Well, I've witnessed this on dozens of houses in the town where my ex-wife grew up. The local river was slow-moving in a shallow river valley. Every spring, it would flood, and houses built within a half-mile of the main river would flood up to the second floor.
Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."
That's not what an environmental impact assessment is. Environmental impact assessments look at potential harms to the environment, not the property. It would look at if building a house would impact the wildlife, and sometimes other related phenomenon
> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich.
This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...
My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard.
The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.
Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.
The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.
The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.
By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.
> The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media.
My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.
Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.
> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.
Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.
> A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026.
Updating an old adage for the modern age:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
― Anatole France
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
Can you elaborate on the collusion aspect? Is the implication that OpenAI and Anthropic are coordinating their purchases in such a way that they target the hobbyist market? What’s the collusion angle here?
Only works so long as you eventually pay up... well unless the manufacturers make too much this way. That said are there some Chinese manufacturers that aren't part of the cabal and could undercut them?
Except that it doesn't work like that. If you buy DRAM and don't do anything genuinely worthwhile with it, you'll ultimately dump it all right back onto the market, and everyone knows that. The biggest worry is that it's actually OpenAI and their direct competition starving the rest of the market because they predict AI research and the like to be a highly valued use for the stuff, compared to building gaming PC battlestations or whatever the highest-valued use was before. Many observers think that this will also happen with GPUs and cutting-edge digital logic more generally.
> because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs.
The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?
Cogs receiving abuse (which in this case is a scary word for "feedback from the public who is paying you and is unhappy with your process") _do_ cause the system to change. It's really not that much different from writing angry letters to Congressmen:
One letter "doesn't do anything", but a surprisingly small number of letters does. And the one Congressmen "can't do anything", but usually a small number of Congressmen can sway real change. HN often advocates writing angry letters to Congress because it understands this dynamic.
You will never be allowed to talk to the people who made the fax policy; they hired people like Karen specifically to make sure that doesn't happen. The person who can talk to management is... Karen.
These systems usually settle into a steady state where the interface with the public receives an acceptable amount of abuse. I guarantee that if a few people a month did what OP claims to have done, they'd figure out how to take docs over email pretty quickly.
In fact, writing to your Congressional rep is probably the way to solve this.
They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to be on a senator's bad side.
>They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved
That's almost worse because what it creates is a system that abuses everyone by default and only when someone cries to their politician does it shape up.
I guess this depends on whether you think the system was deliberately designed to be “abusive” or has evolved some blind spots/legacy issues.
In this case, I’d guess “fax in your documents” was, long ago, meant to be an improvement over having to mail them in. It wasn’t chosen to be intentionally inconvenient. The system—or perhaps the laws it operates under—could certainly be modernized and your rep is well-positioned to nudge that along.
Likewise, I doubt the rudeness was a matter of policy. At a business, you’d ask to speak with the manager. Here, YOU via your rep are the manager and this is how you get your say.
And saying it doesn't is like saying "my one piece of litter won't make the park dirty". Just because you can't see the effect one instance has doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful when added all up.
Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses, theories and findings?
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
By intentionally hiding their position (and simultaneously acting as though it is completely obvious) the OP shuts down any useful conversation that might follow. Do they think Meta will sell the user's data? Do they think different people are in charge of different policies at Meta leading to actions that appear to be in conflict with each other? Do they think they will use this information to train AI models? Do they think they will use this information to serve Ads?
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have been carried forward but there is no way to continue the conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please tell me what you're trying to say here.
What’s the point in providing a rebuttal to these points (e.g. that Meta doesn’t actually sell data to anyone) if the OP can simply say “that’s not what I meant”?
They are taking a position that cannot be argued against or even discussed because they don’t make that position clear.
> providing a rebuttal to these points (e.g. that Meta doesn’t actually sell data to anyone)
So one of your suggestions of what the OP could mean was something you explicitly don’t think is true and would argue against? That sounds like a bad faith straw man set up.
Perhaps it’s just as well that the OP didn’t provide one specific reason to be nitpicked ad nauseam by an army of “well ackshually” missing the forest for the trees.
You could, as the HN guidelines suggest, argue in good faith and steel man. The distinction between “selling your data” and “profiting from your data” isn’t important for a high level discussion.
Can you truly not see through Meta’s intentions? There are entire published books, investigations, and whistleblowers to reference. Zuckerberg called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and has time and again proven to be a hypocrite who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
Or, OP is not hiding their position and shutting down conversation — they are not imposing their position and are opening it up to discussion.
What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"
Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where everything must be falsifiable?
I think they meant that Meta is offloading the cost (fines) of farming minor's data onto the operating systems. With an up-front cost of 2 billion dollars in lobbying, they can avoid paying 300m+ fees regularly.
Is it? I don’t have a clear picture in either direction. What does an environmental impact assessment for a housing project typically result in?
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