> but you can't have everything. Where would you keep it?

— @cazabon

There is a sub-genre of isekai (異世界, other world) which involves arbitrage between the world of today and the historical/fantasy other world.

• (Charles Stross, The Merchant Princes) A clan of secretive world-walkers have been using their abilities to build an empire spanning two worlds. An American gets unexpectedly drawn into intra-clan conflict, the U.S. government's covetousness, and the irrationality in assuming there is a highest natural number.

• (FUNA, #Saving80000Gold for My Retirement) After receiving a blessing which saved her life, diminutive teenage orphan Mitsuha decides to amass a fortune sufficient to retire to either world. Luxury-obsessed nobles, plucky young villagers, and a company of flexible-minded modern mercenaries help her establish a foothold.

• (Makishima Suzuki, Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!) Since childhood Kazuhiro would dream of a fantasy world. When he and and elf are killed while exploring, he learns that his dreams are real and falling asleep or dying allows him and the person he is touching to move back and forth. Cultural and economic exchange transpires.

• (Ren Eguchi, #CampfireCookingInAnotherWorld with My Absurd Skill) The absurd skill is Amazon (actually Online Supermarket).

• (Hiiro Shimotsuki, Peddler in Another World: I Can Go Back to My World Whenever I Want!) Pretty on the nose.

• (Hirukuma, #RebornAsAVendingMachine, I Now Wander the Dungeon) A sapient vending machine accepts coins in a magical world to restock with items and upgrades from our modern world and the main character's love of Japanese vending machine culture.

#Isekai #LitRPG #LightNovel #Arbitrage #Economics #SciFi #Fantasy #CharlesStross #TheMerchantPrinces #FUNA #WelcomeToJapanMsElf

RE: https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116704437459045497

#SpaceX #IPO is still a major risk to #NASDAQ index funds, however.

Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney for the DOJ says this:

> Hey everybody. I try to bring you the legal news calmly and factually, but today the news is so outrageous that calm is just not possible. Today we witnessed what I would call the greatest abuse of our legal system in history. It rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy between the president and the Justice Department.

> The judge handling the case suspected the lawsuit was a farce. So, she appointed a team of independent legal experts to evaluate the merits of the case. They all agreed that it's nonsense and it should be thrown out. But before the court could toss the case, Trump's lawyers moved to dismiss it voluntarily. Why? Because Trump reached a settlement agreement with the Justice Department, which he controls.

> These five people have total discretion to give this money, our money, to anyone they choose with no oversight, no transparency, and no public input. I don't say this lightly. This is straight up criminal.

> This is a theft of our property. It is a fraud on the American people. It is a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels of our government. As the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche ... has a fiduciary duty to protect taxpayer money from false and fraudulent claims. He has abdicated that duty. He has betrayed the American people. He has betrayed his oath to uphold the Constitution.

> Please do whatever you can to spread the word and sound the alarm. Thanks.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4bnF4IlufC8

Super TL;DR — By weaponizing the Unitary Executive Theory over decades, Trump sued his own administration as a pretext to, with his own lawyers on both sides, “settle” out of court to extract a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded fund with zero public or congressional oversight.

Just corruption at a scale that dwarfs the Teapot Dome scandal, even when adjusted for inflation. Gigascale corruption.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/116597017246406093

TL;DR

In case you missed it:

1980s: Reagan and Justice #Scalia push #UnitaryExecutiveTheory arguing that the Constitution vests all executive power directly in the President.

2001–2008: #GWBush uses "Unitary Executive Theory" to consolidate security services and justify signing statements on laws passed by Congress.

2014: #Trump stated on air: "If I decide to run for office, I'll produce my tax returns, absolutely... And I would love to do that. He would go on to repeat this during actual campaigns. He did not release them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump

2019 While Trump was president, a man hired under Trump's IRS gave #TaxRecords to the New York Times while Trump was defying a congressional subpoena for records they were allowed by statute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Littlejohn

2020: In Seila Law LLC v. CFPB the Supreme Court claims "the entire 'executive power' belongs to the President alone" and strikes down removal protections for the director of the CFPB.

2024: In Trump v. US the Supreme Court granted presidents broad, near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Also, the leaker of the records Congress couldn't get and that Trump promised was sentenced to 5 years in prison.

2025–2026: Over and over, "Unitary Executive Theory" is used to justify a purge of employees and departments Trump deems to be enemies.

2026/01/29: Trump sues his own IRS and Treasury over the leak of tax records that he had previously promised to release himself. He demanded 10⁶ × $10,000 — https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72207870/trump-v-internal-revenue-service/

2026/05/18: Before showing up in court to answer "is Trump just suing himself with our $$$ at stake?" they settled out of court for a reported 10⁶ × $1776 — no Court, no Congress, no Transparency.

Nothing is so twee as an American who has learned a new British word.

Congrats to @pluralistic for coining the word #enshitification [☜ this is my mistaken misspelling] (See footnotes 2 and 3) — as something that is named is more easily discussed, weighed, and planned about than a concept that exists only as vague concern. And the government of #Norway has thoughts and words on it and thinks they can help make it stop. 100 page PDF

https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-free-pathways-to-a-fair-technological-future.pdf

Correction: The preferred spelling is #enshittification https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification

@mmasnick summarizes many of the arguments in the poorly crafted lawsuit against #StabilityAI , #Midjourney , and #DeviantArt regarding purported infringement on #copyright by #StableDiffusion and related generative AI systems.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/21/stability-ai-and-deviantart-ask-court-to-dismiss-artists-silly-lawsuit-against-generative-art/

Doc 58 is an amended version of Doc 51 from #StabilityAI

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.58.0.pdf

• Footnote 1 changed from
"Stability AI consents to personal jurisdiction in this District solely for purposes of this action. Stability AI’s participation in this litigation should not be construed as consent to personal jurisdiction in this District for any other purpose or as a waiver of its right to contest personal jurisdiction in any other action."
to
"Stability AI consents to personal jurisdiction in this District solely for purposes of this action and any others raising substantially similar claims arising under the Copyright Act, DMCA and/or Lanham Act. Stability AI’s participation in this litigation should not be construed as consent to personal jurisdiction in this District for any other purpose or as a waiver of its right to contest personal jurisdiction in any other action."

I'm not a lawyer, but this feels like there may be some land mine in case law if they don't phrase their agreement to personal jurisdiction is a specific manner.

Doc 50 is a motion to strike by #DeviantArt the California Right-Of-Publicity claims which they think are forbidden by California Anti-SLAPP law and the #1stAmendment to the US Constitution.

It's such a good idea #Midjourney and #StabilityAI jump in (Docs 54 and 59, respectively.)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.50.0.pdf

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd (3:23-cv-00201) District Court, N.D. California

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66732129/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/

Today we have the expected motions to dismiss.

#StabilityAI

Doc 51: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.51.0.pdf

• Many required copyright registrations not in place
• #StableDiffusion does not store images, make collages; plaintiffs concede it does not output close copies
• There is no claim of even a single act of direct or vicarious infringement, nor did they allege that copyright management information was stripped out of even a single image
• "publicity rights in images" = "copyright holder rights", you can't just relabel them and double-dip
• StabilityAI is not trading on plaintiff's identities
• Copyright law preempts claims that might otherwise exist as unfair competition
• You have to win or lose on your claims as stated; there is no such thing as requesting declaratory judgement in a complaint that your other claims are to be found true

#DeviantArt
Doc 49: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.49.0.pdf
• Complaint does not specifically allege that Deviant Art did the bad things they accuse "defendants" of
• Derivative works must be substantially similar in order to be infringing and Plaintiffs allege the opposite
• DeviantArt did not beach its own terms of service, so there can be no breach of contract claim against it

#Midjourney
Doc 52: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.52.0.pdf

• "there is no conceivable class that might satisfy the requirements of Rule 23 in this case."
• "Plaintiffs seek to do the impossible by applying a single class definition to four distinct violations of law, each with its own elements and individualized, fact-intensive inquiries that overwhelm any conceivable common issues."

Also some CA motions to strike

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd (3:23-cv-00201) District Court, N.D. California

tl;dr Artists sue #DeviantArt, #StabilityAI, and #Midjourney over purported #copyright violations inflicted by #StableDiffusion #AI and related tools.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@hewittlaw@mastodon.social/109789753621184612

The original complaint (¶¶ 80-81) has a nice cartoon of stable diffusion as a kind of interpolation, but since the cartoon uses a 2-D "space of all images" with but two images, basing your lawsuit on such a cartoon seems a bit naive and misleading.

The cartoon came from the left part of Figure 8 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11239 . It is not very large. Blink and you would miss it. But it lacks the context of what the computer knows, which is the discovered relations between images.

¶ 76 links to that paper but puts the date as Dec 2020 when there are actually two similar preprints of the paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, and Pieter Abbeel [v2] dated 2020-12-16 and [v1] dated 2020-06-19. The published version is in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2020/hash/4c5bcfec8584af0d967f1ab10179ca4b-Abstract.html

The plaintiffs' lawyers have arranged for a late January media blitz of misinformation about the technology with a companion website that boosts the plaintiffs' story: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

But there is what reads to me as a more mathematically-informed view suggesting that plaintiffs are using only reasoning by analogy with little foundation in what the computer is doing: http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/

There is no database of images. The rare toy example of overfitting ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188 ) does not mean an example of near-duplication proves that StableDiffusion is some form of lossy image compression.

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd (3:23-cv-00201) District Court, N.D. California

#DeviantArt, #StabilityAI, and #Midjourney are expected to reply (by which I expect motions to dismiss) on April 18 to this proposed #ClassActionLawsuit #lawsuit over #AI tools like #StableDiffusion violated #copyright in the scraping of images or the generation of new images.

Stability AI's UK parent, Stability AI, Ltd. which is the lead defendant in the case caption, doesn't have filings indicating that they have been served or have waived service yet.

To my mind, the act of web scraping itself seems harmless as it is literally necessary for the operation of libraries and search engines.

Generating images in the style of artist X seems beyond the realm of copyright law. And the claim that generated images are collages created in violation of copyright seems to be deficient in the facts. Specifically, nothing that StabilityAI does seems to be akin to maintaining a library of art and creating collages from it.

There seems to be a possible copyright issue with hypothetical image replication, but not only is that an unwanted behavior, but it has also been found to be exacerbated by unintentional overtraining on multiple copies of an image in the web-scraped inputs. "That's a [rarely seen] bug, not a feature." seems like a defense to this layman #IANAL. That it's rare and hard to reproduce for some of the generative AI products hurts the case for a class action where each plaintiff needs to be in basically the same boat.

Also, will 47 U.S. Code § 230(c)(1) immunize online generative AI products for outputs they produce at the prompting of information from a third-party user?

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66732129/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/

It is 6 AM on Sunday in California.

Did @elonmusk@twitter.com just break https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ by @Luca or is this an expected general systems failure to authorize external apps?

6:05 https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/ continues to work.

And now Fedifinder works again.