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Beware Hollywood’s digital demolition: it’s as if your favourite films and TV shows never existed
  • For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.

    CRT TVs didn't need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.

    The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.

    The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.

    This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.

    To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.

    Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.

    VCRs didn't usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.

  • Does money corrupt, or is money attractive to questionable people?
  • I grew up near an area where a large number high net worth people. For example as a kid I thought Lamborghini was a common car because I saw them all the time.

    In my experience lots of money brings out your true self and let's you act the way you want. So if you are inclined to be self centered and an asshole you can be a massive asshole. You can also be generous and kind.

    Most rich people are pretty normal. However the normal ones do try to not make it known that they are rich. So you often don't notice the normal rich people.

    It's also hard to tell the difference between a person who lives on a 200k a year income and a person with a double digit millions net worth.

    I had a friend as a teen. I invited him to go diving with me as he had never been. He showed up with a 20k wetsuite.

  • Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image
  • It comes down to how transformative the work is. They look at things like how much of the existing work you used and how much creative changes were made.

    So grabbing your 9 favorite paintings and putting them in 3x3 grid is not going to give you fair use.

    Cutting out sections of faces from different works and stitching them together into a franken face could give you enough for fair use if you made it different enough.

  • Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image
  • There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.

    Even when you have copyright on something you don't have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.

    See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It's to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I'd have loved to see the courts decision.

    As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.

    I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.

    To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

    1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

    This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.

    Nature of the copyrighted work.

    Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.

    -> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

    I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn't contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.

    Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

    Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.

    Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It's going to take years for this to be decided.

    Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn't fair use.

  • What can I do with US$10K that is a good investment?
  • Money market or CD is going to have terrible return. You will be lucky to match inflation. Get a low overhead SP 500 index fund. By low overhead I'm taking .15% or less. You should be able to find .125% with a bit of poking around.

  • What’s the craziest or most outrageous (maybe even NSFW) incident that led to someone being fired from your workplace?
  • Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.

    The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.

    Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn't afford any interruptions.

    We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.

    One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.

    I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.

    On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.

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    Baltimore bridge collapses into river after being hit by cargo ship
    www.theguardian.com Baltimore bridge collapse: at least six missing as Biden laments ‘terrible accident’

    Mayor says rescue efforts continuing after cargo vessel hit Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending vehicles into the water

    Baltimore bridge collapse: at least six missing as Biden laments ‘terrible accident’

    A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.

    At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.

    “All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.

    Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)HU
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