News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

semiquaver

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:22PM (#50347182)
This will be your refrain as the killbots come down the hallway: “it’s actually just a specialized harness, they’re just invoking the kill all humans tool, not even impressive!”
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:13AM (#50337090)
They’re really not having an actual conversation. You’re mistaking unnecessary argumentativeness for something more than it is.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:10AM (#50337026)
I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to understand your comments here. I’m convinced you are a very odd person with a confused mind.

Brilliant semantics? No one said anything normative. You’re arguing with yourself on your own non-sequitur. SQL is SQL. It’s extremely flawed but who freaking cares, that’s why ParticleDB shouldn’t have tried to implement SQL let alone full postgres compatibility when they clearly are not equipped to do so! Your comments about how strange and non-intuitive SQL are true but irrelevant.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:03PM (#50330401)
That is weird, good to know!
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:26AM (#50326014)

  > does not lead to high quality software.
Reality is probably closer to “moving the abstraction layer up is a nontrivial process that people are still figuring out and it’s easy for LLMs to produce garbage code that they tell you is good”
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:12PM (#50321847)
Apologist for what?
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:34PM (#50319902)
No, they’re aware they don’t possess copyright on the source code because it has not one scintilla of human effort, so keeping it secret is the only legal way to protect it! :)
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:10PM (#50319647)

  > WHERE column = NULL and then query WHERE column <> NULL
Well, yeah? NULL by definition is not equal to anything. so both parts of that statement don’t have any meaning. Did you mean to write this?

   WHERE column IS NULL and then query WHERE column IS NOT NULL
Otherwise you’re just arguing against 3VL semantics. NULL means what it means and is conceptually foundational to SQL.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:22PM (#50319199)
Sorry to reply to my own comment but they are also lying when they claim to pay top of market on https://orkes.io/careers

$180K in CA for someone who reports directly to the head of engineering is not even top of market for Topeka, KS.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @02:14PM (#50318500)
https://github.com/particledbai/jepsen/issues/18 is utterly humiliating. I can’t believe they kept going after getting that report. I would die of shame.

(Edit for clarity: this is quoted from the linked article)

  You could write predicates over non-existent columns:

  root=> SELECT * FROM t
         WHERE definitely_not_a_column = 4;
   a | b
  ---+----
   4 | 5
  (1 row)
  Or ask if 4 = 5

  root=> SELECT * FROM t WHERE 4 = 5;
   a | b
  ---+----
   5 | 6
  (1 row)


Good on them for being good sports I guess, but after reading this I would never touch a piece of software built by anyone involved with this company. The sheer hubris of their claims combined with the specific reality of their broken garbage software (with the contradicted marketing claims and hallucinated documentation) is literally breathtaking.

It must have been darkly amusing to see all these defect tickets coming in, only for them to frantically shovel each one to increasingly overworked LLM agents to apply pig-lipstick while the humans in charge oh-so-slowly start to realize their software quality is not quite what their glazing agents had been telling them and that what they have on their hands is basically sub-mongo-quality slop. What a world we live in, huh?

You’re confusing two very different things. One is Oracle being careful with the provenance of IP that they let allow into their copyrighted codebase. That’s prudent in the face of real legal uncertainty over the issue. The other is

  > technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL
so whether a the weights file of a machine learning model itself can “be” GPL as a result of including GPL content in its training corpus.

That question is a category error because machine learning weights are not copyrightable at all, being mere lists of numbers and facts, the result of a statistical process and not a human creative hand, very much ineligible for copyright protection. They would be protected by trade secret law only, like the coke recipe.

So the GPL, which operates entirely within the domain of copyright law, cannot possibly virally spread from a licensed source code file to a machine learning model which trained on it. That would be a cross species jump. Certainly there could be other legal consequences but in no universe is someone going to jump out and yell gotcha and force OpenAI to personally hand deliver the newly GPLed weights for their frontier model to RMS.

Yeah, it does matter. This:

  > I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs
is vibes baloney.

  > If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
No. Copyright doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you might wish it did. And it’s a very important thing for the web that it doesn’t.

Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.

Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.

People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.

Not a lawyer, are you?
Ok, so go yell at Microsoft about that incident instead of speculating about a different party doing a different thing.
Did someone do that in this case? I don’t see any indication let alone evidence that happened. And I don’t think it’s likely that it will.

Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.

Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.

Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.

This is a website about starting businesses.

Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.

Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.

So what? You made your content available and someone downloaded it. Why is this even notable?
Re:Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:20PM (#50249489)
Your “oh well, can’t trust anything” reaction is an insane reaction to what’s being implied.

To be clear here, the accusation is that the Chinese communist party or Alibaba itself intentionally engineered malicious secret loyalties into Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and made sure that evidence of them stays out of CoT. To compare that with “ordinary” stochastic model quality issues is bizarre and shocking. No idea if this accusation Is true, but if it is, this is an absolutely watershed moment.

Re:Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:04PM (#50249254)
There is no reason this needs to be a he-said-she-said thing. The model is open weights. Cohere should immediately publish their code to deterministically reproduce this on a given checkpoint of this model. Then anyone can verify the claim for themselves.
Re:The first broken iPhone Duos are here on Saturday October 24, 2026 @02:45PM (#50223936)
Presumably the cost of replacing these based on the higher than average defect rate is already baked into the price.
An interesting question is whether LLMs are going to make HDTVs more or less expensive.
I said nothing about politics, you are reading your own stuff into it. I linked to the original reporting that every other article is a rewrite of. Sorry that you find it biased.
Can you provide citations for all you claim? Ground News was founded in 2017 by Canadian siblings Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, through the University of Waterloo's startup ecosystem. I cannot find any evidence of what you say about its origin story, and to be honest I think you made it up (or are passing along claims that someone else made up)

Receiving investments from people affiliated with the GOP doesn’t seem itself that bad, unless you are so partisan that you yourself are infected with exactly the thing the site aims to combat. Left wing bias is also toxic in certain media sources and should be avoided unless you don’t actually care about bias and are more interested in an agenda.

Dog whistling refers to coded racist language that tries to appear deniable. I don’t see how this qualifies.
I never said anything about partisan spin?
I make no comment on the political bias of the outlets. My comment was all about who actually reported these facts and who regurgitated a terrible summary.

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