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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Soooo… Interstellar was wrong with all the shaking of the camera?

    All for the cinematography :) I will say that there’s a small caveat in really extreme situations like close to a black hole. Spacetime gets so warped there that your head and your feet take very divergent paths through spacetime, enough to stretch you out and even break you apart at the atomic level. You’d definitely notice that…

    In case of accelerating ship, I wonder what would happen in local frame once you hit/get really close to c. You’d get decelerated out of nowhere? Just as if you hit something?

    Oh boy, special relativity is another fun one. So here’s the thing: there’s no “universal speed” that you’re moving so you’re never any closer to c no longer how long you accelerate for. To accelerate is to change your reference frame and there are no special reference frames.

    Which is to say that any physical test you could run inside your ship will give you the same result, always. Accelerate for 13 billion years at any rate and check the the how fast light moves within your ship, the answer is always c.

    This is where the name relativity comes in. You have to think in terms of relative speed. Your speed relative to earth will indeed advance closer and closer to c but never reach it. There’s a bunch of really wild and crazy implications behind this.

    Like that acceleration doesn’t change the relative speeds of things uniformly. Keep accelerating at 1 meter per second per second and every second Earth’s relative speed changes by less than 1m/s. And look up relativity of simultaneity, another consequence of special relativity. It’s fascinating stuff.


  • One mind-altering fact that I love is that there’s no “acceleration due to gravity,” once you’re in free fall, until you hit the ground. Hop in a space ship with no windows and fly off straight in some direction. Turn off the engines and watch an accelerometer. It’ll never read anything until you run into something.

    You could fly past a planet, a massive star, even a black hole. Your path through space could be full of curves and loops but you’ll never feel it. It’s popular to think of those things as like crazy high G turns but they’re not. You’re just flying in a straight line through space time.

    On the flip side, say someone knocks you out and puts you on that ship. You wake up and instead of being weightless, you can walk around the ship like normal on earth. Are you on earth or is the ship in space accelerating at a constant rate? Again, there’s no way to tell. They are, physically, the same.









  • There are multiple facets here that all kinda get mashed together when people discuss this topic and the publicly available/public domain difference kinda gets at that.

    • An AI company downloading a publicly available work isn’t a violation of copyright law. Copyright gives the owner exclusive right to distribute their work. Publishing it for anybody to download is them exercising that right.
    • Of course, if the work isn’t publicly available and the AI company got it, someone probably did violate copyright laws, likely the people who distributed the data set to the company because they’re not supposed to be passing around the work without the owner’s permission.
    • All that is to say, downloading something isn’t making a copy. Sending the work is making a copy, as far as copyright is concerned. Whether the person downloading it is going to use it for something profitable doesn’t really change anything there. Only if they were to become the sender at some later point does it matter. In other words, there’s no violation of copyright law by the company that can really occur during the whole “training” phase of AI development.
    • Beyond that, AI isn’t in the business of serving copies of works. They might come close in some specific instances, but that’s largely a technical problem that developers want to fix than a fundamental purpose of these models.
    • The only real case that might work against them is whether or not the works they produce are derivative… But derivative/transformative has a pretty strict legal definition. It’s not enough to show that the work was used in the creation of a new work. You can, for example, create a word cloud of your favorite book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, or produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie. None of these could exist without deriving from a copyrighted work but none of them count as a legally derivative work.
    • I chose those examples because they are basic statistical analyses not far from what AI training involves. There’s a lot of aspects of a work that are not covered by copyright. Style, structure, factual information. The kinds of things that AI is mostly interested in replicating.
    • So I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of success in taking down AI companies with copyright. We might see some small scale success when an AI crosses a line here or there. But unless a judge radically alters the bounds of copyright law, at everyone’s detriment, their opponents are going to have an uphill battle to fight here.