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Recent Notes

Aras Pranckevičius · 4w
Someone else pointed at this: for all the "massive testing, production-ready, blah blop" talk that Unity does, they also ship pieces of code like this. This is from Unity IAP package, new stable versi...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... looks like they didn't fully embrace memory management 🥁

I wish c# had a way to partially compile even the disabled parts, I've made similar mistakes a bunch of times while developing a unity multiplatform library - it became difficult to keep track of all the variations (4 platforms x 3 RPs x several unity version ranges)
Alice I. Cecile · 6w
AI: virtually no subject provokes such vitriol in my communities. I can grant the haters many of its harms, but their solutions leave much to be desired. I fear for the future even as I wonder at the...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q...

> infrasound harm are effectively pseudoscience

in what sense? there's plenty of research to suggest it annoys people at the very least, for example:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876/full

and idk about you but I wouldn't want to live in some location that effectively guarantees that I'd be more annoyed than elsewhere 100% of the time
Aras Pranckevičius · 8w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg luckily I still know some people at Unity, and poked them to poke others
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg "to promote the useful arts and sciences" - not to "ensure fair reward."
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's origina...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... I don't think anyone's arguing in court that a genAI model training script is infringement by itself?

The issue is with the data set the companies collected and fed into the script.

If they had the rights to every single image they used, there would be no lawsuit.

Sorry if I was initially unclear, that was what I was referring to, not the general act of "training".
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg No, you're still wrong. The act of making a transient copy of a work in order to examine it and publish facts derived from it does not infringe copyright. You don't need the rights ...
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > Ultimately though what matters for infringement is whether the original work was s...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... In that case you can argue that the particular work was not substantially used in the end result, if all you needed was a pile of pixels (or a palette) without their positional association to each other.

To me, cases like this sit far outside the "substantially used" circle.

AI "models" on the other hand, explicitly consider the positional associations of the pixels of the original images at various scales, not just their color.
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg You could produce a painting that consisted of the "average" face by measuring and averaging out the features of every face in every painting extant and it would not infringe copyright.
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg Yes, there's some interesting edge-cases implicit in this new, more explicit rule that...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... Hypothetically, if someone were to extract all the brush strokes from a file, wrote them into a book, retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work, to me that's still a clear-cut infringement, not even de minimis (which could apply if only e.g. less than 0.1% of the brush strokes were used).

At the end of the day, copyright is an economical tool to ensure the author is fairly rewarded for their work, not an obfuscation challenge.
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work You are describing an infringing *use*, which does not make the machine itself infringing. T...
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg Further: the cases against models are only tangentially related to memorization. It's ...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... Perfect memorization is also irrelevant - lossy compression is also a thing, doesn't stop copyright from applying (otherwise reencoding videos would remove their copyright).

Ultimately though what matters for infringement is whether the original work was substantially used to produce the new work (regardless of the exact process) - and clearly that's the case.

Not even the AI companies dispute infringement, they argue that it's "fair use" instead.
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > Ultimately though what matters for infringement is whether the original work was substantially used to produce the new work (regardless of the exact process) - and clearly that's the...
Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > "Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruc...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q... That doesn't make sense. That's what most computer data effectively is - instructions to reconstruct data in a more accessible format. IDK if you're familiar with art tools but some literally encode the brush strokes (like Substance Painter or Clip Studio Paint vector layers) needed to reconstruct the picture.
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg Yes, there's some interesting edge-cases implicit in this new, more explicit rule that copyright inheres only for human (and not machine) work. While it's unlikely a case regarding the...
Cory Doctorow · 22w
Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Supreme Court saves artists from AI; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap/ #Pluralistic 1/ https://static.mamot.fr/media_attach...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
@nprofile1q...

> [..] all seek to establish that training an AI model is a copyright infringement. This is wrong [..]

This is such a strange hill to die on. Of course "training" infringes - it's compression.

Framing it as "mathematical analysis" or collecting "facts" is disingenuous.

Fourier transform could be easily described the exact same way, except it's fully reversible.

"Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree.
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Cory Doctorow · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq2spdmtqs75xq7mje3am8jq0nr33rkclkyzxm8r22l7w92f0zqsqsdfepsg > "Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree. Literally you could write a book describing each brushstroke needed to rec...
Arvīds Kokins profile picture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egswms3F_yk

game developers seem to do the opposite of filmmakers

people have often talked about lens flares and chromatic aberration but it's even more basic:

🌗 shadows 🌓

game developers try to reconstruct all the shadows, from clouds and geometry to inside materials

meanwhile lighting artists in movies are basically trying to get rid of them

makes me wonder if it's even possible to get a "cinematic"-looking game with "correct" shadows

#gamedev #graphics