beezlebroxxxxxx

One example is basically all of the major AI players have used Annas Archives/Libgen's database to unlawfully access millions of books.

> Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".

The principle of copyright is fine for artists. AI and ChatGPT aren't fundamentally changing the underlying logic: artists should have their intellectual property protected and be able to receive compensation for their work free from getting ripped off. The problem is stretching copyright to absurd timelines when the underlying logic also recognizes that novel ideas emerge out of the public commons and ultimately return to them after a certain amount of time. 7 or 8 years is reasonable. 10 tops. Decades or even hundreds of years is absurd.

I agree. I've met some very wealthy people before and when you're outside of the bubble you start to see how $$$ helps a lot to justify anything you do as helping people. A lot of wealthy people will say "look I contribute to this cause!" as an indulgence in the religious sense to "counteract" much of what they do in their day to day or the raison d'etre of their work.

It's weird to say, but some people simply are not tuned in to the long term ramifications of their work. The "fuck you I got mine" mentality is even at play in many outwardly appearing progressive communities where short term gain is a moral imperative above doing good.

> BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance.

It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.

That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick. Most of them are interchangeable. They're meant to make you think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe.)

Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.

> I can’t imagine hiring them as a prof when they’re so young

Many institutions would actually jump at the chance. That's way better than a 35 or 37 year old burnt out from just finishing their PhD and getting onto the tenure track suffer-fest. Think of how many years of productive research she has in her. It used to be way more common until academia became so professionalized and bureaucratic.

My mother tongue is English, but I learned French and German for my work. My French colleagues say I "speak French" and my German colleagues say I "kinda speak German."

Would you say they're wrong? When, according to you, has someone learned a language? You don't get a medal at some point, you learn a language when you can do things with it.

Most people that know many languages, know many languages because they're trying to do things with many languages, and they grow up in that situation: they have to speak many languages. You need to get things done, so you communicate in the way that allows you to do that. They're not thinking about grammatical rules, in fact many people that learn many languages almost never learn grammar very well at all, what they learn is how to ask for a bathroom, where an address is, what's such and such called, or how do you say..., or how are you today?, how much is this?, that is okay, and various responses, ect., things that allow them to do things with people who speak different languages. Often the languages are from similar families and the peoples are from similar regions. I've met many people from the indian sub continent, for example, who can speak 4+ languages, or people from the European alps who can speak 3 or 4, quite well (which does not mean grammatically accurate in a school sense). The people that learn wildly different languages are devoting extensive amounts of time to it and are outliers. They obscure the reality that speaking many languages is a part of different communities interacting and trying to get stuff done together. It's not a private mental exercise, it's a part of public life for many.

This is something that really only seems like a mystery when viewed from an explicitly academic context. Speaking many languages is the norm for many people, and speaking many, many, languages is a very refined ability. When you think of language as "purely" mental and private then it seems "mysterious", but once you rid yourself of the mentalist (Cartesian in philosophical terms) confusion and focus on language as public behavior, then it's not mysterious at all.

The Last Supper by Leonardo was painted with tempera, a medium that uses egg-yolk.

Damn, kudos for approaching a pretty well trodden area with a new look. The animations and the design are great!

Despite what every AI exec will say publicly, I'm pretty sure they're salivating at the prospect of war/defense related applications of AI. There's just too much money floating around in the military industrial complex for them to ignore. This is doubly so if the "business" part of your AI company is about as solid as a fart in the wind.

I've used an Android and Apple phone on and off since the first phones were available with the respective OSs. In general, I've found the Android UI to be more intuitive (although they've both had their boondoggles).

But lately it does seem like spinning wheels on the UI front for both. Without a distinct new feature to build the UI around, most UI changes just seem like change for the sake of change (ie. resume/executive driven design). Both OS seem to be approaching a very similar paradigm (Apple becoming more androidy IMO lately). Minor changes aren't going to cause major changes in popularity. "Liquid Glass" does seem to be uniquely disliked, and probably for good reasons, but Apple generally has ecosystem and brand lock-in that will put the brakes on much ship jumping.

I don't think the syntax is particularly difficult, if slightly archaic; but the real problem is the lack of a paragraph break in the first 2 paragraphs (it felt like reading Henry James) and the way Harper's styled their website. On paper, though, even when the sentences and style are quite out there, I find Harper's to be the most readable of all the major magazines.

I think people actually do find social networks, and apps that support them, to be deeply useful and in high demand. The problem is almost every social network app, or website, is really just a massive spynet trying to capture as much personal information and data as possible to sell.

The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".

The majority of work behavior and relationship advice can be summarized down to 3 points.

1. Be nice.

2. Don't be an asshole.

3. Don't be a push-over. (Arguably the hardest as many people read that as "be an asshole". It is not.)

The same applies in remote environments.

I can already see the pharma salesmen drooling at the idea of how various symptoms can be marketed to.

"As an AI agent, a possible diagnosis is [xxx]. Ask your doctor about / look into [yyy™] for a possible solution!"

Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.

I don't know if this is the case with BART, but I've seen in my own local public transit network an incredible inability or lack of will to use systems proven in other areas. Instead of going with quick, proven, and reliable, systems, they'll default to going for the cheap option, which is usually slow, re-inventing the wheel, and unreliable. I visit a city like NYC or London or Tokyo and see a transit system with decades of accrued understanding, technical experience, and optimization. Then I come home and ride something shiny but slow, janky, and bug ridden.

More and more you run into people who simply don't care about craft and quality.

I can already hear the chorus of people that will scream "I'm not paid enough to care" or "it's just a job for some people", and those things are often true; but, nonetheless, people used to take much greater care in their craft even when they were paid less. There was a sense that, even if it was just a job, it should be done well. A certain sensibility of care and craftsmanship has faded away.

I've heard through the grapevine of some designers (one who worked at Shopify) getting caught using Fiverr (or something similar) to farm out all of their work.

Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.

You always hear these sayings and then when you look at acceptance rates in Canadian higher-ed you find that there just aren't that many highly selective schools. Brock isn't an outlier at all; compared to a school like Stanford, for example, literally every Canadian school is wildly more accepting. People just apply to less schools at once (less culture of moving for school) and the schools have far more clear grade requirements --- if you meet them then you have like a 95% chance of getting accepted. There is no insane competitive application process like in the US and no one cares about what school you went to for undergraduate.

It is funny how every school has a saying like that for rivals, though.

I agree. The long term effect will be a devaluation of knowledge work more broadly. It's a rich irony that so many people clamor to these tools when their constant use of them is more often the thing undoing their value as knowledge workers: flexibility, creativity, ability to adapt (intellectually) to shifting circumstances and new problems.

A downstream effect will also be the devaluation of many accreditations of knowledge. If someone at a community college arrives at the same answer as someone at an Ivy League or top institution through a LLM then why even maintain the pretenses of the latter's "intellectual superiority" over the other?

Job interviews are likely going to become harder in a way that many are unprepared for and that many will not like. Where I work, all interviews are now in person and put a much bigger emphasis on problem solving, creativity, and getting a handle on someone's ability to understand a problem. Many sections do not allow the candidate to use a computer at all --- you need to know what you're talking about and respond to pointed questions. It's a performance in many ways, for better and worse, and old fashioned by modern tech standards; but we find it leads to better hires.

There is skill atrophy, and there is also a certain kind of entitlement. I see it in a lot of new grads and students that are very reliant on LLM and "GPT" in particular. They think merely presenting something that looks like a solution, without actually understanding it or why it might or might not be applicable, entitles them to the claim of understanding and, furthermore, a job.

When engineers simply parrot GPT answers I lose respect for them, but I also just wonder "why are you even employed here?"

I'm not some managerial bootlicker desperate for layoffs to "cull the weaklings", but I do start to wonder "what do you actually bring to this job aside from the abilities of a typist?", especially when the whole reason they are getting paid as much as they are as an engineer, for example, is their skills and knowledge. But if that's all really GPT's skills and knowledge and "reasoning", then there just remains a certain entitlement as justifcation.

If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.

Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.

In Canada, Rogers/Bell would have you assassinated for even suggesting speeds like that are possible in 2025.

> Whole article is just authors screaming insecurity.

I have yet to see a single AI proponent commit to giving their kid over to AI, if they even have one. SV CEOs are sending their kids to hardcore techfree schools and limiting their own kids access to their tech, all while insisting AI and their tech poses no risk at all to kids and that any reservations are "fear mongering."

I find audiobook performances are usually quite bad or cheesy. Even the ones that people rave about. I also find radio plays, or podcasts with full scripts, the same way.

I also find them simply boring to listen to, even the ones of books I love. It feels very passive and I'm always slightly annoyed that I can read significantly faster than the wpm of an audiobook (speeding up an audiobook ruins the performances).

At your fitness level, you're more than capable of doing a long bikepacking trail.

The hard part isn't really fitness (for any moderately experienced biker unless your trip has a specific time or FKT goal), it's the logistics of food + shelter, the mental grind, and dealing with possible repairs.

One person's purple prose is often another's style. It's not really a measure of something, and more an assertion of taste. You see a similar thing when someone says a writer uses "too much description and not enough action!" without realizing that, sometimes, the action is in the description. It's a style of writing with a different reader in mind, a different understanding of how word choice and prose functions.