eschaton

It is equally naïve to pretend all politicians of all alignments are equally corrupt.

How does this compare to setting the status line on a terminal that supports one?

That’s not how terminals actually work, at least if you’re talking about actual serial terminals. They often do not gracefully degrade and this kind of “everyone is using a window with the latest fancy thing” needlessly excludes people who might like to use them.

Darwin is a BSD.

What if the technical experts tell the legislators something they don’t want to hear? Do you think the legislators will just go along with a bunch of egghead nay-sayers? Their constituents/donors/special-interests are demanding action!

Is there actually any jurisdiction in which technocrats have veto power over legislation?

Rails didn’t really push forward the state of the art, though. Not compared to something like DirectToWeb in WebObjects, where instead of static code generation, it did dynamic site generation with open-ended rules.

I concur in the first but dissent in the second. LLMs will not achieve superintelligence or hard takeoff. But the aristocracy expects AI and robotics to deliver the chance to cast aside the entire rest of humanity, except for those they keep as pets and slaved. It won’t, at least not with LLMs, but it’s completely obvious that it’s their goal.

Pretty rich statement in a world where slavery exists.

If you’re reading “Hacker” “News” either this sequence of English words should make sense to you or you should be competent enough to use a search engine and/or Wikipedia to easily learn what they mean.

Anyone who sells such an exploit should go to prison.

The NetBSD developers keep a great CHANGES document up to date with what’s new overall, and even categorize it by architecture and machine when appropriate.

Want to know what changed between 10.1 and 11? Or 10.0 and 10.1? It’s all right there, summarized by the people who did the work.

“Xenon” is a pre-existing word. Intel’s not going to lose protection on “Xeon” for IBM using “Xenon” as an internal codename for their own CPU.

Because simple similarity doesn’t usually result in a lawsuit? Especially if one of the words isn’t a public product name and also happens to be an existing word with no existing specific use in the industry.

I didn’t see anything in there instructing the LLM not to generate text about goblins.

And they had also switched to NEXTSTEP on SPARC, HP-PA, and x86 hardware a couple years after the last NeXT hardware shipped. (It’s a trivial recompile for 99.9% of NeXT software.)

The Pyro accelerator.

At a certain point you have to take people at their word; I’m reporting what the contributor said they did (used the documentation to generate the code).

A couple of things: The “AI industry” is nowhere near as large as it pretends to be, most of its valuation is in the form of IOUs being traded back and forth. However, the bubble popping probably will wipe a few hundred billion of value from the stock market, because that’s what happens when a speculative bubble pops.

The second thing is that I’m not necessarily talking about whether _a specific LLM itself_ infringes copyright, but whether _its output_ is covered by the copyright of _its training material_. Whether training an LLM is an activity that infringes copyright is not well-settled in any precedential way, whether the trained LLM as an artifact infringes copyright is even less settled, and whether the output of that LLM is either infringing or covered by copyright is also not settled. These are all still extremely open questions.

That means anyone doing reasonable risk management should not just blithely race ahead and assume that there’s no infringement, which appears to be the approach the GCC project is taking explicitly and which also appears to be the approach projects like Linux and LLVM are taking implicitly (mostly through weasel-language like accepting responsibility for code you’re submitting).

Not quite the precedent that it may sound like. A district court judge ruled that using copyrighted materials for the training itself was not infringement, but that the materials must be obtained legally.

Anthropic is trying to settle the case with most plaintiffs with respect to obtaining their works in an infringing way, but there are still plaintiffs pursuing the case on both the grounds that the remedy is insufficient (being only about $3000/work, when it has been as high as $250K/work in other copyright infringement cases and via statutory damages) and also on the grounds that the ruling that training is fair use was an error of law on the district court judge’s part.

Notably it doesn’t cover whether the output of the trained LLM continues to attach the training set’s copyright, which is independent from whether the training itself was an infringing activity. And there’s a substantial argument that the judge erred, if it can be shown that the training works are stored in a recoverable manner (even with some loss/defredation) rather than more extensively transformed.

If someone were to train a coding-oriented LLM on only GPL code, I would assert that any code it outputs is covered by GPL because an LLM is fundamentally storing and reproducing its input, not understanding it and generating new things based on that understanding.

The starting point of GNU was that Stallman was pissed he got in trouble when he got caught copying code from the Symbolics sources to the MIT and LMI sources, which was against the agreement Symbolics and LMI had with the AI Lab, which was that improvements could only flow one-way (AI Lab to commercial). Dan Weinreb (RIP) confirmed this publicly.

Of course, not long after starting GNU, Stallman got caught copying code from Unipress emacs sources into the then-new GNU emacs sources. Oops! That’s why it was difficult for quite a long time to find early GNU emacs sources online—they were purged from various archives because they were infringing.

I have personally seen this happen:

Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device.

LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a form of lossy compression of their training set. And you don’t need to be explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of that training set for an LLM to output one.

Not really, no. There have been many settlements of lawsuits, which means they are very explicitly not precedents. The LLM companies likely prefer to settle because of the existential risk being found liable for copyright infringement would result in, whereas even an expensive settlement doesn’t upend their entire business model.

Furthermore, I don’t think you can really assume that the courts will rule a certain way on this just because of the money involved; there’s a lot of money involved when it comes to the copyright holders too, and they’ve long enjoyed a rather favorable status with the courts and legislators. (For example, in the days of P2P file sharing lawsuits and attempts to legislate P2P file sharing, the software industry was already many times the size of the media industry, but the media industry consistently won.)

It was a strategic invention that has only ever applied to the plebs, the plutocrats have always been exempt from it.

If someone wants me to spend my time reading something, they need to be willing to spend their time writing it.

Oh no. The horror. How terrible.

It’s incredible to me the lengths these people will go to just to avoid using the standard tools.

Because it would cost Apple a substantial amount of money to make it possible to build your code for iOS on other platforms in any sort of supported fashion. So all the stuff they invest very substantial amounts of money into creating and maintaining are only going to be licensed for use on the hardware they sell under the latest operating system it runs. Asking for more is asking them to spend more money without any evidence of a commensurate return.

If you can produce a properly structured submission to the App Store ingestion pipeline without using a Mac, then I doubt Apple will care. But that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to help you, and especially not to spend millions of dollars to do so.

It’s not really that onerous for a platform to require that, to develop for it, you need to actually take part in it. For Apple platforms that means becoming a Mac user. For IBM i and z that also means getting substantial hardware or paying for accounts and licenses (once you want to go beyond learning).

You can develop for Linux and BSD and Haiku and all sorts of other platforms for free. If the cost is what matters to you, then just do that. If you’re doing it as a business, though, consider that you’re extremely lucky to be able to just buy a low-end device and a low-end system and that’s all the capital investment needed (plus the US$100/year membership as recurring opex).