For a lot of people for a long time your insurance card (that didn’t have a photo) was the only “identification” you had. Otherwise you had to bring your school ID, work ID etc.

Most people don’t have drivers licenses cause they take the train. When you sign up for banks etc you usually have to get a bunch of official documentation from the local ward office with your information.

Proof of identity in Japan has always been a bit of a hazy problem. You sign most documents still with a family stamp, so the idea of what legally is defined as identifying is kind of vague.

Most local offices aren’t networked up, so when you move you have to register with your local ward office and the japanese beauricratic army goes and gets the previous ward office to fax over your info.

“My Number” is the japanese governments attempt to get all that stuff wired together in one database.

Yes the “my number card” (national ID) was mostly a volunteer thing but now that it’s needed for health insurance it’s required of everyone

Japan just hooked up the national health insurance to the national ID.

I know of matrix, what are some other alternatives?

Also a protocol that got falsely maligned during the crypto days was secure scuttlebutt, and people should be talking about it more.

I assume a lot of android foss app developers are going to refuse to register and the projects are going to need to be forked.

Personally I’m getting an old feature phone and an ipad mini that only has wifi. If my choice is between apple iOS and google iOS I’d rather just not use anything to do with Google.

iOS has had this same system for forever and nobody’s ever (seriously) claimed you could sideload on there.

That’s good and also somewhat disappointing as they were the first to release the weights and mechanism to run them as open weights.

A lot of fully open source (and “ethically trained”, depending on your opinion of that entire idea) models still use major portions of the code they open sourced.

A lot of relatively “good” LLM models run on top of Llama.cpp

JAXA remains my favorite of the big three (western) space agencies to visit the facilities for.

They have the same love and wonder for space that the NASA facilities had when they were built, but without the military undertones.

“it says here you clicked ‘sign me up for ISIS’ 10000 times?”

“Haha no officer, you see it was my social chaff AI that clicked it”

Soooooo… Kind of…

I didn’t check the cargo numbers but for Crewed missions we have some nice estimates from the OIG in 2024 based on the crew program development costs and the built-in 6 flight missions we got for the contracts:

-SpaceX Dragon ~ 55 million/seat

-Boeing Starliner ~ 90 million/seat

-Russia Soyuz ~ 86 million/seat

-Space Shuttle ~ 87 million/seat (adjusted for inflation)

Soyuz was ~ 20 million a seat in 2007, 2013 it was ~ 55 million a seat, and 2014-2018 it was 62 million a seat, now it’s that 86 number.

Funny thing is happening at SpaceX recently, namely NASA used up all 6 flights that were 55 million a seat, so they needed to extend for flights 7-9 and 10-14

In February 2022 NASA Extended their contract with SpaceX for flights 7-9 at around 258 million per flight (so ~64.5 million per seat) and again in June 2022 for flights 10-14 at 288 million per flight (so ~72 million per seat)

So SpaceX came out of the gate with their handfuls of investor cash and subsidized the original contracts, but they’re likely rapidly increasing prices now that they’ve burned through most of that runway.

Looking forward to every other country on earth advancing space exploration while America feeds SpaceX more money to blow up endangered bird sanctuaries.

Nah you can’t even use cash in a lot of post offices now.

Agreed, Scylla and Charybdis, as it is.

It’s not quite cut and dry as there’s also the recent decisions by the supreme court:

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith (2023) - “At issue was the Prince Series created by Andy Warhol based on a photograph of the musician Prince by Lynn Goldsmith. It held Warhol’s changes were insufficiently transformative to fall within fair use for commercial purposes, resolving an issue arising from a split between the Second and Ninth circuits among others.”

Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC (also 2023) - “The case deals with a dog toy shaped similar to a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle and label, but with parody elements, which Jack Daniel’s asserts violates their trademark. The Court unambiguously ruled in favor of Jack Daniel’s as the toy company used its parody as its trademark, and leaving the Rogers test on parody intact.”

The aforementioned Rogers test was quoted in both decisions but with pretty different interpretations of the coverage of “parody.”

One thing seems to be the key: intent As long as AI isn’t purposefully trained to mimic a style to then it’s probably safe, but things like style LoRAs and style CLIP encodings are likely gonna be decided on whether the supreme court decided to have lunch that day.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994) - This case established that the fact that money is made by a work does not make it impossible for fair use to apply; it is merely one of the components of a fair use analysis

This isn’t quite correct either.

The reality is that there’s a bunch of court cases and laws still up in the air about what AI training counts as, and until those are resolved the most we can make is conjecture and vague moral posturing.

Closest we have is likely the court decisions on music sampling and so far those haven’t been consistent, and have mostly hinged on “intent” and “affect on original copy sales”. So based on that logic whether or not AI training counts as copyright infringement is likely going to come down to whether or not shit like “ghibli filters” actually provably (at least as far as a judge is concerned) fuck with Ghibli’s sales.

Remember:

There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses

The jimi-halloween trend from Japan but it’s /r/nosleep instead

Looking up more information about this I found a much less sensationalized analysis on this from the UofC:

https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinner-table-analyzing-peoples-republic-chinas-proposed-minor-mode

I think that was the draft proposal for this.