Public domain on the other hand is legally only possible if/when copyright has expired. That means the owner has enjoyed proceeds from copyright protection for more than his own lifetime. That is fair. It is still not comparable.

EDIT: since you tacked on more like "wind, gravity, radioactivity" etc, I would still not classify them as "free". They are invaluable to very existence of life.

"Knowledge passed on" is also after someone (in ancestry) has paid for it through blood, sweat and tears. It isn't "free". "Public domain" is legally recognized form of "knowledge passed on".

Except it is actually taxed based on HP in various countries. Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy use engine horsepower to levy annual car taxes.

> In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Citizens are paying taxes for betterment of roads irrespective of whether they own vehicles or not. In India, betterment charges are collected for construction/maintenance of roads if you own land. Property tax collected every year has a certain allocation for maintenance/upkeep of roads. Apart from that, money from direct and indirect tax collections are allocated for roads upkeep as well. It just is done indirectly rather than a direct road tax if you have vehicles (road tax is actually an extra tax you pay APART from taxes you already pay for upkeep/maintenance of roads).

> Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. Some countries use HP while others use CC. But end of the day, they use some measurement to determine taxes to be paid. It is not free.

EDIT: Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

To answer this in more detail: HP/CC and all other measurements were created to equalize with human specific metrics. Bridges, for example, have safety measured based on how much weight it can sustain at any given time (called load limit). Weight, in this specific case, is an equalizing measurement (it can be in tonnes, kN, PSF, Pa etc). A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.

No.

> If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine?

Not mine. But the company that made the coffee machine. It is stealing IP.

> Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement?

It is just a fancy way of saying you stole someone's IP. You can call it infringement if it makes you feel good. But the act is the same end of the day.

"United States copyright law protects only works of human creation". That means the source of creation of any work has to be from a human being for it to be copyrightable. Machine-generated output is not copyrightable and is public domain by default. If you, for example, use Claude to generate code for you, for any project (be it private or public), it is automatically public domain and you have no way to claim copyright over that generated work. It can be used by anyone (including the AI provider) to further train models or heck duplicate your work with zero consequences. So it is a violation of primary producer of copyright work (which was used in training models) as neither was he/she compensated for use of the work, but subsequent derivations (generated work) even strip of his/her legal protections as guaranteed by Constitution of various countries (in US copyright law applies only to human beings). So naturally it follows that copyrightable work can only be consumed by humans. Machine-generated code is not on the same footing. It is violating copyright law.

What do you mean? Xenophobia does not mean what you think it means, especially so in this context. Also, every creator/producer of content has rights on who/what has access to his/her produced work. It is not xenophobia. And it is definitely not xenophobic to call out stealing of copyrighted works.

EDIT: Let me clarify this further. A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well. Else it would be, using your own words, "xenophobic" against humans to have their copyrightable works be consumed by any species (other than humans) while the reverse is not recognized by Law.

https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be...

> Didn't pay a cent.

Taxpayers did pay on your behalf by funding the Library via the Government (if Library is public).

Nothing is free. Except ofcourse stealing, which is free.

The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard. I don't understand why we have to bend-over backwards when it comes to humans being exploited by AI companies.

It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.

We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.

EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.

> some interpretation of the Vedic texts, which doesn't actually entail all that much

If you studied the Vedas you would know why this issue exists in the first place. The Vedas talk of One Supreme Brahman who should be given Havis during a Yajna. The dispute between the sects is on who the Supreme Brahman is identified as. Every name in the Vedas is but a name of the Supreme. Vyasa composed the Brahma Sutras to unravel it. But then, as is the case with Dharmics, we have around 30+ commentaries on the Brahma Sutras itself. This, coupled with commentaries on Prasthanatrayi as well as interpretation of Puranas created sects.

All of them come within the umbrella term of Hinduism as all of it is Dharmic and native to the Indian subcontinent.

That's exactly the point of why he even attempted to have this conversation with you. It was to convert you to Hinduism.

I explain it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49620794

This is literally how Islam got to places in Asia and spread. It was through Sufis who acted as initial points of contact.

> A lot of these traditions are much more flexible than whatever is the dogma or institutional version of the time suggests.

This is only so when it comes to missionaries in each religion. Be it Evangelists saying Vishnu is Avatar of Christ (we literally have Christ idols shaped like Vishnu with multiple arms and sitting on a lotus in a Church in India), Sufis singing Krishna is same as Allah or heck even ISKCON claiming Christ is an Avatar of Krishna /Vishnu. That does not make "traditions flexible". It's just a cheap tactic to increase followers/harvest souls. These converts are typically fluid in their own convictions and can easily be swayed one way or the other based on reasons unconnected to the Religion/Dogma/Philosophy itself. Reasons could range from political, monetary to finding fame/popularity within a new sect/group/cult/ideology.

Very few are seekers of Truth.

Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu.

It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Buddha as Gautama Buddha who founded Buddhism.

What do you mean by "local religion"?

I don't dislike her. I am talking about her antics doing a disservice to something as serious as climate change. To the point where there is at least 50% of the World not believing in climate change and associating it with Greta and her antics. (also, when I say Greta I mean all the crazy lunatics like her... which includes fools gluing themselves to the streets, blocking roads used by common folk and splashing oil on paintings).

> When would they have been taken seriously? They have been warning the world since at least the 1980's. How long do we have to wait?

It was not pushed with same urgency as that of Ozone by the media. What was needed was putting a sense of urgency into the public through media without making it into a clown show.

> Billions and billions of people did exactly that, and nothing happened.

I am saying she should not have been the face of the movement. And yes she is one of billions and she should have stayed that way. Maybe excelled in some field that actually suits her. Instead of becoming a prop for politicians and media who love to have her face plastered everywhere as a caricature of climate change activists.

> In all the decades before Greta Thunberg, all the scientists who warned the world about climate change were largely ignored. Almost nothing happened to fight climate change. Greta has been in the spotlights for less than a decade. And yet it's all her fault? That is completely preposterous.

The scientists were not ignored. Their messages never reached the masses as the media did not spread it with the same urgency that was Ozone or heck even COVID. You did not need someone like Greta to make people realize dangers of COVID right? Most countries followed lockdown procedures. It only became an issue once Fauci and co started becoming partisan. Initial weeks of COVID lockdowns (wherever it was implemented) were extremely successful. You just need the same sense of urgency for climate change and that can only happen through media and the right set of scientists. Take the Nepal disaster as an example of effects of climate change. How is the media portraying it? AS some natural disaster. Very few outlets are directly linking it to climate change.

> It looks like you're the one who lets Greta's opinion and actions influence yours.

My opinion on climate change is exactly that of Greta's. However, I know what I am. I am not a scientist. Much less a climate scientist. So I won't go on media claiming to be a representative of the movement and causing mayhem. I can at max educate the people around me to the dangers of climate change. But I won't make a fool of myself publicly by speaking on a topic that I have only cursory knowledge of.

> My opinion on climate change has not changed by the appearance of Greta Thunberg.

You are not the target audience. It is the remaining 50+% people who do not believe in climate change and think it is some grand conspiracy who need convincing. And they can never be convinced by a clown like Greta.

Funny how this same media brought Greta to limelight. If you want to kill the messenger at least realize that it is the one that gave Greta her popularity (for better or worse).

> What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?

Simple. Stayed out of news. Stayed in school and finished education instead of taking a gap year. The ones who should have been given coverage by media should have been the actual scientists working on this crisis. They would have been taken seriously. Instead it turned into a big joke.

> By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?

Ofcourse there would have been. The World took scientists seriously when it came to ozone. It did take scientists seriously when it came to COVID even (though Fauci and co caused a lot of damage by becoming a political hack causing polarization when it should not have been). There was absolutely no reason to assume people would not have taken climate change seriously if it was presented in the right manner.

> This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one

The very fact you are seeing it often recently should tell you that a lot of people feel that way. Irrespective of which side of the divide you are on, the messaging is lost if an issue as critical as climate change is hijacked by a bunch of teens who are not taken seriously by those in power. If you ask me, the politicians and media were more than happy to let Greta be the face of the movement. Think about the last sentence I said for a bit and you'll realize you have been played.

At least if you have the population by your side, you wouldn't have "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1]

They are all willing to risk everything to see if their bet on achieving "singularity" fructifies. I don't see us getting anywhere close (at least with the current tech).

[1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper

If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.

Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.

> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?

Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.