I’m Upset Again About a Co-Creator of RSS Being Prosecuted For Something Meta Is Doing With Little Consequence – quailblog

Also here’s a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk

Look at this little guy. They don’t know what an AI model is and they’re so much better off

It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR – charged so excessively to be made an example of (we’re talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture) to the point where he felt the need to take his own life rather than deal with the court circus and impending financial ruin – while Facebook (oh I’m sorry Meta) has torrented 80 TERABYTES of books to train their AI models with virtually no consequences other than a court case they will most likely get some sort of financial slap on the wrist for while their AI models continue to print them money.

Swartz’ use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta’s use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code that cooks the environment while giving CEO’s psychosis and making one of the world’s richest people even richer.

I never met Aaron but I get mad on his behalf so often and I don’t know what to do with it other than get more radicalized.

Maybe that’s for the best.

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Anyway, here’s your end-of-post cat photo. Her name is Lilith and she’s wondering why we don’t do something about all these tech billionares.

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