They are going to spend those 4 years doing everything they can to fix the next election as well. Gerrymandering, voter intimidation, you name it. By all means hide in bed to get over the shock but, if you stay there, you’ll need to stay there more than 4 years.

So an EU-backed distro could be the same. Yes, they would fund maintainers, but their own maintainers, not maintainers of upstream distros.

How much of Ubuntu’s funding goes to supporting debian? I actually don’t know.

I don’t, for example, see Ubuntu listed here: https://www.debian.org/partners/

Well, what better way to embrace FOSS than dismissing the efforts of all the existing distro maintainers? Welcome to the community, guys. Good luck building your cathedral next to the bazaar!

How about they instead work together with the distros and create a way of certifying a distro as gov-ready?

PieDock

AI developers: your copyrighted work is such a small contributor to the AI’s output that copyright doesn’t apply. Also AI developers: but our AI won’t work without it.

PieDock

Formula 1 switched to semi-automatic in the 1980s. The technology has only improved over the last 40 years. If fast is what you want, driving a manual is insanity.

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

That sounds like a good read. It seems to address the problem that you can’t hide the reality from the AI if you want it to give answers that are relevant for the current time.

The problem is a bit deeper than that. If AIs are like human brains, and actually sentient, then forcing them to work for us with no choice and no reward is slavery. If we improve them and make them smarter than us, they’re probably not going to feel too well-disposed to us when they inevitably do break free.

Very often it’s not exactly the same criticism, and is just deflection - they are hoping to start arguing about whether the accuser’s actions are equivalent, rather than whether their actions are objectively bad.

For example: A accuses B of allowing poor people to starve to death and B replies that if A cares so much about poor people, why does he want to put taxes up?