Tag: problematic
TechCrunch+ roundup: M&A red flags, handling problematic CEOs, E-1 visa questions
Early-stage investors don’t closely manage the founders they shower with cash, even when things go off the rails.
TechCrunch+ roundup: M&A red flags, handling problematic CEOs, E-1 visa questions by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Darth Vader, the problematic fanzine fave of 1977
Fandom latched onto Vader back when he was just ‘Darth’
The Problematic Arrival of Anti-Obesity Drugs
‘AI Music Generators Could Be a Boon For Artists – But Also Problematic’
In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs…. Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists….
Google’s AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows… an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn’t been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what’s known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it’s fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works….
It’s not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth’s vocals onto the Tetris theme).
And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern…
The project’s lead stresses that “All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community.” But even with that, TechCrunch notes that “Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore.”
For example, beyond the question of whether “training” is itself a copyright violation, there’s the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When Windows updating goes bad — the case of the problematic patch
Every month, Windows users and administrators receive updates from Microsoft on Patch Tuesday (or Wednesday, depending on where you’re located). And each month, most users all apply the same updates.
But should we?
Case in point: KB5012170, a patch released on Aug. 9 that either causes no issues — or triggers Bitlocker recover key requests or won’t install at all, demanding that you go find a firmware update. This patch, called the Security update for Secure Boot DBX, applies to nearly all supported Windows releases. Specifically, it affects Windows Server 2012; Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2; Windows 10, version 1507; Windows 10, version 1607 and Windows Server 2016; Windows 10, version 1809 and Windows Server 2019; Windows 10, versions 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2; Windows Server 2022; Windows 11, version 21H2 (original release), and Azure Stack HCI, version 1809, all the way to Azure Stack Data Box, version 1809 (ASDB).