JimDabell

> how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?

Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.

> Spin up a bunch of loops or fire a semi-autonomous factory at a project and it's pretty easy to blow through a 20x account in a few hours if you can afford the sandboxes, CI and other infra required.

This is a tiny minority of people, not “most people”.

Can you quote the part of my comment that you think says that?

> most people, get hardly a days usage out of a 20x account

This is not even remotely true.

Large organisations don’t buy a single batch of machines then call it a day. If an organisation standardised on Chromebooks because of the support period, they will still need to buy new machines and those won’t get the support period they had expected.

Camouflage is a requirement for volume in subreddits with effective moderation.

> Are you ok?

What do you mean?

> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.

There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.

> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?

Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:

> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.

2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.

Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.

> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.

This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.

It sounds like you might be thinking of the Google Web Accelerator incidents with 37signals.

If that’s the case, then the delete links were behind authentication, but DHH assumed that meant it was okay to ignore the HTTP spec. and use GET for unsafe actions. Lo and behold, authenticated users with the GWA browser plugin installed deleted all their data.

Then, instead of learning from the mistake and fixing his bug, he tried to detect GWA and hide from it. Sure enough, that failed and users experienced data loss for a second time. He still continued to blame GWA, calling it “evil” and “scary”. You’d think he’d be smart enough to figure out that he needs to follow the HTTP spec., but he couldn’t admit to being wrong.

Follow the specs, people!

https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-acceler...

See also: Lizardman's Constant is 4%.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

> If the user doesn’t perceive/value the measured improvements in quality or availability, then it is legitimately sameish.

Right, but that is not what was said, so “summarising” it in that manner is not a good faith representation of their argument.

Them:

> a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.

You:

> user-facing delivery is sameish

I don’t see how you can think that is a fair summary or a good-faith argument.

> It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

I’ve noticed Astra doing this a lot as well.

People say ChatGPT generates images with a yellow tint. The person you are replying to is suggesting that these images have a yellow tint and therefore this model is distilled from ChatGPT.

> > If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.

> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?

It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.

Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.

> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.

This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.

I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.

Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.

“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.

You are mixing up culture, data, and the creation of new works as if they are the same thing when they are very different.

> Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while?

No. Plenty of people – not just “piracy advocates”, whoever they are – have pointed out that copyright infringement is not theft over the years. Learning, copyright infringement, and theft are three distinct things.

Learning isn’t copyright infringement.

Learning isn’t theft.

Copyright infringement isn’t theft.

These are all different statements, and all are true.

> There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost.

“Gaining exposure to” isn’t theft either.

Copyright isn’t some form of “super-ownership” that gives you absolute say over what happens to all copies of the work. It is very specifically a monopoly on the production of new copies, and even that is limited in many important ways and is not absolute.

There is a form of control over information that matches what you want copyright to be though - trade secrets. If you want legal protection that allows you to control knowledge, then it needs to be a trade secret.

> how can you say that he didn't think it himself?

Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.

> It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up

Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?

This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.

Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.

Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.

The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.

More specifically – because I think this is an aspect that has mostly been lost to time – when the CSS Zen Garden was first created, table layouts were still the norm and there was huge pushback from a surprisingly large number of developers who insisted that it was impossible to use CSS for nice-looking sites. The accusation was that CSS sites were all “boxy” and to get something nice-looking, you had to use table layouts.

It was pretty obvious even back then that they were just people who didn’t want to learn something new and they would not listen to anything pro-CSS at all. In fact, developers who insist LLMs are not useful for development remind me of them a lot.

Anyway, the CSS Zen Garden was released, and it seemed to shut everybody like that up overnight. It conclusively won the argument that CSS sites could look as good as table-based sites and could even do things the table-based sites couldn’t.

Either you are paying attention or you are doing what the GP described in their comment. The two are mutually exclusive.

Pay attention to what you are staging. Generally this means `git add -p` or similar.

Pay attention to what you are committing. Generally this means looking at what you have staged before writing your commit log message.

Pay attention to what is in your pull request. Generally this means looking at your commits / draft pull request before you ask for code review.

If anybody other than you sees crap in your pull request that should obviously have been ignored, it means you have failed to pay attention to what you are doing three separate times.

> You clearly haven't seen the people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.

I’ve worked with and managed plenty of people like that and those are the people I least want doing something like this. Seeing the flotsam and jetsam of .DS_Store etc. are an early warning sign they aren’t paying any attention to what they push and the sooner that gets caught and addressed the better.

> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.

As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.

It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.

> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.

Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!

I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.

You can usually safely dismiss sentences that start with “It’s widely accepted that…” because if it were actually true, they wouldn’t need to hedge like that. The usual reason to start a sentence like that is when it isn’t as widely accepted as they claim, but they would like the reader to believe that it is. When something is widely accepted, you can just say it without the weasel words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word