I appreciate your experience here. If you're interested, I'd highly recommend looking into Portugal's results in decriminalizing drugs (coinciding with an enormous reduction in opioid overdoses): https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid
I'd also recommending looking into the UK's previous method of treating opioid addiction, commonly referred to as "The British system." Vice is hardly an unbiased source, but they serve as a good entry point on this topic imo: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw4nnk/how-the-us-stopped-a-...
It's important to note that the systems people hold up as evidence of decriminalization's success are rarely "solely" down to decriminalization. Typically, they involve a broader "substance-abuse-as-public-health-crisis" approach. However, decriminalization is essential for such an approach to work.
There is censorship in both the West and China. There is also water in both a desert and a rainforest—but it would be ridiculous to say that rainforests and deserts are therefore equivalent in terms of water.
Post about US funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine. I've seen half a dozen Twitter accounts banned and subreddits quarantined/banned over posting on that issue alone.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the claim myself, though Victoria Nuland's "denial"[1] certainly raised a few eyebrows. She said that Ukraine has biological "research facilities" and implied that it would be a very bad thing if any of these "research materials" fell into the hands of the Russian forces. Whether that counts as a "biological weapons lab" or not seems to just be arguing about semantics.
Or they were banned for spreading disinformation, or being traced back to Russian state sponsored agents. You didn’t see anyone get banned for anything specific unless you monitor everything they do including their source IP, because Twitter doesn’t send you a message and say “hey we banned this person because of their anti-American propaganda”.
> I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the claim myself, though Victoria Nuland's "denial"
Yea this tactic is called “simply asking the question” and it’s always done in poor faith.
I’m not saying Donald Trump is a child molester and eats babies, but that photo of him with Jeffery Epstein sure does seem fishy... [1]
[1] Random links that nobody clicks on but appears to give you credibility and creates doubt in the minds of others who scroll by and see it.
> Or they were banned for spreading disinformation
"Disinformation" is a propaganda term. Unless you are Ministry of Truth, of course ;)
In practice, what is labeled "disinformation" is just what those in power do not want published. Or: "News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print".
From personal experience, I have strong sense of deja-vu. I've seen all of this in 80's in my country. Exactly the same, except at the time it was reactionary propaganda.
> or being traced back to Russian state sponsored agents.
You see, for Chinese posting about Tiananmen Square is being traced back to US programs intended to undermine the statehood of independent countries. For them, it is the same thing pushed by state sponsored agents as you claim about Russians.
So either both are fine when censoring it, or neither is. (I personally take option two).
Except I can write all of the following statements and I could speak them publicly, but you cannot write or speak of all of these things publicly in China or Russia.
The US sponsored terrorist biolabs in Ukraine to target Russian citizens.
The US *didn't* sponsor terrorist biolabs in Ukraine to target Russian citizens and it's all fake misinformation.
and I can write:
China has never genocided Uighur Muslims.
Tiananmen Square didn't happen.
The CCP is currently participating in a genocide of Uighur Muslims.
Tiananmen Square did happen and the CCP murdered lots of people.
> For them, it is the same thing pushed by state sponsored agents as you claim about Russians.
This is called a false equivalence. I also demonstrated why it's false here in this very post. Ta-da!
Yes, you can say all of those things in isolation, where nothing is at stake. In practice, a response is triggered when the “wrong” narratives start to gain momentum.
I can say them regardless of whether something is at stake in or outside of isolation, as can others which is evidenced by the fact that people do spread disinformation and misinformation routinely in the United States.
Biolabs in Ukraine? That's just made up bullshit by Russia. Period. And despite the Sovereignty of the United States being very much against Russia, people go on television and broadcast things that are not only wrong but completely against the interests of the Sovereign and not a single bad thing happens.
Covid vaccine misinformation? That resulted in some tens of thousands (maybe hundreds) of dead Americans. I can go on Twitter or down to the state capitol building and hold up signs that say crazy things and not a single thing will happen to me from the government.
I can say anything I want about Donald Trump, or Joe Biden.
Now contrast that with the CCP or Russia. You can't do those things. Period.
So these attempts to try and draw equivalences are, in fact, false. Hence, false equivalence.
yeah, that's the exact wording the Chinese, Russian and other authoritarian regimes use as well. "disinformation"
one would think 2016 should've taught you people that the power you give to the government will eventually end up in the hands of the people you don't like
>>Or they were banned for spreading disinformation,
New to this thread, and I may agree with your stance, but if this is how you defend it, please stop :D
More seriously though: "Spreading disinformation" is such a vaguely-defined, over-used phrase to justify any and all censorship, that any attempt to use it automatically invites suspicion of bad faith; and usually correctly so. Add to that my own personal perspective that censorship on account of spreading disinformation invariably backfires spectacularly .
If under discussion is "everybody censors" and our best defense is "but we do it to combat spreading disinformation", we have lost and catastrophically so. EVERYbody does it to combat "disinformation", however they choose to define it.
(I'm not taking some extreme "all truths are relative" approach here either; I'm merely focusing on this specific justification for censorship as utterly untenable)
My point wasn't "say something conspiratorial ergo get banned from Twitter" because if that were the case there would be far fewer people using Twitter. My point (and certainly I could make this more clear) was that it could be someone who is paid to say things that aren't true, for example, which would fall under this "spreading disinformation" category, but the OP has no idea because they don't have any information.
As an aside, it is also Russian propaganda and disinformation. But that's unrelated to the main point.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's fair for you to imply that I'm posting in bad faith.
The link I posted is not a "random" link, and whether you click on it or not is up to you, but it's a real video of Victoria Nuland (a high ranking US government official) speaking to the US Congress. It's not Russian propaganda.
I honestly don't really care if the US has biological weapons labs in Ukraine. I don't live in the US, or Ukraine, or Russia. I don't have any skin in that game. When I first saw rumours of it I thought it was a nonsense conspiracy theory. It wasn't until I saw Victoria Nuland's "denial" that I thought "huh, maybe there's something to that".
You've got to trolling, these things are nowhere on the same level and it's not even correct. You can talk all about copyrighted material you want and there are many many more female nipples to be found on the Western internet than on the Chinese internet.
Just because the western propaganda machine is more sophisticated and more powerful it doesn't mean it doesn't spread lies that twist or change the facts, actually the propaganda and brainwashing done by the west enemies is far weaker and more basic. Since the west rules the world (even from behind the curtain) it doesn't care to lie to our face or even tell us their intentions directly (think about Iraq war, ISIS, Syrian war, even Ukraine now), many 3rd world citizens can't or don't differentiate between UN and US for good reasons, because they know that in most situations UN and most international organizations acts as the facade that hides who actually taking the decision.
Now things are changing, and the western bloc is getting weaker, at some point it will start to act like the standard "dictator" you imagine.
I am very critical/skeptical of more or less all things crypto, but I heard an interesting point from an artist recently who had begun selling NFTs of their work. It is in line with the thinking around the Rolex example in the article, but in my opinion, more salient:
I asked them about what appeared to me as the inherent silliness of selling an "exclusive" tokenized image, which could be easily copied with a right-click for free. Their response was that this is essentially no different from print making. When you buy a print, you are buying something you have the means to produce yourself. You aren't paying for the quality of the print making materials--you could order identical prints of the image from a print shop, or if you're less concerned with quality, simply print at home.
But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable.
I don't know if that is an argument against print making or a case for NFTs, but I found the point interesting.
I sometimes wonder if they get that there's no "THE blockchain".
I mean, an NFT would tend to exist on a particular blockchain. If that blockchain forks (e.g., [as Bitcoin's done a number of times](https://www.investopedia.com/tech/history-bitcoin-hard-forks... )), then it's not unique, but rather exists multiple times -- potentially with different copies being owned by different folks. Plus folks could create duplicate NFT's of the same (by simply minting new ones), presumably on the same blockchain or/and others. And then, if an NFT is reliant on external-resources (like links to a host-server), as I've heard that most are, then presumably those could break and even if someone continues to "own" an NFT on some particular blockchain, the NFT itself would seem decontextualized and essentially meaningless.
Then, durability isn't ensured even on a continuous blockchain, as blockchains can elect to remove stuff (e.g., through forks or filter-protocols). Presumably blockchains would ultimately want to truncate historical stuff; it'd seem strange to assume that an NFT would necessarily be carried through such a process.
Then there's the non-optimality of primitive blockchains. This is, when there're innovations, we'd presumably expect folks to create new blockchains that may displace older ones, retiring prior-NFT's in the process.
Then if we're talking long-term, historic value, then we'd probably consider stuff like advances in cryptography mooting the original signatures, and just generally how ancient blockchains would seem to be of little interest to those in the future. Plus, I'd imagine that advanced AI artists would render the concept of trivial art being in any way non-arbitrary obsolete.
Long rant short, it's just weird to hear non-technical folks seemingly believing that blockchains confer "uniqueness" outside of more limited, subjective contexts.
How would you simply mint a new copy of an nft? I thought the point was their uniqueness, hence the non fungible part of the name. By copy are you referring to having the same payload/url/whatever?
Satoshi proved that any blockchain that isn't currently the leader won't be mined and therefore will fall into disuse. Anyone who read the paper understands this, the principle of what's called Bitcoin maximalism.
So if you want your money/NFTs/whatever to continue to be secure in future, there is ultimately only going to be one global blockchain, singular, so it's very much correct to use the term "THE blockchain".
If this weren't HackerNews, where sarcasm is heavily discouraged, I'd assume that you were being very sarcastic. But since this is HackerNews, I'm confused.
I mean, surely anyone who knows anything about blockchains would be aware that the long-term plans, even among traditionalists, would involve an ecosystem of interacting chains. And then presumably folks with some level of technical understanding realize that even a singular ecosystem's overly naive. I doubt few people actually believe in Bitcoin-maximalism, outside of memetic-humor. ...right?
Sorry, I'm still confused about junk like flat-Earthers. I mean, I've known flat-Earthers who were straight-up committed trolls; they were committed to the bit and would actingly-angrily denounce the round-Earth conspiracy, but they most definitely didn't actually believe that Earth was flat. But.. other folks.. it was harder to tell; were they even more committed, or did they actually believe that Earth was flat? Anyway, a lot of blockchain-stuff's similar -- I get that a lot of folks are trolling, but are there really true-believers who're legitimately sincere?
Bitcoin is possibly the most important bit of engineering since the Manhattan Project.
You may not have any interest in fixing the world but some people do.
Bitcoin takes energy. You can't use that energy for two things at once. You can't mine Bitcoin and Ethereum at the same time. The market for mining one squeezes out the other. A blockchain is only as secure as the game theory backing it.
Then why do we currently have many blockchains? Plenty of people preferred making their own new blockchain where they were in control instead of just working on the bitcoin blockchain.
> But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable.
I'll bite: I also find 'limited editions' with no unique characteristic to be idiotic.
If they have some unique characteristics, whether it's a LE book with a different cover illustration and fancy binding or a LE Ferrari with a specially-tuned V12, then they're actually rare objects and it's fine.
But if your artist's print is 100% identical except for that "#3 of 100" signature, I wouldn't pay one more cent for the privilege of owning that signature. Same with autographs on books or CD/vinyl covers. Picasso and Hendrix were interesting people and artists, but there is nothing particularly interesting about their signatures and they don't improve the painting or CD in any way *.
Paying hundreds of dollars for a perfectly ordinary book that some sweaty fan brought to an exhausted author at an event to have him quickly scribble "John Q. Author" on it is, in my opinion, exactly as pointless as paying hundreds of dollars for a NFT of that book.
* Some trivial exceptions: if a painting's author is disputed, the signature can help solve the dispute. And some artists do have interesting signatures (e.g. Dali). For the vast majority of 'limited prints' neither consideration applies.
How is that different from the current art market where you can already buy some painting with a high degree of confidence that it's an original, numbered, signed by the artist, etc.
Blockchain does not add more confidence to these kind of transactions. You still need middleman to authenticate the art, that it wasn't stolen or whatever.
Writing ownership in a blockchain, why not, but for all the famous crypto use cases (real estate, concert tickets, art, etc.) these only solve a very small part of the problem (if there is one to solve...) and I don't see how you can cut all the middleman that are always here for a reason.
With a good quality physical fake it can be hard for even the artist themselves to know if they made it.
An NFT, they know for certain without question if they minted it or not. That’s the whole schtick. You have a jpeg or whatever provable signed by the artist. Sure you can make copies, but those copies are provably not signed by the artist.
For me the main issue is do I care? Leaving aside the: "which Blockchain/NTF represents the real image" issue, you actually have to give a crap about that stuff. That's where the value lies. I'm not sure most people do.
the main use case is not an oil or acrylic painting but digital art and digital media. look at highest sales on any platform its memes, gifs, JPGs, digital photographs, 3D renderings, videos, generative art. there was no easy way to distribute signed editions of digital media in limited capacity and have it certified by the artist themself, the only option was to make it a signed physical print which is not a digital substrate.
the only middleman you requires is blockchain indexer like etherscan or TheGraph or an alternative , and if you do not trust those platforms you can run your own local node as the data is not owned by any single entity.
It’s trying to replicate some medium (world of atoms) properties unto another medium (world of bits) which provides a wild different perspective (scarcity is not the rule).
If anyone wants to play the scarcity/exclusivity game, fine.
There are better, more efficient solutions/means than crypto and nft for this already.
> There are better, more efficient solutions/means than crypto and nft for this already.
lol people like to repeat this without pointing to any solutions.
with crypto art an artist can sign their cryptographic key on a transferable and ownable digital asset published on a distributed ledger, set its scarcity and supply, and then use the blockchain as a sales and auction mechanism without requiring an intermediary auction house to handle escrow like sothebys or christies.
what is the proposed alternative for these digital media?
Art certificates, both physical and digital have existed for… ages?
And even the NFT frenzy is a good opportunity to market a « new », « better » Dropbox-like integrated solution, that’s supported in the long run and enables small artists to be as well autonomous on this.
Edit: seriously. Selling NFTs as a solution for art certificates sounds like an American coming in France to sell the concepts of bread and cheese.
> Art certificates, both physical and digital have existed for… ages?
and they are generally pretty crap? easily lost, forgeable, destroyed, manipulated, unrecognized.
typical certs require a centralized "Certificate Provider" who upholds their value, for example a major auction house might distribute a cert when selling a painting. in crypto art there is no centralized authority that maintains the veracity of the tokens as the provenance and ownership lies in the distributed ledger.
for those who wish to achieve similar goals as a digital cert but with more cryptographic robustness and less reliance on a centralized actor, NFT is a fine approach. that it has sales and market mechanisms built in is a bonus and probably the reason for its booming success as a new digital art market.
How are NFTs, or any crypto assets, better in that regard?
The independance from a centralized auth (house auction, bank, law court) is rather moot, because that's what you need to have to investigate, solve and guarantee dispute resolutions (lost, stolen, forged, impersonated assets, unfaithful transactions, illegal transactions, etc.).
Moreover, cryptos exchanges today _do_ act as few centralized points of control.
You still can lose NFTs, lose control on them. You can still have your own artwork being minted by someone else, even against your own will (and to control against that abuse, you will need some sort of central authority somewhere).
You can still forge or impersonate artists.
You can manipulate people on their actual value versus the value of the thing they represent (that is, owning an NFT on an artwork today provides no guarantee of owning any right on the artwork itself).
And that's not even taking into account the energy burnt into it.
you can forge a cert or a painting by copying it. a good forgery can be very convincing and requires expert investigation. see Salvator Mundi in which the authenticity of the painting is still not clear despite years of investigation by countless art historians and conservationists.
if you try to copy a token you will end up with a new cryptographic hash and a new history of transactions associated with it. there are countless clones of crypto punks for example, but the only one that has any real traction is the one that has a clear history of transactions associated with its contract hash. anybody who can tell the difference between two strings of characters can detect whether a token is a forgery or not, it does not take an expert.
yes obviously centralized exchanges are centralized, they are not the ones upholding the ledger or crypto art certs. even crypto art platforms like Foundation and opensea do not own or uphold the certs being issued and indexed by their platforms. it is more like the way that google indexes search results, it doesn't own the websites on its search results.
yes impersonation is possible but often easy to detect on-chain. if a supposed notable artist is suddenly minting new work from a public key different than the address they've used in the last two years, suspicion would be warranted.
> anybody who can tell the difference between two strings of characters can detect whether a token is a forgery or not, it does not take an expert.
Yes, but the value is not in the token, it's in the art itself. You don't own anything but the NFT itself, not the artwork it refers to. Artwork that goes public domain 50/75 years+ after the artist death anyway (and is way easier to replicate than physical artwork/copies).
As for exchanges. Banks and auctions do not uphold things either, they're the same kind of operators of principles they don't write, they are merely applying the rule of law and use their credentials for that purpose.
As for impersonation, NFTs-as-certificates are of no impact for notable artists, who already have teams and networks that do this work for them (with old or new techs).
Easy/manageable/controllable art certificates really have an impact when available first to small and emerging artists (because that's the crucial when and where they do need this kind of foundations and support for their living).
the value is in the limited edition asset signed and distributed by an artist. you can verify this by taking the Beeple PNG and re-minting it yourself to see if others value it the same way. or you can take any popular artist's or photographer's signed print like Damien Hirst and create a copy without a signature to see if people value it.
banks and CEX both have nothing to do with the topic of certification of art. neither a bank or CEX upholds the cert.
interesting that you say NFT-as-certs have no impact for notable artists yet there are a variety of notable artists using NFT-as-certs. see: Hirst, Koons, Pace gallery all using NFT. the nice thing is that this tech is available to all, whether you are a notable artist like Hirst or just an illustrator or pixel artist, such as @jmw327.
In less than a century, your Beeple PNG and Hirst photograph will be in the public domain. Free to copy, reuse, whatever, without exclusivity.
But, yes, you will still have an exclusive, costly certificate. Just a certificate.
In less than a century, the public domain art will still have admirers, remixers. The certificate itself will hold no value to no one. It's literally a depreciating speculative asset.
See: today, who cares as much about whoever funded it and how, than about Mozart's Requiem?
Would this have been funded through an exclusive certificate at the time, apart from being a museum artefact of a bygone era, it would not be worth much. The music is still studied, performed, derived, listened to.
I'm not an artist and I don't understand art, beyond liking something tangible with an aesthetic that appeals to me.
So I'll buy prints, or originals, that I like, and that I don't mind looking at every day, and hang them on my wall. I have no objection paying a reasonable price for them either - artists have to eat.
The issue I have with NFTs is that they are not art. They are just vessels signifying financial worth. The worth of a painting, a print to me is aesthetic, not financial. But there is no aesthetic worth in an NFT. I can't hang it on my wall. I can't enjoy it every day.
So if we treat NFTs as tokens of value without any artistic worth, they become no more than a variant of another cryptocoin, albeit a 'unique' coin worth $XXX, and by decoupling the artistic argument from the financial argument, all the 'silliness' goes away. It's simply a store of value.
Only you have the print in your position. An NFT is like buying a ticket which gives a deed of ownership to a specific print of a specific book. The book itself is available in public for anyone to read for as long as the original seller cares to look after it.
Prints and NFTs are very different. You will very rarely be able to print it yourself because high quality copies will not be available to you. You also wouldn’t expect a print to have resale value. You are buying it because it looks nice on your wall. Not as an investment.
NFTs are still a load of crap. Im glad some artists found a way to make money off them, but that doesn’t make them any less of a scam.
artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints. sometimes this is with holographic stickers, or separate certificates of authenticity, or even non NFT blockchain certification.
most signed prints are not bought because of what the content is, but because of the signature. you can buy unsigned prints of many notable artists work for 20 bucks while the same signed version sells at sothebys for thousands.
users should not expect NFT to have any more or less resale value than a signed print. but because there is currently a market for it, it is easier to sell a token than a print. in future this may change if tokens are as commonly distributed and purchased as prints are.
> artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints.
NFTs make this problem worse. E.g. OpenSea is awash with stolen art and removed the ability to contest the problem several months ago.
the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Picasso NFT but this does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso. the same is true of an impersonator trying to mint a new Pak or Beeple or whoever you think is a popular nft artist.
almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. and if you look at the data, 99% of these copy-mints are not actually selling and are not making any impact in the market.
a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash will be uniquely different than the crypto punks contract, which has a long and clear historical trail associated with it on chain. if a copyminter starts to post new work that resembles a popular artist like Beeple, it will be under a new public key hash or address, and also easy to discern.
compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating for years and still are not able to discern the authenticity of the painting despite its $450 million price tag.
> does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso
There are innumerable examples of digital art being sold on OpenSea without any knowledge of the original authors, but presented as if it was from the original authors.
> almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself.
It literally doesn't matter if the token is forged. The theft is there, and NFTs (and blockchains in general) have literally no mechanism to prevent it.
> a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash
You keep pretending that stealing art is the same as stealing/forging the token that points something
> compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating
Who. Cares.
There's an irrefutable fact: NFTs provide literally zero protections against art theft. It's gotten so bad that sites like DeviantArt now have automated tools to find stolen art on sites like OpenSea and report it to original artists.
you are right: it is trivially easy to publish any media file and assign an NFT to it and then list it for sale, and there is a lot of copyright infringement as a result.
all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain.
imagine putting a Damien Hirst image on OpenSea only for nobody to purchase it. is this a complex form of art forgery and art theft? in some cases this process is automated by bot-scripts scraping DeviantArt, and the end result is like spam mail. maybe there is a buyer naive enough to purchase your Hirst image thinking it is authentically from the artist, and in that case I sympathize just as I do when an unsuspecting user falls for an email scam.
it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be, or that the minter does not match the artist's public address, or that the artist is not even claiming to make nfts and therefore a nft of their work is unlikely to be authentic.
if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year, and many high value paintings do not have a clear provenance and authenticity as this information is easily lost and altered over the course of history.
> all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain.
Payments, yes. But not provenance. Because you'd have to find all the artists, then all their work, then sift through all the listings at OpenSea, and cross-reference that. Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie:
> it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be
No. It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not.
> if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year
NFT scams are significantly more rampant because stealing a digital image trivial. As is pretending someone you're not.
Quote:
"DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said. It’s now scanning for fraud across 4m newly minted NFTs each week. The number of alerts doubled from October to November, and grew by 300% from November to mid-December." [1]
> Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie ... It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not.
lol, have you ever looked at the chain? if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address and then suddenly somebody purchases a lookalike token from a different public address there is a high likelihood it is a copymint. you can avoid this by comparing the addresses, it does not take an art history expert to detect this form of copyminting.
many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.
> DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said
it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search, and not a sophisticated form of forgery. still you are not able to provide evidence of significant funds being consistently lost here despite it being so prevalent, especially when you compare to trad art forgery where you can easily find evidence of millions of dollars per year being mistakenly spent on forged artworks.
it is like Nigerian prince email scams. part of the protocol that some unfortunate and naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.
> if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address
No ifs. There artists right now whose work is sstolen and sold without their knowledge
> many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.
Ah yes. And you know the exact addresses and the exact attribution for all hundreds of thoudands of digital artists, right.
> it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search
No. It's not "easily detectable". It's detectable because DeviantArt hosts some digital artists, and they still have to lookup, download and analyse 4 million OpenSea submissions a day, and match them against 350 million images in the DeviantArt database.
And that is a tiny fraction of all the digital art in the world. Besides, if it was so easy, show me a single NFT marketplace that automatically takes down stolen art.
> naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.
And how exactly are they going to recognize the problem? E.g. someone sells NFT of an image that you like. What are the exact steps to find out if it's legitimate? Keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people producing millions of images across hundreds of thousands of websites and platforms.
you are making it seem like it is difficult to tell a David Hockney NFT is a fake. step one: does the artist have a clear history of minting associated with an address? if no, and the artist is not making any claims to making nfts, then most likely it is a fake. if yes, and the artist is promoting the nft at that address, it is probably not a fake.
in the case of Hockney as he has been expressly against nfts and has never publicly made one, a fake is easily detectable. in the case of Beeple who has been expressly for nfts, it is easy to authenticate as it will be associated with his address.
despite knowing so little about art market and art history that you’ve never heard of the world’s most influential and highest sold living artists, you can probably still make a rational guess that this NFT collection is a copymint. perhaps the fact that the artist never once mentions or links to the collection from their Instagram profile acts as a hint.
this is what I mean by “trivially easy” compared to art forgeries in the real world, which do take professional art historians and years of study, and yet still leaves many of them fooled.
it’s worth noting that the collection has not sold, and very likely never will.
> despite knowing so little about art market and art history that you’ve never heard of the world’s most influential and highest sold living artists, you can probably still make a rational guess that this NFT collection is a copymint
Demagoguery
> perhaps the fact that the artist never once mentions or links to the collection from their Instagram profile acts as a hint.
So, you're basically saying that you have no idea whether either Instagram or OpenSea page actually belong to the artist and it's impossible to find out if they do or do not.
The argument "they didn't sell anything" is moot because, again, there are hundreds of thousands of digital artists producing millions of images, and not all of them are "famous minting more than a year and you know what they say about NFTs off the top of your head"
A print, especially a classic gelatin silver B&W or c-print, is something the artist has ostensibly personally labored over. It is as much a product of their craft as the original source material was, whether that was a negative, positive, digital image, or PSD file.
most artists will hire professional printmakers and printers. just because a photographer is good at shooting does not mean they are good in the dark room.
when we talk about editioned prints, most of the effort is not in the print. a screen print takes a couple hours to make, an Epson print is a click of the button. but the work being printed might have been built from years of practice as an artist.
ML's use is extremely widespread at this point. The above list is just a tiny snapshot. "AI" is term thrown around by marketers and hypemen all the time, no arguments there, but ML's usage is anything but niche these days.
Good list but it is so much more ubiquitous .. any time you pull your camera out to take a picture, there is a ton of AI/Deep Learning based methods being used. Yes, it used to be done with classical techniques a few years back, but DNNs are finding themselves being used in all sort of niche functions.
That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site.
People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time.
But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.
Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least).
One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.
I'm pretty critical of click-bait headlines in what are supposed to be more academic journals, but I don't get the frustration with this one. 'Families' is written in quotations, which tells me right from the jump that the author is probably not speaking about literal family units, and the use of "family" or "family tree" nomenclature in discussing matters of genesis and inheritance is pretty commonplace.
Unfortunately if you do enough outreach it's not long until you encounter some nitwit who claims all "religion of science" is controlled by them (be they lizards, moonmen or voldermort). And articles structured like this don't help trying to people like that.
Eh, if you boil all research in AI/ML down to the binary of "AGI or bust," then sure, everything is a failure.
But, if you look at your smartphone, virtually every popular application the average person uses--Gmail, Uber, Instagram, TikTok, Siri/Google Assistant, Netflix, your camera, and more--all owe huge pieces of their functionality to ML that's only become feasible in the last decade because of the research you're referencing.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I obviously concede that stuff like applying kNN over ginormous datasets to find TV shows people like, or doing some matrix decomposition to correlate ('recognise') objects in photographs, is obviously useful in the trivial sense. It has uses. It wouldn't exist otherwise. I was more thinking on a higher level, about whether it has led to any truly epochal technological advances, which it hasn't.
Machine learning / neural nets also (like I said) get to claim credit for a hell of a lot of things which are just products of colossal advances in hardware – simply of its becoming possible to run statistical methods over very very large '1:1 scale' sample sets – and not due to a specific statistical technique (NN) which is not remotely new and has been heavily researched for about 40-50 years now.
These are engineering marvel! This is engineering at it's finest. Applied math at it's finest. So it's not a failure.
The way people hype AGI/AI/ML whatever undervalues the actual effort behind these remarkable feat. There is so much effort being made to make this work. Deep learning works when it is engineered properly. So it is just another tool in the toolbox!
Look at how graphics community is approaching deep learning. They already had sampling methods but with MLPs (NeRFs), they are using it as glorified database. So it's engineering!
I want to underscore that AI/ML/DL research requires ground breaking innovation not only in algorithms but also in hardware and software engineering.
I'd also be surprised if Jones kept a strictly disciplined financial operation running at InfoWars over all these years, such that there is no opportunity for the courts to pierce corporate veil.
I'd also recommending looking into the UK's previous method of treating opioid addiction, commonly referred to as "The British system." Vice is hardly an unbiased source, but they serve as a good entry point on this topic imo: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw4nnk/how-the-us-stopped-a-...
It's important to note that the systems people hold up as evidence of decriminalization's success are rarely "solely" down to decriminalization. Typically, they involve a broader "substance-abuse-as-public-health-crisis" approach. However, decriminalization is essential for such an approach to work.