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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • If not having it doesn’t lose you anything can I have yours?

    You’re focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn’t have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

    Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.



  • I have zero belief that any units will ignore or slow walk any orders. There’s just no history of that happening in recent US military existence to expect it to happen now. Vietnam saw a handful of cases where people likely killed their commanders, but it very plainly didn’t impact the course of the war.

    The UN will never determine that the US is engaged in an illegal war. The security council needs to vote on that, and the US gets to veto. The ICC doesn’t apply to the US because we never ratified the agreement. It’s just someone elses laws.

    Direct action against the military is more likely to have an effect, but linking arms is not going to be effective. Impeding military production is just going to get you beaten and arrested, at best.
    Specifically interfering with military operations is particularly illegal and carries penalties way worse than the usual you get for messing with other businesses.
    If you’re going that far, at least do something effective rather than slowing down a truck for a few hours.
    Look to the WW1 protests, and what was effective there and what happened.



  • It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
    They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

    My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.




  • It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
    The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

    Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

    It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

    Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?


  • The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

    It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
    Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

    Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.



  • If you have reason to believe they are, you explain that reasoning to a court and if the reasoning is sufficiently persuasive the company can be compelled to provide internal information that could show whatever is going on.
    Hiding this information or destroying it typically carries personal penalties for the individuals involved in it’s destruction, as well as itself being evidence against the organization. “If your company didn’t collect this information, why are four IT administrators and their manager serving 10 years in prison for intentionally deleting relevant business records?”

    The courts are allowed to go through your stuff.


  • Just for an example that isn’t visible to the user: the server needs to know how it can communicate responses to the browser.
    So it’s not just “what fonts do you have”, it also needs to know "what type of image can you render? What type of data compression do you speak? Can I hold this connection open for a few seconds to avoid having to spend a bunch of time establishing a new connection? We all agree that basic text can be represented using 7-bit ASCII, but can you parse something from this millennium?”.

    Beyond that there’s all the parameters of the actual connection that lives beneath http. What tls ciphers do you support? What extensions?

    The exposure of the basic information needed to make a request reveals information which may be sufficient to significantly track a user.




  • Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

    The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

    https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

    It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
    Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
    The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

    It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

    Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.


  • I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

    If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
    The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

    A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?





  • I’m not sure that’s entirely true.

    Most of their money comes from retail, either the site, subscriptions, or the seller services they provide. AWS, while massive, isn’t what’s keeping them afloat.

    You’re entirely correct though that competition with Amazon is difficult because of those additional sources of revenue. Having additional stable sources of income gives them the ability to accept lower margins in retail with less risk.

    The way they make money selling things with no profit or at a loss is to ensure that someone else is always paying the difference. “Free shipping” with a paid subscription means that rather than providing shipping for a loss, they just need to do it for less than the subscription. Turns out “guy with a van” can deliver a lot of packages for quite cheap. So many that he’ll be out delivering from 3am to 9pm, and for $5 they’ll drop your package off first and call it overnight.
    In some cases they can get the seller to pay for shipping as a promotional incentive, since Amazons conditioned people to look for free shipping as a precondition to considering a product.

    Only give away for free what you got someone else to pay for.