anileated

If weird sun twitter was on Bluesky, in which category would it go?

It is much more recent than the Greeks. McLuhan, for example, had some good points* about how writing/reading is different (and indeed in some ways worse?) than oral tradition, and how it influences even our social interactions and mindset. Film is different yet again (partially has to do with its linearity IIRC).

So it’s not like “kids these days”, no. To be honest, I don’t know how generative AI tools, which arguably take away most of the “create” and “learn” parts, are relevant to the question of differences between different mediums and how those mediums influence how we create and learn. (There are ML-based tools that can empower creativity, but they don’t tend to be advertised as “AI” because they are a mostly invisible part of some creative tool.)

What is potentially relevant is how interacting with a particular kind of generative ML tool (the chatbot) for the purposes of understanding the world can be bringing some parts of human oral tradition (though lacking communication with actual humans, of course) and associated mental states.

* See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type and his most famous work

I just don’t get your angle. My point was that the human is the one who has some freedoms and the one who bears responsibility. If you read a bunch of books in a book store without buying them and use your imperfect memory of them to do your job better and get paid more, it is shady but if you are not shooed away by store owner you have the freedom to do it. No one can extract the books you already read from your brain, and you did not sign an NDA. But if you set up an industrial scale book scanner in the same store, the boss will call the police on you and you cannot point fingers and say the scanner “reads” books and incorporates them into its worldview just like you would do. Because scanner is not human and you are, so you’re the one responsible for operating the scanner.

I see no difference with cryptotokens here, the human has freedoms to do things and the human is responsible for them if those things are bad. (Just unlike LLMs, theft of property and all that is kinda always a crime, unlike reading a book in a shop without buying.)

Why?

So we’re back the human vs. unthinking machine distinction. American inventors were human. We’re going in circles and this article was hidden on HN anyway.

You’re correct, there is a distinction since it is technically another product.

> If the argument is that human authors should get a cut of AI profits because their works were "stolen" to train the models, this is going to be a increasingly losing argument, because it doesn't have a leg to stand on for private training data.

The argument can be made that LLMs could not be created without expropriating the original works of all the authors they were trained on, and that argument would in fact be true and have quite sturdy legs as far as I’m concerned.

It’s not a historical instance of forgotten times, it started less than half a decade ago and I would be surprised if it’s not still ongoing (your argument about synthetic training data is forward-looking).

If IBM’s original product was “designed to facilitate the Holocaust”, then every article about IBM darn better lead with that.

In case of Facebook, it was originally designed literally to compare the attractiveness of female students; but no, it’s not even remotely as bad, and comparing it to the Holocaust trivializes an incident where masses of people were murdered in an industrial fashion.

“Transformative” is always a grey area. If my service just returns you a book you requested, but in upper case, then it was transformed.

But sure, the “transformative” argument is the one that could apply (and even I believe Google used it to argue its case), if it can be shown that an LLM can not verbatim reproduce a given work (which, incidentally, is something that you, a warm-blooded fleshy human with agency who has the freedom to read books, cannot do, but LLMs were shown to do).

That said, relevant laws existed before LLMs, and may are outdated. If the goal is to balance reasonable uses while protecting original output of authors that ultimately drives innovation and creativity, I am not sure if the preexisting laws are continuing to fulfil their function, but that’s my opinion.

> The point is that fair use exemptions isn't limited to "being a conscious human being enjoying human rights"

Sure. However, my point is that this is not fair use*, so other principles need to be applied. Whether legal systems in various countries find that fair use applies here or not, I agree we are yet to see.

* At least in cases where it’s an LLM operated at scale for profit (which I suppose would not hold for Meta’s models if they were truly open, but that’s not the case if they require obtaining a license in some conditions).

“Automated” is key. You are not an automaton, not a machine, you do not infinitely scale with compute power; but unlike a machine you have free will and agency, and legal framework of developed countries grants you human rights that include freedom. That was, in fact, my entire point.

In United States a private business is free to shut down any speech it likes on its infrastructure/premises*. If you look closely, you will find that most or all do it to some speech or other. The revealing part is specifically what speech gets shut down.

In other words, unless you believe Facebook is part of State or acts on behalf of the State, “you don’t get to shut down hate speech” is mereley your sentiment, not something Constitution requires from them.

If Mark Z actually called hate speech “protected speech”, it is something he is free to do, but Facebook is also completely free to suppress hate speech.

* https://www.nyclu.org/commentary/column-applying-constitutio...

This is not a good analogy. Google does not display the contents to any significant degree (you have to visit the search result). And even then it was/is in legal trouble, in fact (in some countries like Australia* more than others).

Furthermore:

> Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship.

I do not see “automated generation of derivative works of arbitrary nature” in it.

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55760673.amp

Have you considered that you have some traits that make you eligible to read books and access information freely in the country you live in*? Something about being a conscious human being enjoying human rights, perhaps? An implement that does the same but (A) at scale and (B) without thought or free will or agency, completely at the bidding of its operator, for profit, has no such protections. Instead, the operator carries all responsibility (in this case, Meta).

If a software service had legal protections like that, sure, I could build one that returns you any book you request and say that the service had integrated it into its worldview. Who can check, eh?

* Actually, in some countries you could be in trouble for reading a book and incorporating it into your worldview, to say nothing about quoting it, but let’s set that aside.

I was curious about the topic of Middle East (no personal ties) a couple of years before the October 7, so I got to witness the Wikipedia campaign unfold. The transformation is difficult to notice but changes are drastic over months (maybe weeks, but I didn’t consult it that often). Sometimes Wikipedia feels self-contradicting and tying itself in knots on some topics, like the dominant colonization angle. It feels like certain editors would prefer if there were no articles about the ancient cultures that existed in the area and relevant archeological evidence, luckily for now those are still difficult to remove.

It’s a sobering reminder that all knowledge is biased, no matter where you get it. So far Wikipedia is at least a good list of sources, but if you are truly interested in a remotely controversial topic you need to go to those sources and judge for yourself the veracity of each.

I somewhat wish there were more publicized instances of manipulation, just to combat Wikipedia’s reputation of being trustworthy that probably makes many people blind to the above.

(This is not a statement on whether I support all policies of incumbent Israeli government, etc.)

Thanks. My comment may have been overly cynical, and things are not so black and white yet, but extrapolating the trend from the last couple years is depressing.

Note that anyone not living under a rock in 2025 would assume a significant probability that the articles in your blog are generated with an LLM, making it hardly a signal of skill.

Maintaining a blog in 2025 is worth it if you do not mind almost all of your readers being LLMs that ingest your work and repackage in ways that prevent you from being aware of your actual human readership, often without credit and for profit of their operators.

> i put as many keywords and "inurl"s and whatnot in as i can manage

More keywords does the opposite of narrowing the query. Unless you use quotes and/or other operators, it’s enough for the document to contain only one of your keywords (anywhere, including meta tags) to be a match. Hope this helps.

I wonder why no terminal app implemented Z-axis scrollback like in Avalon, since they increasingly (e.g., Alacritty) boast GPU-based rendering it seems like it wouldn’t be such a resource hog but can look gorgeous.

And practical, too. It would make going through multi-screen lengthy program output much more palatable. Part of the problem here is scrolling by arbitrary offsets, of course (imagine being able to just say “it’s N screens back at this point”, where each screen is an unchangeable recognizable landmark), and once that anti-feature is gone pushing screens back on Z becomes the logical next step, allowing for more spatial reasoning.

— I use tmux, what’s the point?

— Add a button to push a screen back on demand, a way to bookmark screens, and it would elevate multiplexer & TUI experience just as well.

Exactly.

Also, it is only a matter of time until one of those employees (thanks to free will and agency) will whistleblow, it doesn’t scale, etc.

Frankly, the fact that such a big segment of HN crowd unthinkingly buys big tech’s double standard (LLMs are human when copyright is concerned, but not human in every other sense) makes me ashamed of the industry.

“A person is fundamentally different from an LLM” does not need a legal argument and is implied by the fact that LLMs do not have human rights, or even anything comparable to animal rights.

A legal argument would be needed to argue the other way. This argument would imply granting LLMs some degree of human rights, which the very industry profiting from these copyright violations will never let happen for obvious reasons.

> I've noticed I tend towards a feeling of everyone else in the world being so alien, living some totally different incomprehensible life from mine. (Or more than I'm the alien, and everyone else is living a normal, enviable life.)

Same.

> Seeing little snapshots like these, most of them seemingly just for memory's sake, makes me feel a little more human.

For me these videos only highlight the previously mentioned state of affairs.

No one really means everyone when they say “if everyone could just”. There is always an implied scope. The problem is only when scope is too large. Reduce it and everyone could literally just.

> any group of N>2 it is impossible

Not true.

It is possible to get everyone to just, it’s just that it only works with smaller sets of everyone. Everyone everyone would certainly never going to just, but you could just pick a smaller everyone (like everyone in this room or something).

Cheers! FWIW, I think you could easily build Sphinx docs using GHA and publish it on GitHub Pages and not pay a dime. Depending on your distaste for Microsoft’s monopoly, I suppose ;)

Whether you are a user bristling at a library author telling you how to pronounce the name of the project, or library author bristling at people mispronouncing the name of the project, in OSS world we all have our things to bristle about but differ in our abilities to influence them.

Let’s put it this way: I would consider myself eligible to be irked by ads on Read the Docs pages if I paid whoever maintains the project.

If they bother you enough, absolutely no one’s going to frown if you estimate how much they would be making on ads from traffic volume yearly, email the maintainer and suggest to pay that in return for turning off the ads for a year.

(Some people might frown if you just block the ads, since after all it is robbing a fellow open-source dev of some income.)

There are two points I am curious about:

— I would like to know if RTD forces the ads. Considering they have a business tier, it would be funny if they had to finance OSS project hosting from ads.

— EthicalAds started as an ad platform for developers, but apparently is now an “AI ad network”. I wonder if Python OSS project owners know about the 180 degree turn that’s happening there…

Copyright & capitalism is the crucial part of how we have the technical foundation that got us ML and most of the material used for training it. Big tech companies that want to monetize it at scale would like us to not think about that (or any long term consequences that do not affect shareholder value beyond current management), of course. If anything, the problem with intellectual property law is that they feel it’s safe for them to ignore it when it comes to ordinary people’s work (good luck suing ClosedAI).