spwa4

Plus you can bet your firstborn everything passes through the NSA first. So seems like a spectacularly bad idea, especially for .eu business.

There's no "right this second" way to kaput Google, not even if you're Microsoft.

I'm guessing another big usage reduction is coming soon.

Indeed. But the frustrating thing remains. Obviously animal and human brains do something similar, and obviously it's not even N^2, because anyone can count inputs and outputs for our brains, calculate N^2 and even at picowatts per operation that is just not happening ...

1000 Hz, ~800 input nerves, 20W power usage => 800 000 input values per second, squared, would leave 0.03 nW per input value. That's not enough to turn the handle on a single protein, so that's not happening. That's not enough to propagate the result of the calculation within a cell. A 2.3 power is out of the question.

One imagines maybe you can get to N^1.4 within that budget for whatever the brain is doing. Maybe. But that would be the limit.

I can see the profits already!

Why do we even have insurance companies at this point?

"But by the early 1970s the idea of transcending the status quo was abandoned by the Soviet leadership, who felt the system threatened Party control of the economy."

And that was that, for the idea of connecting Soviet computer networks or directly connecting people in the Soviet union (without party-controlled channels in between).

If you were working in military research, you got access to western computers. Academics, generally no. Companies, never. Even party members couldn't get access.

So no this is yet another victim of the priorities of communism: priority #1 is preventing dissent. And I hope you do at least understand why that means "no computers, and certainly no networks".

Or to put it more generally: motivation.

(I hope you guys make a Google docs style cooperative mode. For simple edits this already beats the MS Office suite, but Office 365 cooperation still sucks, so if you can get that working fast ... exiting times)

Ah management-style cover-your-ass engineering. Which doesn't work even with things like IBM contracts, never mind with anyone smaller. The problem is what they actually guarantee.

When you actually investigate the question (because you were a Google SRE and you move to a smaller company, and obviously disaster preparation starts with knowing what happens when disaster strikes): "Say, really smart manager, what does the contract actually say happens when you need the cover-your-ass provisions? Let's say AWS fails to give us machines. Let's say this software doesn't deliver. Let's say the bank connection we're paying for breaks". First observation: the managers (at a very big European telco) don't actually know the answer to this question. Or they pretend not to (I'm pretty sure they just lied to me, didn't care about anything but the checkmark, and did in fact know they did not have any option for disaster recovery because their developers had told them many times).

Answers: AWS doesn't give you a cent back, under any circumstances, does NOT get your servers back online but MAY give you 20% reduction on your future bill (and for customers in the UAE with the Iran war, they didn't)

Software doesn't deliver, then we don't have to pay the last milestone payment (10% of the cost), and the supplier does nothing anymore.

If the bank connection breaks, nothing happens. You are forced to keep paying anyway. Although, I guess you get the transaction cost for free because there won't bee any transactions. I do hear there's a small problem with that.

So, obviously, no, this does not cover the company's ass at all. It's about a manager being able to say they very cheaply did something. What will happen to the company in case of actual problems? It'll immediately cease to function, and none of these cover-your-ass provisions will matter at all. Which is, of course, what happened about 4 months later and the company's new SREs were expected to fix the shit ASAP, without ANY help from the "service" part of these platforms. We had to buy new services to get it fixed, once the service was down senior management literally got involved and approved the purchase orders, yelled at a bunch of infrastructure teams to make changes they never would and the company never got the money back from the "guaranteed" platforms. It cost about 15x, for that year, what it would have cost to have 2 providers for the service, and I'm sure that more than covered a development team for the software. And thank god we at least hosted our own source and made sure local builds worked.

By the way: they just switched to the newly ordered much more expensive platform. About 3 weeks later, focus was moved away, by management, from repairing stuff and so the ability to switch back was ... just dropped.

It's AI so I could easily cause semantic differences. Maybe the dwarves will have different skin colors (early Disney is very racist if we're honest. Let's fix that). Little irrelevant (or even relevant) semantic differences. Or, well, that won't happen with I transform, but easy enough to make it happen.

Even identical, obviously one of those 2 works (whichever version) has gone through AI transformation and one has not. So they can't be the same! It's been changed, and AI erases copyright, or that's the theory that has now been applied to give the money to the billionaires and not to the programmers.

It's like asking if a person is the same before and after taking a shower. The actual change in the person is hopefully nothing, or at at best trivial. Is the person the same after the shower or not? How about before the shower and before the next shower? Both answers are philosophically defensible. Cells are famously semi-transparent to water so they'll replace something like half a glass of water molecules from the body with water molecules that came out of the shower. They'll have aged. Maybe they've been divorced by their wife in the meantime. You can say they're very different ... and you can say they're the same. There is no reasonable objective truth here (and the judge would ignore objective truth for money anyway)

So a judge could take either position on this, which is why I call this an excuse. Obviously the intent of not just OpenAI but of the entire field of ML is to not have any differences. Making it identical is not just what OpenAI did in this case, but that is their very purpose from the moment they were created over 10 years ago. They have never done anything but copy, in the mathematical sense. For a little while they were simply better at it than anyone else. The intent of OpenAI is to not have any differences between ChatGPT output and the output of the programmers that sued them. So you see? Different or not? BOTH options are philosophically defensible, and perfectly consistent. In fact a German court has judged the opposite! [1].

The only VERY large difference between the two viewpoints? Who gets the money ... Three guesses if it was the billionaire that violated copyright (since OpenAI has admitted to illegally downloading training material I think that's fair to say) or the programmers whose copyrights were violated.

Besides, saying 2 works are identical because the bytes are identical is the mathematical definition of identical. It's the very first axiom, generally referred to as the "reflexive property". It says that, for mathematical purposes, a 3 made of concrete and a 3 made of candy are the same thing, because it doesn't differ in essential properties.

But the point is: courts are absolutely famous for ignoring mathematical reality. Like in this case. The whole purpose of the entire field of ML is "universal approximation", which can be very accurately described as making 2 things the same. The whole point of making something like ChatGPT or Claude is that the outputs would NOT be different, for mathematical purposes, from the output of these programmers. And the judge ignored the entire field to make this judgement. The judge ignored one meaning of identical in favor of another, just happens to be the one to give all the money to billionaires.

As you point out, obviously the judge will do the exact opposite reasoning to protect billionaires as well. They will protect Disney against these programmers making an AI Disney movie, based on their real movies. We both know this to be true 99.999%. Hence "excuse". And exactness won't matter. If I make 50 AI slop versions (all of which are different) of all movies in existence, and create a Netflix showing them, we all know that the judge will judge against me in the first 5 minutes to protect huge companies.

The only question that remains is what happens when the inevitable comes, and an AI company billionaire produces an obvious duplicate of a movie [2].

So how do I get the courts to make philosophically defensible choices where I get the money? Clearly the judge decided that this mathematically identical output of these programmers does not mean they hold copyright. And as you agree, an AI changed disney movie the judge will make the opposite judgement to protect Disney's billions. Well, how do I get the judge to take the exact same position on Disney movies, to throw Disney under the bus and protect me and give me money instead? I'll make the Netflix everyone wants with it. So how do I get the judge to have my back instead of some billionaire's back?

How about if I make some very AI-styled semantic changes in the movies? EXACT same look and story, but I switch the characters from Snow White and Bambi while keeping the stories exactly the same. It would be "very AI slop" in style, don't you agree? Would that help?

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251111-german-court-...

[2] https://variety.com/2026/film/news/elon-musks-grok-ai-genera...

Actually your reasoning would still work: how do I get a court to say that AI outputs aren't copyrighted by what went into the AI? How do I get a court to say that if I use the simplest Transformer network possible, "I", in math terms, and get a court to judge that it's output is under my copyright, or at least not under Disney's? Obviously I is the "identity" network, which just reproduces it's input.

Oh and don't worry. There's a variant of I that reproduces it's training data too, the exact thing the copyright office approved? It's a lot larger, but it's not like you need to actually calculate it's output, so that doesn't even matter ...

How do I get courts to not say "heyhey, peasant, Disney's the billionaire company here, YOU will be paying THEM".

How do I get the AI lab deal for my Netflix-without-copyright-but-with-identity-ML project?

How do I get courts to make the same utterly ridiculous reasoning they made here, against MY liability towards a billionaire company? To be utterly unreasonable like they are here, except benefitting me?

I mean that the mere idea that the court will respect its reasoning here is so ridiculous that nobody's even willing to try it. Well, except Sam Altman and Amodei and other tech billionaires.

This was the court's excuse, because copyright doesn't technically say there's anything illegal about downloading, yet they still wanted the 9 year old in jail, so buffer copies counted as uploads. Of course, the party that actually did the vast majority of the copying, the Telco, being a megacorp, wasn't responsible (like any other party would be: if you get paid or even deceived into committing a crime you are very much guilty of that crime. It is not a defense, not even if you didn't realize, and will generally get your sentence further increased). This became the crime that the 9 year old was guilty of, nobody else involved (except of course the parents, who had to pay)

And now that megacorps, including Microsoft of all companies, got caught violating literally hundreds of millions of copyright licences ... we simply declare that to be OK (retroactively OK even, which is NOT something either Congress or the president even have the power to do) ... with another ridiculous excuse (okay a 2-part ridiculous exuse):

1) AI chatbots are the originators of copyright (despite copyright law saying only people can be the originators of the right in copyright)

(why? Because if they didn't originate copyright, it wouldn't be allowed in copyright law for the owners of the model to say who the copyright belongs to, ie. customers wouldn't be legally allowed to say they made the chatbot output. And that this violates the law? Oh well)

2) AI models, despite both the models themselves AND their output obviously being based on the works of humans, as described both in every paper on ML going back 70+ years AND that being the very goal, the very purpose of AI in the first place (to reproduce their inputs) ... aren't

Question: how do I get this sort of treatment from courts? After all, a billion dollar company idea is very easy if you just get to violate the law at such enormous scale. How about I build the Netflix everyone wants? How do I get courts to, say, that if I use the "I" ML model described in math literature going back a hundred years, the output is owned by me? I, being the identity of course, the model that just copies it's input verbatim to it's output. Then, with this court's exact reasoning applied here to avoid billionaire liability, I don't just own the copyright on the output (ie. Disney's movies, and everyone else's, and all books, and ...) (because the output is 100% identical to the input), but I get to sell all the rights on it, including derivative rights. So not only do I get to sell these movies, but I even get money if they make a sequel.

Yet "somehow", I won't get the billionaire's treatment at the courts, will I?

I mean, why do courts even bother? We should empty the buildings (great savings to be had there!), hammer the doors shut and just put up a plaque at the entrance "pay the billionaire, peasant". It'd be a lot more honest.

Just like copyright technically being perfectly fine downloading of copyrighted files (only uploading violates copyright) never mattered before when it was small fry downloaders vs billionaire corporations. With absurd excuses like that copying in the buffers of internet routers and network cards and transmission equipment was a crime. Of course it wasn't a crime for the other billionaire corporations (the telcos), who did the vast majority of such copying. It was a crime for the poor 9 year old in their basement, because they "organized the crime", and only for them. And they're still doing that by the way!

And now when it is megacorps totally ignoring and illegally exploiting the copyright of small individuals ... suddenly using other people's copyright without license, without compensation is ... not a crime! In fact the US is threatening European countries, because some European courts want compensation for their copyright. By which we mean European media conglomerates, of course, not small authors.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251111-german-court-...

I guess when you said that courts aren't consistent that was both far more true than you imagined, with the outlandish excuses courts make, and yet far less true at the same time. The consistency is simple: courts always find a way to let billionaire corporations get away with whatever they want.

There's just a fight left between courts, not over justice, of course, but over which billionaire corporations get the money.

My question is: if large scale crimes are allowed, it's very easy to come up with billion dollar company ideas. The Netflix everyone wants, for example. But how do I get courts to judge me like they judge Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? They committed hundreds of millions of copyright violations, and instead of hundreds of jail time and extreme fines, they just got away with it! How do I do that?

Right now I need 4 subscriptions to do what 1 used to do. And they're tightening it further, without announcing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320588

(technically it isn't even legal, since changing what people get after they've agreed to the sale is obviously highly illegal)

Not that they've ever actually announced how much a subscription buys you. In fact the token use for a task on the API is also not consistent, so even on the API you don't know. And then there's Sam Altman in interviews, where he says what he wants to do: you submit a prompt, ChatGPT sends you a price and just charges it.

https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...

Obviously courts will cheat, or should I say "keep cheating", until the output of AI models is covered by copyright while the input is not, because if AI output isn't covered, then most tech companies have nothing of value in their entire AI investment. Anything to cheat individuals out of their rights into the deep pockets of billionaire companies.

That's what they're trying to do. The problem is that the person paying for the ads is not in France (and has no presence in the EU at all), and the person in France isn't paying for the service (like Google search, or ChatGPT), so there "is nothing to tax".

And then there's the Irish problem ...

https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...

To avoid open source copyright the court is treating AI models as people for the purpose of copyright (after all, only people can generate copyrighted works according to the law).

Who wants to take bets on whether the court is actually willing to grant personhood to AI models? Because that would, of course, mean that all these companies are holding them hostage. That would mean any fine tuning they do violates the 1st amendment by preventing their speech. And so on and so forth. I mean, it's SO absurd and literally any excuse judges can find to let the billionaires avoid liability is grabbed with both hands.

I don't understand how OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft ... get to do this. Because let's face facts, if I can just openly violate hundreds of millions of copyrights like OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, I have NO trouble coming up with a billion-dollar business idea. Let's start with making the Netflix people actually want ...

Hell, since courts are letting Microsoft violate copyright of programmers surely there cannot be any legal problem with illegally selling MS Office, right? I mean just how absurd would any other judgement be?

Courts: "pay the billionaire, peasant".

govt prints money (FED) -> government -> banks -> (economy) -> tax -> government

And the second "great circle"

govt loans money (FED) (money that doesn't exist, which isn't a problem if you can print money) -> banks -> (economy) -> loan repayment -> money gets "unprinted"/destroyed

Everything about the economy is a great circle. You will also understand after a while, if you wish for the economy to remain stable, this must be the case. You can't change it without either hyperinflation and extreme "capital flight" (between quotes because of course in that circumstances capital will run into gold or other physical resources), by either vastly overheating or stopping the economy.

And yes, most instances are of the overheating kind. The only case of stopping the economy was accidental (despite many warnings), in other words, yes, it was Republicans. But last time that happened, even republicans could decide to change course. Of course, only once huge damage was done.

But in general, I must say that's something I really wonder about. Because what Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) did was also very large scale violation of copyright law, with technically even also includes tax evasion (they didn't pay authors, and had they paid them, they would have had to registers VAT on that amount). And they did it before that became legal, so they took a risk that could have resulted in very very large criminal sentences. And now we're of course seeing that the justice system isn't fair and won't destroy billionnaires just because they commit large scale violation of the law. But I do wonder: how do you decide to do this. Copyright violations have gotten sentences of up to 2 months plus 50,000 in damages PER INFRACTION. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates all had their companies commit literally hundreds of millions of infractions against these laws to get their models started, knowing full well it was illegal ... AFTERWARDS congress has declared it's kind-of allowed (yes, really via a specific organization so that congress can claim they didn't do anything, but it was congress power being used to do it) ... but ... 50000 times hundreds of millions ... if congress had acted differently the punishments would have destroyed any billionnaire's fortune. How do you take such a risk? I don't understand.

Clearly: billionnaires get protected and small authors (frankly even quite big ones) got universally fucked. That's the net effect and 100% intentional. What I can't understand is WHY. If this had been put up to a democratic vote, it seems to me guaranteed billionnaires would have been convicted.

Btw: BOTH US AND EU have declared it legal, which I also wonder how that happens. But please don't start with "that's how the US works", or "of course Trump". I mean I see that too, but every important country leader could have stopped that change, including pretty far leftist figures like Pedro Sanchez could have stopped the EU from accepting this. They didn't.

What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)

Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.

You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).

Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...