Feels like I'm in the twilight zone here. A few minutes of my pay per month for my kid to not be bombarded with bullshit ads seems like a good deal to me.

This is all already happening, that's why we know about it. But there's also nuance. Was piracy Meta corporate strategy, as implied ad nauseam on here, or was it some guy taking a shortcut?

Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.

I've already connected the dots of the HN zeitgeist. Besides this was done by a few individuals at Meta, or are you thinking they had a board meeting and shareholder vote on it?

Me getting free movies and music, piracy good

Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad

At my job going through procurement for something like Docker Desktop when there are free alternatives is not worth it.

It takes forever, so long that I'll forget that I asked for something. Then later when they do get around to it, they'll take up more of my time than it's worth on documentation, meetings, and other bullshit (well to me it's bullshit, I'm sure they have their reasons). Then when they are finally convinced that yes a Webstorm license is acceptable, they'll spend another inordinate amount of time trying to negotiate some deal with Jetbrains. Meanwhile I gave up 6 months ago and have been paying the $5 a month myself.