February 2023 – DocBug

That high-altitude balloon from China

February 6, 2023 / Technology

As you’ve no doubt heard, a couple days ago a high-altitude balloon from China drifted into US airspace and has been causing a minor rift. China said it was a civilian weather research balloon that blew off course while the Pentagon claims it was being used for “surveillance”. Over the past few days various law-makers got lots of sound-bites slamming China, Biden or whoever else they wanted while the balloon drifted across the central US, and military jets shot it down once it reached the Atlantic.

I don’t know much about US-China diplomacy or the finer points of espionage, but after 10 years working at Loon I do know something about high-altitude ballooning.

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A few more points on that lawsuit against Stable Diffusion

One of the big claims in the class-action lawsuit against Stability AI is that Stable Diffusion in some way contains all its training data, and is therefore a derivative work it its own right: Because a trained diffusion model can produce a copy of any of its Training Images—which could number in the billions—the diffusion