After listening to Cory Doctorow’s latest book, I did see a different perspective on this. His argument is that the technical analysis of a copyrighted work has been fair use - it’s how we have search engines, for instance. The key is that you can’t copyright that generated analysis.

He also argues that copyright right now is so ridiculously tilted towards the major media/tech companies that any perceived benefit to the artist from it gets absorbed by the companies because the marketplace has become so consolidated.

If your expectation is that the EFF will denounce anything AI-related you should certainly cancel your donations. I’ve found them to be great champions of the lost cause of trying to preserve our digital rights. That they haven’t given up despite the insurmountable odds is inspiring to me.

It’s $229 and out of stock, but my first impulse was to buy one just to say thank you for not taking more money from customers just because you could.

For me, it’s about understanding the value having it provides. It’s ok to have something for sentimental reasons, but it just having been present in your life doesn’t make it meaningful. If you keep a piece of clothing you can’t or won’t wear again, what does having it do? My dad passed and I kept one of his favorite flannel shirts because it evokes so many memories for me. But it’d have been silly for me to have kept all of his socks just because he wore them.

The Things They Carried is so beautifully written. The story On the Rainy River, about a young man struggling with whether to avoid the draft, had this which has stuck with me:

If the stakes ever became high enough - if the evil were ever evil enough, if the good were good enough - I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comfortable theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

It’s an amazing future where a tech bro is literally using an episode of Black Mirror as inspiration for their product.