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oldkinglog

75 karma · joined November 20, 2023

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oldkinglog··on Moments in Chromecast's history
> The decision was either to avoid them entirely or resign and buy into the ecosystem.

An easy choice that you somehow managed to get wrong?

oldkinglog··on [dead]
What is "the message"? The video doesn't say.
oldkinglog··on Python's Supportive and Welcoming Environment Is Tightly Coupled to Its Progress
Invoking Popper's paradox of tolerance is misjudged IMHO, because the PSF doesn't aim to maximise liberty. Instead it aims to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and that involves adding restrictions that go beyond what is necessary to prevent a descent into fascism.
oldkinglog··on Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)#Concern_troll
oldkinglog··on Chicken wings advertised as 'boneless' can have bones – Ohio Supreme Court
> Boneless is a convenience, not an absolute guarantee.

It's a guarantee in any jurisdiction with adequate consumer protection law.

oldkinglog··on Chicken wings advertised as 'boneless' can have bones – Ohio Supreme Court
In the UK we've labelled things made in factories that also handle nuts since forever. I assume it's an EU thing that we never got rid of.
oldkinglog··on The data that powers AI is disappearing fast
This comment neatly explains why the LLM bubble will burst as soon as prosecutors remember that the DMCA doesn't have a carve-out for AI.
oldkinglog··on The data that powers AI is disappearing fast
> I think the worst possible outcome is a licensing regime that means that Disney or Paramount or Elsevier or whoever all get to have a monopoly on training large models within their niche.

Why is this the worst possible outcome? Companies using AI would be training with properties they own or have licensed appropriately, rather than the existing scheme of ignoring copyright law to extract $$$ from the creative works of ordinary people.

oldkinglog··on Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com
Monopoly leveraging is illegal, not mundane.
oldkinglog··on [dead]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

> According to one version, it says that "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces."

oldkinglog··on Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

A reform of the US voting system would make elections much more competitive and greatly reduce the risk of electing another Biden or Trump.

oldkinglog··on Sam Altman, Lately
Left wingers complain when journalists don't hold powerful people to account. Right wingers complain when they do.
oldkinglog··on AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them
Why can't "dampen" be applied to oscillators? It means "To lessen; to dull; to make less intense" in this case.
oldkinglog··on 3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe
> The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.

More importantly, don't let this dissuade anyone from helping. Some caution is needed yes, but cynicism is the greater foe. A life of public service is a life well spent.

oldkinglog··on The Lunacy of Artemis
> This is a remarkable situation. It’s like if you hired someone to redo your kitchen and they started building a boat in your driveway. Sure, the boat gives the builders a place to relax, lets them practice tricky plumbing and finishing work, and is a safe place to store their tools. But all those arguments will fail to satisfy. You still want to know what building a boat has to do with kitchen repair, and why you’re the one footing the bill.

What is this? The essay is littered with these awkward family guy-esque jokes that do nothing to illustrate any point.

oldkinglog··on The man who killed Google Search?
If you also take a wage, then you're also a class traitor by any reasonable definition, because denying the existence of class struggle only benefits capitalists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
oldkinglog··on The man who killed Google Search?
"class traitor" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor
oldkinglog··on [dead]
The Spectator harps on this issue, but do they ever offer their own definition of "woman"?
oldkinglog··on Giphy is sharing your IP address and private data to 816 partners
This is quite a misleading comment IMO. You don't "pay" donations, you make them. There is no exchange and no debts are settled. And wikipedia isn't a "product" in the usual sense of a commercial product.
oldkinglog··on Git Project doesn't allow criticism
> Suggesting that Junio isn't infallible is a violation?

Junio never claimed to be infallible though

oldkinglog··on PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server
Paper can't provide binaries as it would infringe Mojang's copyright. Users must "build" the server by downloading the official binary and applying local patches. This is well-automated for users.

Licensing wasn't so much a problem in the early days of Minecraft. The first really popular server mod (CraftBukkit) not only provided binaries, but deopfuscated server code on a GitHub repo (since DMCA'd): http://github.com/bukkit/craftbukkit. That repository was ostensibly licensed as LGPL, but no one really believed that, given it was derived from Mojang's proprietary binaries.

Mojang eventually acquired CraftBukkit and hired their devs. And there's an interesting footnote: for several months, Mojang didn't tell anyone they'd acquired CraftBukkit, and they kept making releases to the public GitHub repository. Given it was Mojang making these pushes, I believe (IANAL) that they are officially-licensed LGPL versions of the Minecraft server, albeit ~10 years out-of-date now.

oldkinglog··on Ask HN: Good Counter-Intuitive Arguments?
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Regular intuition: switching doors doesn't matter, you have a 50/50 shot either way.

Counter-intuition: probably just check out the wikipedia article, there's a few different approaches.

oldkinglog··on Ask HN: Good Counter-Intuitive Arguments?
Monty Hall problem is a classic one, if that's the sort of thing you mean?
oldkinglog··on [dead]
> For my part, what I’d really love to see is something completely honest. Scrape all the data in the world and tell me the truth.

This author considers "all the data in the world" to be the truth. Yet what society considers true changes over years and decades. The danger of unleashing such an AI is that it will throw the brakes on human progress and privilege the opinions and works of people alive today, to the disadvantage of the generations to come.

But tampering with image generation like this is nowhere near sufficient. If anything it sets AI safety back by making it seem so ludicrous

oldkinglog··on Reddit Files to Go Public, Reveals That It Paid CEO $193M Last Year
I'm in the process of trying to delete my reddit account, but they do not honour GDPR deletion requests. Not sure why they're operating in the EU?
oldkinglog··on What it was like working for Gitlab
I didn't mean to imply that people choose to have gender dysphoria, sorry if it came off that way.
oldkinglog··on What it was like working for Gitlab
In the UK, the Equality Act (2010) protects: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership (in employment only), pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation.

Pregnancy, maternity, marriage, civil partnerships and gender re-assignment are usually chosen by individuals, not forced upon them.

oldkinglog··on NY times is asking that all LLMs trained on Times data be destroyed
> What license requires attribution to read and understand the code?

BSD, MIT, several others. Without a license you cannot read the code.

oldkinglog··on NY times is asking that all LLMs trained on Times data be destroyed
For years I've complained about how the MPAA, RIAA and big tech lobby politicians to wreck copyright and force all culture through an ownership sieve. But I might forgive them if it happens to prevent the commercialisation of all remaining human culture via AI.
oldkinglog··on Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?
You assume the competition needs to be commercial, but P2P video sharing has been around for a long time. Folks contribute bandwidth for altruistic reasons.
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