Closi

I don't think I need to?

I don't need to offer my own analysis to know that "Netanyahu asked trump to go to war because he wanted to create instability and that it was because of the the military industrial complex" is the sort of analysis you get if your research is 2 or 3 facebook posts.

> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.

Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.

I don’t know if Tetris is the best example, as they are a landmark case where they sued and won.

See Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc

Depends what you would call that architecture then I guess!

I run my local theatre website by writing the posts in markdown, and then have some github actions which use Hugo to turn it in to a static site and then uploads the content to an S3 bucket. The site itself has dynamic content like within-website ticket buying from eventbrite and a contact form that sends email using an external service. It also calls in things like google analytics.

Does this still count as static? Personally I think so, Even though there are 'dynamic' elements.

IMO static refers more about how the content is served rather than saying that the content can’t be ‘dynamic’ as lots of Wordpress sites have static/non interactive content but still regenerate the html on each page load.

They can - it’s just more complex.

You just put the comments into something like firebase/supabase etc or use one of many off the shelf solutions. Free tier is fine.

> the problem is network effects

This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.

I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.

We are going around in circles. Of all the examples, Dave Gnukem quite obviously infringes the trademark. Again, just because no one sued them doesn't mean it's not succeptible to a trademark infringement claim if the IP owners wanted to sue.

While I am aware they claim parody law exempts them, see the enforcement of other brands (e.g. Starbucks) and see how far that goes once it gets to court.

But I don't think I'm going to convince you, and I don't think you are going to convince me, so I'll just disagree agreeably and this will be my last message.

GNU != Transport Tycoon

Different types of media get treated differently by courts. If you repaint a painting 1:1 then you are liable to copyright. If you make a song that is too substantially similar you are liable to penalties. If your branding is too similar to the Oscar’s or Starbucks you are liable for infringement.

On the other hand if you reimplement Java the courts have decided that’s OK.

Different media are treated differently. A game and an OS kernel have different attributes in reality (even if technically they are both bundles of code - courts don’t always decide things on technical literalism, they often apply the spirit of the law, understanding if the application meets the original intent and precedents).

Giving a list of examples doesn’t mean this example is legal or would stand up in court.

Other than the fact that most of these are very different situations, but even if they were the same it is like saying “snorting coccaine is legal because I can give a list of celebrities that have done it and have not been arrested”

The examples that are similar - eg FreeCiv, imo probably survive because of the decisions and polices of the original publisher rather than some magical legal protection which allows you to make 1:1 copies without being sued.

TuxRacer isn’t really a copy of anything, and an OS or computer utility will likely be treated in a materially different way to a computer game by a court of law.

This list might just be survivor bias though - it only includes the projects where they didn’t get sued and taken down (either because the developer was ok with them, or because they strayed far enough into fair use).

There are clear counter examples - see Tengen vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Palworld, Microsoft vs halo inspired games, Microsoft vs Minecraft clones. Most are settled out court. Examples that go to court tend to be from companies with budgets to fight, lots of projects will just get DMCA’d and won’t fight, or will back down after a legal letter.

Ultimately copyright and IP infringement is decided in the courts, and the rules aren’t entirely black and white.

Also even if it is a ground up rewrite, the look and feel still matters.

Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)

Atari own all the IP and copyright.

While OpenTTD is open source, it's basis is really that the original game was reverse-engineered, originally using the original assets, and then rebuilt.

Also all the map data etc is owned by Atari, so you need to have a 'genuine' copy to access all the levels etc.

I wouldn't feel that smug considering these are single prompt generations on a pretty small project.

As Two Minute Paper's always says, it's not just about what this looks like at the moment, it's about what this might look like another three breakthroughs down the line.

While you can't guarantee further breakthroughs, at the rate of advancement and pace of improvement, you would have to be brave to bet on no further breakthroughs.

> Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.

You always have people at both sides of the aisle though - people who say it can do much more than it can, and people who say it can do much less.

It's the same with all technologies - robotics, crypto, drug discovery, the internet, digital cameras, quantum computing, 3D Television, self-driving cars - it was probably the same with the steam engine. All of these will have had people who said that the technology would be useless and die (e.g. Napoleon and the steam engine), and others that would have said it was totally transformative.

Pointing to people who hold extreme opinions 'for' a particular technology that are overly-bullish, and then dismissing the technology based on that, isn't a particularly good strategy in my opinion.

> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user.

I'm shifting 'blame' to Spotify, rather than the user or the AI model - although blame is probably a pretty strong word anyway for what is probably just supposed to be a fun DJ feature.

> All the prompts were crystal clear.

We don't know what the prompt is, because the FULL prompt will be a combination of the base prompt plus the user prompt. It's trivial to show that a modern model with a minimal base prompt will return correctly (as per my original post), so IMO there is probably something in the base prompt which is encouraging the model to return differently.

I wanted to clarify the first two points, but i'll not respond to the rest of your comment as it's a bit overly-emotive (calling what I say disgusting, rambling about the downfall of society as a whole etc).

From the article:

> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?

IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in the general capability of 'AI'.

We can prove that an AI can understand this with a basic prompt:

https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c...

This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by default. Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model, or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after')

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will be in the eating of the pudding. AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of quality/taste.

The counter however is that lots of schools are on 365, which doesn’t work so well on a Chromebook but works great on a mac.

I think we can safely assume that OP was picking a bit of a ridiculous hypothetical example to make a point that it’s possible for something to be deadly and transmissible, although in nature Baculovirus in Caterpillars has a similar mechanism (encourages their host to eat a lot, then climb to the top of a plant so when it turns to ooze it infects others) or cordyceps although both of these aren’t as highly transmissible as they hypothetical explode virus.

But the Black Death mixed high contagion and high mortality as an actual example that shows they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Better models already exist, this is just proving you can dramatically increase inference speeds / reduce inference costs.

It isn't about model capability - it's about inference hardware. Same smarts, faster.

Because humans always say 'bread' if you ask them what you put in a toaster.

And humans will always deduce that you should switch doors if you are in a hypothetical gameshow and they show you a horse behind one of the doors.

(All I mean is - an example of an LLM answering illogically is not proof that LLMs can't really think logically, as you can equally find examples of humans answering illogically and also find examples of novel questions that LLMs get right)

Let's not forget that Einstein almost got a (reasonably simple) trick question wrong:

https://fs.blog/einstein-wertheimer-car-problem/

And that many mathematicians got monty-hall wrong, despite it being intuitive for many kids.

And being at the top of your field (regardless of the PHD) does not make you immune to falling for YES / EYES.

> humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

I'm not saying this - i'm saying the claim that 'AI's get this question wrong ergo they cannot be a senior software engineer' is wrong when senior software engineers will get analogous questions wrong. If you apply the same bar to software engineers, you get 'senior software engineers get this question wrong so they can't be senior software engineers' which is obviously wrong.

Humans aren't immune to getting questions like this wrong either, so I don't think it changes much in terms of the ability of AI to replace jobs.

I've seen senior software engineers get tricked with the 'if YES spells yes, what does EYES spell?', or 'Say silk three times, what do cows drink?', or 'What do you put in a toaster?'.

Even if not a trick - lots of people get the 'bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?' question wrong, or '5 machines take 5 minutes to make 5 widgets. How long do 100 machines take to make 100 widgets?' etc. There are obviously more complex variants of all these that have even lower success rates for humans.

In addition, being PHD-Level in maths as a human doesn't make you immune to the 'toaster/toast' question (assuming you haven't heard it before).

So if we assume humans are generally intelligent and can be a senior software engineer, getting this sort of question confidently wrong isn't incompatible with being a competent senior software engineer.

I suspect they aren’t doing this (just) to avoid fees - it’s more about national security in a world where the US might stop being a reliable ally, and in a world where the US has used withdrawing Visa / Mastercard as a strategy to weaken enemy economies.

I think we have a different definition of free riding.

If you and me both buy the same car, but i'm better at negotiating than you and get a lower price, I'm not free riding because you 'funded the design of the car with the extra money you paid', you are just bad at negotiation.

> The rest of the world is free riding.

The rest of the world isn't free riding - the USA has just setup a market where there is very little bargaining power for consumers because of how the US medical market and insurance works.

Novo and Eli are still making plenty of money in Europe where these drugs cost a fraction of the price, and where there aren't other significant suppliers for GLP-1's like is being implied.

> It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things.

Well I think the article would say that you can diff the documentation, and it's the documentation that is feeding the AI in this new paradigm (which isn't direct prompting).

If the definition of programming is "a process to create sets of instructions that tell a computer how to perform specific tasks" there is nothing in there that requires it to be deterministic at the definition level.

It's about consistency - you want to build an app that looks and functions the same on all platforms as much as possible. Regardless of if you are hand-coding or vibe-coding 3 entirely separate software stacks, getting everything consistent is going to be a challenge and subtle inconsistencies will sneak in.

It comes back to fundamental programming guidelines like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - if you have three separate implementations in different languages for everything, changes will be come harder and you will move slower. These golden guidelines still stand in a vibe-code world.

> Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.

In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!

Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

> Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.

Yes it's bad, although I want to emphasise that I have changed the details significantly here - it was something like this, but this was not the infraction because I don't want the company to be identifiable by anyone. I’m also not sure if my example is an actual policy violation - but it was in a similar vein.

To be honest, the surprising thing wasn’t the ban on a policy violation (because they had violated a policy), it was how automated the internals of Amazon were and how slow it was to overturn.

I used to work for a large Amazon Seller (>$100m per year revenue) who got automatically deactivated with no warning and it took them a week to get re-activated.

We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company - this was not the exact scenario so please treat with a pinch of salt)

They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.