CaptArmchair

Sapiens has only been around for 300k years. Writing and, arguably, civilization is only 5.000 years old. If you subtract 5k from 300k, you still have about 300k left.

If you subtract 300k from 10 million years, you still have about 10 million years left.

The point here is that we are notoriously bad at gauging how big numbers are. We are also bad at intuitively gauging how fast/slow evolution moves.

We are very much still evolving and adapting to our surroundings. It's just that the big changes only become visible way beyond the horizon of a future we are able to conceive.

Interoperability isn't the problem. Leverage to enforce your own IP, or lack thereof as an individual, is.

Just because you publish content on the Web doesn't mean you give license to anyone to use it however they want. IP is rooted on a foundational principle of giving explicit consent. Copyleft is using that principle to explicitly state "anyone is free to use this however they want". Without that consent, it's assumed that the author can ask you to cease and desist. (Hence why e.g. wikipedia is plastered with creative Commons license mentions)

Sure, there are fair use exceptions. But if you take a close look at the conditions that need to be met before a published copy can be considered fair use, it's not as clear cut as it seems.

Thing is, only big media outlets with capital, like the NYTimes, are able to litigate against big actors who wholesale misuse interoperability after a tragedy of the commons kind of fashion.

This imbalance in resources and capital to enforce rights between a handful of big actors and everyone else is exactly what Doctorow draws attention to in the interview.

> Only if you want the species to survive

Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens, given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of that happening elsewhere or on Earth.

Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social construct, but biological speaking by and large inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just 'is'.

The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that influences traits in modern humans, some of that just doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them.

In the same vain, our written record and collective memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact same thing.

Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-faring species might be the biggest mistake we could make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a distant future which turned out to be our distant relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one can't readily exclude.

I think this is going to be a test of the fair use doctrine.

https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

Now, there's this idea that "news" is just factual and therefore falls under "fair use". However, that's only part of what section 107 says.

Fair use very much is still conditional, as there are 4 factors to be considered: (a) Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (b) Nature of the copyrighted work (c) Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and (d) Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

The big issue isn't companies training LLM's using unlicensed materials (e.g. copyright protected works); it's publishing the output to the wider world. That's where a liability is created.

Well, here's the link to the post-mortem of said "horror" story on the Roblox blog:

https://blog.roblox.com/2022/01/roblox-return-to-service-10-...

TL;DR The outage was caused by (a) they enabled a new streaming feature in Consul under unusualy high read-and-write load, (b) the load conditions triggered a pathological issue in the third-party BoltDB system upon which Consul relies and (c) all of that was exacerbated by having one consul cluster supporting multiple workloads.

I'd use quotes to catalog this as a "horror" story, because this was clearly a very specific issue triggered by a specific and complex set of circumstances.

The blogpost also mentions that Roblox worked closely with Hashicorp engineers to mitigate the issue, and work towards structural solutions; the post also affirms their choice to manage their infra themselves rather then moving into a public cloud solution.

Sure, Kubernetes covers loads of territory. But there definitely are niches where products like Consul & Nomad do add value.

I think the point of the author was that as a young - implied: inexperienced - developer he was blinded by the power of being able to describe the world in code; and inadvertently got stuck in the rabbit hole.

Learning to take a step back and discern the best fitting abstractions that allow modeling the business domain is a learned skill. There's a difference between learning about object inheritance in school, and actually applying it in big projects where the effects only become apparent over the course of months.

Moreover it's "opt-out" and not "opt-in":

> A new metrics collection setting will be added to the privacy page in gnome-initial-setup and also to the privacy page in gnome-control-center. This setting will be a toggle that will enable or disable metrics collection for the entire system. We want to ensure that metrics are never submitted to Fedora without the user's knowledge and consent, so the underlying setting will be off by default in order to ensure metrics upload is not unexpectedly turned on when upgrading from an older version of Fedora. However, we also want to ensure that the data we collect is meaningful, so gnome-initial-setup will default to displaying the toggle as enabled, even though the underlying setting will initially be disabled. (The underlying setting will not actually be enabled until the user finishes the privacy page, to ensure users have the opportunity to disable the setting before any data is uploaded.) This is to ensure the system is opt-out, not opt-in. This is essential because we know that opt-in metrics are not very useful. Few users would opt in, and these users would not be representative of Fedora users as a whole. We are not interested in opt-in metrics.

Those last three lines are essentially adding insult to injury. I have no problem with telemetry, I do have a problem with telemetry being on "by default" as it puts the burden of safeguarding privacy squarely with the user. As an individual you have to make sure the toggle is set to "off" yourself, and assume that telemetry really is switched off.

Back in february, the Go project proposed to add opt-out telemetry in the Go toolchain and they were almost torn in half over a weekend.

These laws being byzantine is the result of almost two decades of legal battles. Meta and Google have batteries of competent lawyers and lobbyists, constantly testing for legal loopholes, interpretations and contesting complaints in European courts.

Privacy laws aren't new, they existed before the GDPR. But they were fractured and not up-to-par with the new digital reality of large scale collection of personal data. These laws are geared exactly against the very business model of Google and Meta: offer free services, be first to market and become a gatekeeper, collect user data as broadly as possible, sell business intelligence and marketing services to actual paying customers.

When Meta states that it can't release Threads due to "unknown legal liabilities" that's a round-about way of admitting that their business model doesn't entirely square with European laws, such as they are.

Finally, as far as size in terms of user base, revenue and expenses go, the likes of Meta, Google and Twitter are very much a league of their own. Given their business model and its profitability, it's inevitable that their goals and motives are at odds with the interests and legal rights of citizens.

> A lot of

Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number representative for everyone who publishes text, video, pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or, even more limited, a handful of online platforms?

> making quality content

I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online, both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value attribution.

The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet, interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast majority of internet users don't collect and curate links: they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".

Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital future.

The author also designed the "Spring '83" protocol, which is a really quirky, neat way of disseminating information in a small way i.e. like classifieds in a newspaper.

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/

Yes, gambling ads will be banned as well.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgium-bans-gambling-a...

I don't think so.

> To develop the third world, it might be more informative to look at the postwar trajectories of Japan, Singapore, Korea, and of course China.

That's the exact sentence, and it doesn't sit right with me for three distinct reasons.

First, it can be read as an an implication: "these 4 countries where part of the "third world" and now aren't given their post-war trajectory." which ignores the history of those 4 nations long before WWII or Western involvement.

Second, makes the same a-historical mistake by assuming that the particular path followed by those nations can readily be transposed towards other regions in the world.

Third, it's a take that ignores the agency other cultures and peoples have to carve out their own place in the world. Moreover, many of the problems in the so-called global south are a direct result of this exact thinking. Countless cultures and ways of living have disappeared over the past 2 centuries because it.

I would argue that "applying lessons" ignores not just local geology, but - more importantly - local / regional culture, politics, socio-economics, etc. as well. It assumes that, throughout history, the rest of the world subconsciously has had - and still has - a need for Western-European frameworks of thinking about their place in the world. Which is very eurocentrist perception of the world.

A hallmark of post-modern historiography is exactly discarding this history can only be perceived through a western-european lens, and acknowledging that there are as many valid ways of looking at the past as there are cultures and people around the world.

> Japan, Singapore, Korea, and of course China

Neither Japan, Korea nor China were "third world" countries before WWII. Or even ever.

On the contrary. Japan was very much an industrialized nation in the 1930s. Before then, it has a long history as a advanced, albeit, regional power. The same is true about Korea. Chinese history itself is rife with empires and kingdoms - having trade networks, technological advances and so on - some of which being as large and influential - if not more - then the Roman Empire during its heyday.

Singapore already was a bustling trade port long before WWII, and has a history of being part of powerful local sultanates before the arrival of the British.

If anything, the examples you gave are quite ambivalent about the historical dynamics that led to their integration in today's modern global economic, geo-political, cultural structures and global power balances which were borne out of post-WWII victors creating a new order for peace and development.

Well, I disagree.

The author actually acknowledges that opinions on legitimate use of pre-flop charts in the poker community are highly divided. It's a controversial topic.

> Overall, the app was controversial. Many of the Reddit comments were negative, and many accused me of making an app for “cheating.” Though there was some interesting back-and-forth because many people pointed out that high-profile famous poker players openly admit to using preflop charts.

Arguably, the author wanted to build a simple app that generates sizable revenue, having your idea reviled isn't a great outlook.

However, in his case, that's not a problem since his goal was to test an idea quickly, not to build a successful business:

> Overall, I expected some controversy and some negativity. This app mainly was an experiment to make money and learn more about making watchOS apps. If it fails, it’s not too big a deal.

The elephant in the room many have is that the author didn't start from an authentic motivation to solve an interesting problem people have, and turn it into a small business, but instead was motivated by "Hey, I want to experiment with building a business" and then started looking for a problem which was a good fit for his ulterior goal.

It's a kind of thinking about building businesses that will certainly yield successful results. It's also the kind of thinking that doesn't in the slightest consider the manifold impacts of their product or service on their markets and the wider environment in which those markets reside.

As one redditor duly noted:

> And that's how you get watches banned from the poker table.

I can think of several good reasons to self host from your own home. Then again, those reasons are tangential to the core notion of self-publishing / independently publishing on the Web.

There are two key goals here. First, being in full control of what you can put online and in which form. Second, being able to take whatever you've put online and move ship if you have/want to. Owning a domain name and having access to a VPS or shared hosting are great first steps.

Even so, you're still relying on someone else to host your content for you. Depending on how much stock / trust you are willing to put in someone else's intentions and abilities - present and future - you may want to consider self-hosting on hardware you own. The trade-off being that you'll have to put your confidence in your own abilities, resources and skills. Which isn't a trade-off many people wouldn't necessarily be willing to make.

As for the article. When it comes to the rise of social media over the past 15-20 years, well, Eternal September happened. The vast majority of modern-day influencers aren't interested in tinkering and self-hosting. They just took the opportunity of a platform which offered free - albeit limited - tools to share content with a growing audience. More content and a growing audience, in turn, attracted more people. Arguably, the vast majority of people today would have never really entered into massive online communities if it weren't for big tech, social media, cheap internet connections and cheap mobile devices.

Sure, social media has eclipsed the, comparatively small, web of independent blogs and bloggers such as it was back in the mid-00s. That period of time is never going to come back. Despite all their flaws, vast social media networks aren't going to disappear either. Independent Web publishing may see a modest renaissance today with new protocols, the Fediverse and dirt cheap hosting. Then again, from a sociological perspective: the notion of online identity has always been evolving and has become ever more complex and fluid. People don't exclusively turn to one tool or one platform: they own several identities across many domains, platforms, accounts,... Age, social-economic background, culture, personality traits, peers,... are all deciding factors as to how people manifest that identity. In turn, collectively, this drives how the Web itself keeps evolving and morphing into something new in the future, which may or may not put a bigger focus on self publishing.

Yup. 10 commits, first commit was just 4 days ago. Same with their public website & docs. On Github, it's all barely 4 days old.

Brian Lovin has released his work under the MIT license. AFAIK I believe this leaves it open to others to take the code and just run with it.

Even so, looking at their value proposition, it's just a landing page that leads to https://nymhq.com/join where you can subscribe to a "waiting list" to join a server. They claim "Nym is currently in private beta with limited servers, but is accepting waitlist requests now."

The "showcase" on the front page are just content fodder (AI? Web 2/3/5?) with quick, unstyled instances of their blogging software. The rest of that landing page seems to contain a lot of fluff as well.

Frankly, I'm extremely apprehensive about supporting this.

> No-one ever gets sued.

... Yet.

Yeah, it's a fallacy called "changing the goalposts". It's bringing up an argument that, although true in and of itself, is not relevant to the subject of the ongoing debate.

> How can it properly attribute it?

There it is. If you have to ask that question, it follows that co-pilot isn't the right tool for developers to use in the first place.

Would you - or your employer - want to risk a lawsuit because you inadvertently copied code that's actually released under a license with particular terms of use?

"Oh, my due diligence went as far as trusting Microsoft and their product for making sure any and all rights where cleared before their tool provided me code." is a meager excuse in a court case when the original author of said code decides to sue you.

> Little bits of code should not be copyrightable in the first place. I can't copyright a single sentence fragment.

True. You can't copyright single fact statements. But clearly, there are cases where co-pilot suggests way more then that.

It's also true that most people don't really consider how stringent copyright laws really are until they are affected by the consequences of their actions (fines, suits, cease & desist,...).

> it's very rare to use a big chunk of code from copilot without changes

That's a tentative claim.

> His code is already used in thousands of repos without proper attribution. Isn't that worse?

True. And those are license violations as well. But we aren't discussing those.

We are discussing an online service created by a large corporation that automatically hands millions of developers code directly in their IDE's which was entirely stripped from its license. There's no informing of consent or terms of use whatsoever.

> If you want to steal his code you can just copypaste it

When you copy the code from his GitHub repo, a reference to the applicable license is directly mentioned in the files you're copying from.

"stealing" in that regard would mean: willfully ignoring the license and its terms. You can't deny you weren't informed about the existence of the license. It's an integral part of the code.

As opposed to o-pilot which presents you code, giving you the impression that you can just plug it into your own projects, without informing you about any applicable terms of use e.g. attribution.

Put differently, if you're a professional and you copy/paste entire files from some random GitHub repo that doesn't contain any licensing or copyright information, well, you're creating a legal liability for yourself, your employer and anyone using that code through your work.

> No need for a convoluted prompt baiting Copilot into reproducing it.

In an utopian world, everyone would just be able to freely use whatever code is available on the Internet without having to ask for anyone's consent. We don't live in such a world. The reality is one where intellectual property rights and court cases are a thing.

Regarding Canberra, after WWII:

> Immediately after the end of the war, Canberra was criticised for resembling a village and its disorganised collection of buildings was deemed ugly.[96][97][98] Canberra was often derisively described as "several suburbs in search of a city Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies regarded the state of the national capital as an embarrassment.[100] Over time his attitude changed from one of contempt to that of championing its development. He fired two ministers charged with the development of the city for poor performance. Menzies remained in office for over a decade and in that time the development of the capital sped up rapidly.[101][102] The population grew by more than 50 per cent in every five-year period from 1955 to 1975.[102] Several Government departments, together with public servants, were moved to Canberra from Melbourne following the war.[103] Government housing projects were undertaken to accommodate the city's growing population." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Creation_of_the_natio...

Arguably, Canberra's local economy was/is able to rally around the workers who built the city followed by the influx of civil servants due to centralization of government branches and administrations. The same can be asserted about Washington DC or Brasilia.

In the same vain: towns that emerge around a single economic activity. Like College / University towns. Or mining towns.

Their common ground is a clear appealing, albeit single, economic activity that gives people the motivation to flock to the city. Canberra's local authorities only started to invest in housing projects after a clear need was asserted.

That doesn't mean those cities are regarded as "livable" or "favorable". Brasilia, by and large, is viewed as a "workcity" where most of the daytime population consists of commuters who leave at the end of the day.

Whereas The Line puts all the infrastructure in place without there being a growing community that needs catering to. It assumes that the appeal of the infrastructure in itself is enough for people to be willing to move in. I'd say that's premature optimization.

Well, I just pointed out it's an ongoing debate, I didn't connect any particular value attribution to that statement.

> Suppose we add a button to a visual studio plugin called 'Copy me a function' and when you click it, it 100% grabs some random code from github and plops it as-is into your code base.

Personally, that's exactly how I see co-pilot. To my mind, it's a tool that sits in the same category as p2p platforms, copying machines or video recorders. They are just tools.

How, for what purposes and by whom they are leveraged makes all the difference here.

> A human quoting a human without attribution

... as opposed to AI. At the heart of the matter lurks a debate whether AI is an independent phenomenon which behaves in its own right, or a just a tool that's created and wielded by humans against a backdrop of clear incentives and motivations.

The argument isn't about whether or not the law deals in a absolutes - it's a basic principle that law is tested in courts through interpretation - the argument is that co-pilot can be perceived as merely a means to an end and that GitHub / Microsoft have created a massive mountain of liabilities for themselves.

> There's no known issue with file formats being lost. (I think this is what it's about)

Esoteric, proprietary formats have a high risk factor. Long term preservation goes beyond administrative archives and includes niche software used to make e.g. interactive objects which may need to be preserved for legal or other reasons.

Long term preservation also extends beyond the 2-5 year horizon, when one could make a reasonably accurate risk assessment. The legal framework may demand that some (parts of) archives need to be preserved for the next 30-50-100 years or even eternity (no end date specified). Just consider documents related to nuclear installations, machinery, tooling,... which go well beyond ubiquitous office file formats.

> But files should be kept in their original format.

Substitution is choice which needs to be considered carefully. Hence why emulation is a big topic in digital archiving.

> Changing format is the best way to lose information, for zero preservation gain.

It's not that black and white. Ultimately, bitstreams need to be translated to an output device. A big question is "Am I seeing the message in a digital context such as what one would have seen 30 years ago?" There's a can of worms discussion regarding the "essence" of digital information, the representation on screen, and the bits stored on disk.

Changing formats usually is a question of judicious and pragmatic decision making based on valorisation of the material as well as the context from which it originated.

What's more important? Being able to consume the information? Or being able to consume it in its original form? What do we lose and what do we gain? There are no absolute answers to be had in that regard: it's always a per-case assessment.

The answer is yes. Definitely yes. When you're the leader, it's not just about you and how you feel. It's about everyone. It's about fully understanding the gravity of the enterprise you're all pursuing and how the experience might affect participants in different ways.

Traveling to space isn't the same as canyon rafting or bungee jumping. It's not just "exciting", it elicits a wide range of profound experiences and deep emotions. And all of them are just as valid and should be affirmed. If you are organizing and leading people into space, you have to be fully aware as well as humble.

Over the past decades, Bezos spend mountains of energy expounding the importance of space travel, including its philosophical aspects. Bezos response to Shatner makes all of that questionable. It leaves one speculating whether or not he sees commercial space travel as anything else then another thrill ride that might add to the profit margins of his companies.

Maybe he did have a deeper discussion in private. But given Bezos' public image and demeanour, I wouldn't assume he fully understood the importance of that moment before the camera's in hindsight.

US Residential electricity use in 2022: 1477 billion kWH. [1] 6% constitutes about 88 billion kWh according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets are between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia.[2]

Then again, the US is the third most populous country in the world with a population of 330 million. It's also second in yearly electricity consumption globally after China (4 million GWh vs 8 million GWh).[3]

In that regard, your equivalence is false. Sure, dryers clearly use up a ton of electricity and it's perfectly reasonable to question the value of having your clothes dried by an electrical machine. Then again, clearly crypto uses a ton of electricity as well, while you could equally argue that there are clear alternatives, which don't require all of that just to be able to have a means of payment.

Of course, the meta discussion being that laundry drying machines have a clear marketable value and direct use to the vast majority of the U.S population, whereas with cryptocurrencies, the vote is very much still out there.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-use-rise-20... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-202... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

More apt would be: hindsight is a b.

Everyone has a tendency to evaluate the past with today's knowledge and experience. That's a fallacy. You didn't so much "lose" 10 years, it just took 10 years to come to an understanding about a meaningful part of your life. And maybe you really needed all that time to arrive there.

In my book, regret means you've learned something about your past but you're still trying to change the past. Which you can't. What matters is how you're going to leverage your wisdom going forward in a meaningful way.

I was recently taught in first aid class that the survival rate of an out-of-hospital heart attack is about 10-12%. Heart attacks have a ton of causes, lifestyle is just one of those. Sometimes, things go very wrong without an apparent, explainable cause. Medicine hasn't yet figured out everything that might cause a heart attack.

Even with help on scene, people still die in hospital a few days later because of a mix of underlying causes.

CPR on scene doubles the chances of survival, but they aren't a guarantee someone will survive. The entire point of learning CPR is to maximize the number of people that don't have to die in the event of a heart attack, no matter how minute that fraction.

About 800k people suffer a heart attack in the U.S. yearly accordign to the CDC (this is both in-hospital as well as out-of-hospital).