For those not familiar with them, the gist is that Japanese zoning defines what's basically a maximum nuisance level (from low-density residential, up to various levels of commercial operation, up to heavy industry), and anything up to that can be built in the given area. Plenty of 'residential' areas are broadly zoned as allowing up to light or medium commercial activity wherever an owner can put it.
It truly is, I recently read a great article about the coffee shops being run out of a room in people's homes- I would love to sell coffee out of my garage for a few hours before work.
Compared to Australia where the government attempts to plan and control every aspect of commercial business, Japan's laws are a real breath of fresh air. Melbourne's had laws so strict that they've done a bang up job of ruining the local live music scene. Minimum numbers of bouncers, licenses that don't extend past midnight. Our big dance parties have been shifting the start times earlier and earlier because of absurd curfews. Some bars have been grandfathered in because they had licenses before all this started but it's impossible to obtain new ones. Unless of course you are the casino in which case citizens can spend the weekly food money on slot machines at whatever hour of the day they choose.
In Japan I was in a city during a local jazz festival. Entire streets shut down, bars with stalls set up on the street selling drinks. Kids intermingled in the alcohol drinking area and you know what? People behaved themselves and had a great time.
Australia, lacking any real problems to solve is like a modern immune system attacking the host because it can't find the invaders it should be taking care of.
> Melbourne's had laws so strict that they've done a bang up job of ruining the local live music scene.
And Perth ... the zoning here seems to work in a way that suburbs don't get shops, restaurants and bars integrated into them at all. Daycare centres are bloody everywhere, apparently they are really big business, but there's no community pub anywhere round here. Contrast to the UK where pubs are just sorta interspersed with houses in a lot of places.
People say one of the reasons Perth has fewer pubs is because we don't have the pokies so can't support so many, but I think it's also because poor planning has made it a real effort to get to one.
Well, you can definitely make AI art much less obvious with the right tweaking (directly running models, blending different sub-models, etc). The bigger issues from a professional perspective are liability concerns and then, even if you have guaranteed licensed sources, the impossibility of controlling fine details. For a company like GW it's kind of pointless if it can't reflect all the decades worth of odds and ends they've built both the game and the surrounding franchise around.
GW has put an immense amount of effort over time into reworking all their previously more generic marketing and lore elements into being more distinctly copyrightable and trademarkable. They're not going to let possible future lawsuits over LLM training data and the like screw that up.
And that’s probably the OpenAI killer. If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.
This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much as you can.
Also I don't think it will be easy to defend a copyright on AI-generated images, especially if your IP is 'lot of humanoid soldiers in power armor' and not specific characters.
> If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.
right... there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of coming copyright claims" now?
i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has to do with any of this stuff.
> there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens
Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up, distorted and rearranged.
And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to license every single sample individually. People who release successful records with unlicensed samples can get sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that contributed to their successful record.
On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no more copyright issue.
Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.
I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want to wait and see.
Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway, so even the question of whether the indemnification means anything will go away.
On that note, compare early iOS and current iOS and the difference is night and day when it comes to even knowing what on the screen is actually a UI element. I'm pretty sure the only reason I even know how to operate my phone is that I've lived through the transitions that took away more and more and more of the actual visible UI from it.
Yes, modern UIs are baffling. You're meant to know that groping around the screen and swiping at things does magical things, or to swipe from the edges of things for other actions. Combined with the industry's perpetual desire to change what these gestures do every couple of years, along with the constantly changing UI elements (buttons don't look like buttons, then they do, then they look like links, then they look like buttons for a bit, repeat), it is little wonder how older people struggle with new devices and software releases.
Back with Windows 3.11, it came with a paper thick manual telling you how to use the OS. You could read it, and understand it, and you only had to learn how to use the mouse (the difference between right-click and left-click, and how to double-click fast enough), and also knew that scrollbars looked like scrollbars at all times, buttons behaved a certain way at all times, and UI elements were visible and behaved the same at all times.
I think we've lost that with modern UIs and it's a shame.
I would bet that the pad in question has LEGO studs on it that connect to a physical charging circuit to the bottom of the brick. They've had various motor bricks for a long time with similar connections.
There's definitely more than "just" pattern matching in there - for example, current SOTA models 'plan ahead' to simultaneously process both rough outlines of an answer and specific subject details to then combine internally for the final result (https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...).
More specifically, the current zoning of metropolitan areas is the problem. US cities have plenty of potential for more housing, they just won't allow it to be built.
The most absurd example is here in SF, where... okay, context. A recently-passed state law overriding local zoning means that there's a high-rise building project in the Marina district (https://sfyimby.com/2025/12/preliminary-permits-filed-for-fo...) that will almost certainly get built, despite people endlessly protesting it. It will add 790 apartments, 86 of which will be required to be affordable housing.
Before this, in 2024, there were 7 net housing units added for the entire year in the Marina District. No typo there, literally just 7, in the most expensive neighborhood in the city, in the most expensive city in the country.
This one building, only possible because the state overrode local zoning, will be adding by itself more than 100 years worth of new housing to the neighborhood. That's how fucked the approval process is.
Higher house prices in the US are a consequence of literally every major US metro area having a shortage of housing (https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...). There's no mystery here, just that a lot of people decided to shoot themselves in the foot starting in the 1970s by putting more and more zoning and permitting limits on new housing construction.
There's no bubble, there's a massive housing shortage. The only "peak" will be when prices are so high that even the rich can't pay any more, which point it'll just stay there.
Way better than what we have here in the US.
For those not familiar with them, the gist is that Japanese zoning defines what's basically a maximum nuisance level (from low-density residential, up to various levels of commercial operation, up to heavy industry), and anything up to that can be built in the given area. Plenty of 'residential' areas are broadly zoned as allowing up to light or medium commercial activity wherever an owner can put it.
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