora by him if the simulated human theme intrigued you.