Yeah, it's a struggle. The upshot is most of the cost of combined cycle natural gas peaker plants are the fuel costs, so while storage solutions get figured out, or the renewable get massively overbuilt, you can maintain the FF infra for fairly cheap for the these days.
most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).
The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.
Ireland already has the gas capacity built though. It provides about 50% of their power today, so they just need to phase it down and then out, not build it from scratch.
Really great that European courts have created all the legal tools for authoritarian control of the internet in the future, to prevent the scourge of watching sports streaming without paying.
Before this, it was much easier for ISPs / DNS providers / VPN providers to push back against governments wanting to censor the internet because the companies wouldn't have the tools installed to do this kind of blocking. The companies can then argue it is a burden to be forced to implement the tools. That is no longer the case in Europe, and the use of these tools is likely to expand outside the sports domain.
Copyright law has always been the most powerful force on the Internet. Which is why its collision with AI companies who pirate the whole Internet is very interesting.
Copyright law struggles against information wanting to be free. You can get almost anything in contravention of it by typing the odd magic word like libgen or pirate bay or scihub. I imagine even if the French crack down on the big VPNs there will be offshore ones that ignore the French courts.
Copyright is long overdue a check but I don’t think AI is going to be what does it somehow. I can see an opportunity for copyright holders to seek retrospective damages for AIs that mimic their work.
There won't be any collision.
Some companies will get some cash, the same way that Google paid to make Google Search the default search engine and the issue will die down.
> If AI training is piracy then all art made by humans is also piracy
That would only be true if human mental impressions were “fixed media” and therefore (potentially infringing) copies ubder copyright law the way data stored in electronic media in the course of AI training is.
Yes, this exactly. I don't know how people keep missing this.
There's no rule anywhere saying we have to treat computer programs as if they're humans and extend them the same rights. Why would we do that? Says who?
Also, we don't do that, not with AI. We're not talking about paying AI for their labor, or giving them digital housing or something. We only care about the human rights we can extract profits from, other than that these are digital slaves.
Which, I'm fine with digital slaves. They're bits on a computer. But then we need to do that, and we can't be doing this whole "welllll they're basically people" bit we're doing with learning.
I don't know about that slavery argument. If you had a human slave doing unpaid paintings, they would still have the full benefit of a fair use defense.
I don't think there's any "trying to have it both ways" with AI in this context. Copyright and labor laws are very different concepts.
> Copyright and labor laws are very different concepts.
I agree, with the similarity of course that both concepts are explicitly related to humans. Not machines or programs.
If we want to extend these concepts to machines or programs we can, but that's naturally complicated and there's a lot of questions about that. That, to me, needs to be a deliberate thing we do - not some foregone conclusion like people treat it. I mean, these people talk about AI fair-use as if it's obvious. It's not even obvious for humans...
The Windows source code is almost certainly part of the training data given the leaks. You can use LLMs trained on that to make your own OS if you like.
For the same reason that I think it is (1) a bad idea to use an LLM to make your own OS, (2) when the AI is good enough to do that, it won't matter which OSes are or are not open-sourced, nor which OS's source code was used to train a model, as by that point the AI can make any OS for peanuts anyway — given those two points, I think the copyright holders fighting against their stuff teaching AI are missing the forest for the trees.
Is it just Europe though? Have you tried uploading something on YouTube including a remote semblance of a melody from a song? Or accessing porn in some parts of the US? And then there are the App Stores and walled gardens regulating apps, content and really every aspect of one’s digital life.
Yeah you're right this didn't originate here, it is part of a continuum. What is different is before you had to go directly to the website owner with the content (porn blocking in various states, online gambling blocking, copyright on youtube) instead of going to the infrastructure providers and requiring they stop letting a user go to that site.
The VPN and DNS provider requirements in Europe are new for Western country internet. OpenDNS pulled out of many European countries rather than comply.
Most likely they will be forced to implement IP level firewall rules. IE: Traffic from French users is not allowed to go to <list of destination IPs>. This is one of the things the local ISPs already have to do.
It seems that the list of destination IPs would then be determined by whatever the domains listed resolve to (I assume). Since it's trivial to update DNS records, I wonder if they could lead to automated blocking of whatever IP those domains point to.
With that in place, I wonder if that could ever be abused by these pirate sites. Imagine temporarily pointing your pirate site domain name at a valid IP address. When you do that, in theory ISPs (and now VPNs) would automatically block perfectly valid IPs.
This would only happen if the owners of the pirate site domains actually try to do something malicious like that, but I know there are instances in the past of ISPs blocking cloudflare IPs (which is a separate issue, but the scenario I just made up reminds me of it).
That's called domain fronting. CDNs already switch between virtual hosts with headers on HTTP requests and HTTPS TLS SNI, so this even passively happen sometimes.
Now, HTTP headers and SNI are both unencrypted, so oppressive governments abuse these. Obvious fix is to make'em encrypted by enforcing HTTPS everywhere and upgrading SNI to ESNI with DoH-obtained per-server public keys.
Some of offensive side fixes to the defensive side fix are: blocking ESNI, blocking DoH, forcing use of MITM proxy, just blaming strawman terrorist groups for having to block affected IPs. etc.
Couldn't a VPN provider just start updating their DNS entries to respond with IPs of the French government around the time the block goes into place? So the ISPs would be forced to block access to the French government websites?
