FaceDeer

If I wasn't just so very, very tired, I would find amusement in how this story is going back and forth. "Haha, cybertruck exploded! Stupid Elon!" "Oh, it had a bomb, it was a deliberate explosion. And the cybertruck's structure stopped anyone outside it from getting hurt..." silence "Ah! It auto-locked, something about cybertruck we can criticize! Stupid Elon!"

And people complain about the "tribalism" in politics these days.

We're going to go from mocking cybertrucks for exploding to mocking them for not being good at exploding?

Oh, the cybertruck explosion was a bomb? I had wondered why everyone had suddenly stopped mentioning it.

If it actually existed, then obviously I would subscribe to whatever theory most accurately described how it worked. That's science.

If you're asking which theory I would predict is most likely, knowing only that time travel was possible as a starting point, then there are only two that I'm aware of that are logically consistent. Either:

• Single fixed timeline, whereby if you go back in time then whatever you do there was already a part of history from the start. You won't be able to "change" anything because you were always there. This is the approach described by the Novikov self-consistency principle.

• Multiple worlds, in which if you go back in time you just end up following a different "branch" of history forward from there.

Any of the models that let you "change your own history" are logically inconsistent and therefore utterly impossible. They just can't exist, like a square triangle or 1=2. They may be fine for entertaining movie plots but don't take them seriously.

Could be worse. Or better, depending on what you think of swans, I guess.

The fact that the law is hard to enforce doesn't really make it better, IMO. It may be kind of worse, really - it makes the enforcement arbitrary. Everybody's accessing porn illegally, so any time the police decide they don't like you they can drum up some porn charges and actually pursue them.

Yeah, I think Disney would be perfectly happy paying that sort of fee to keep those IPs locked away. The very last thing they'd want is to let something go, and then some time later discover that someone else has turned it into a valuable product. Not only are they losing out on that profit but now there's a competitor out there. Better to just sit on those IPs forever.

If you instead start jacking the price up year after year until it costs billions to keep an IP copyrighted, why not simply declare it public domain at that point and be done with it? I think a hard cutoff makes a lot more sense. And that way nobody needs to go rummaging around through registries to see if they can use any little thing, they just need to know when it was first published.

The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total. It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows. There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

And now he's calling backsies on that.

He's a prick because he thinks he should have been the one to defeat Trump. Even though he was not remotely suited to the task.

Username checks out.

Last year's leaked "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" memo from inside Google continues to age like fine wine. The big industry leaders spend umpteen billions of dollars forcing their way up to the top of the leaderboards and then just a few weeks or months later some little upstart is nipping at their heels with competition that cost only millions to build. I love it.