The Milk Bowl

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

Tl;DR:

Google is saying that any music uploaded to YouTube is legally theirs to use in AI training.

This was to try to throw out a copyright case where the victims were trying to sue YouTube for allegedly using their music to train their AI

full discussion

“A new court filing claims that when indie artists upload music to YouTube, they grant a "broad license" that covers the AI initiatives of parent company Google.”

“Google says in a new court filing that YouTube’s terms of service grant a “broad license” for artificial intelligence models to be trained on music uploaded directly to the platform.”

“This argument came in Google’s Monday (June 8) motion to dismiss copyright infringement litigation filed earlier this year by a group of independent artists, songwriters and producers.

The lawsuit claims that Lyria 3, the AI music model launched by Google in February, was trained on songs ripped from YouTube without compensating artists.”

“The case is among dozens that have accused AI companies of illegally training their models on copyrighted sound, text and images in recent years.

In most of these lawsuits — including ones brought by the major record labels against AI music generators Suno and Udio — tech companies have argued that the so-called fair use principle of copyright law allows them to create transformative works without licensing the training data.”

Instead of making a fair use argument, Google is saying “they actually do have a license to train AI with the songs uploaded to YouTube by these indie artists.”

Google says there’s no evidence for Google using their specific works, but also that they have the right to use

the motion cites a clause in YouTube’s terms of service that states, “By providing content to the service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business.”

“if Google’s argument is accepted by the court, the company would be legally permitted to train AI models on and otherwise utilize that content for “derivative works.” However,

the situation might be different for music distributed through YouTube pursuant to licensing agreements with labels and publishers.”

the following events ensued:

1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldn’t you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?

2. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my band name” jokes

3. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my stripper name” jokes

4. one “ah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa town” joke

5. this absolute masterpiece:

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)