Are you seriously excusing bad behaviour on the basis that there was a financial incentive to behave badly?!
521 karma · joined July 17, 2024
I think this is totally wrong. Math problems are almost by definition problems with a particular theory. That theory might be inspired by the real world, but the problem itself is purely theoretical. I can't think of any theoretical problems like this that actually support a practical problem, as opposed to being an internal knot in the theory that indicates something is wrong with it. Not to say that cannot happen - certain optimization problems were historically actually hard to solve and solving them helped us to genuinely optimize a real thing (rather than just explain why the answer we already had was correct, which is much more common). In particular, none of the millennium problems have anything to do with a "real" problem, including the Navier Stokes one.
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
Woah, really? More than cheap fuel, scientific research, social welfare, political work towards peace?
The only good thing I can think of that is actually directly caused by the way we employ people is that some things (delivery, food) are very cheap, cheaper than they would be if people worked at a sustainable rate. But that comes at the immense cost of the health and wellbeing of a vast underclass of people.
Did you read the part where I said voluntary work is fine?
> A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Almost no work provides the people doing it with a sense of purpose. People have a purpose in spite of work, not because of it.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
The numbers graph is spiky and I can imagine you could argue either way that they are generally trending up or not. But that's irrelevant!
Personally I don't like thinking of LLMs like a PhD student, because most PhD students remember where they learned things from, while LLMs essentially cannot. I think of it a bit more like someone using a search tool carelessly. Although in this case it is apparently more like deliberate misuse than carelessness.
> Why the downvotes?
I think there was only ever one. Not sure why.
If OpenAI did use the conversations from Buckmaster and Alpoge, then not disclosing it, explicitly, is plagiarism. If they planned to use that plagiarism to pressure the authors to publish, that is even more unethical. What the terms of use say does not make it any more or less ethical.
I have to unpack a few things to answer the whole comment faithfully. First is the distinction between "we forbid linux users from running the software" and "we aren't going to invest any development work on making linux APIs work". The first one is in my view completely indefensible and should be illegal. The second one is basically fine even though I personally dislike it. I am mentioning this because companies use "support" as a euphemism for both. My understanding of the situation here is that the game runs fine on linux, ubisoft just isn't able to stop cheating as effectively. Note that both platforms have a nonzero rate of cheating and of valid play.
Companies have a right and an obligation to advertise how their products are designed to work and how they work best. If a shirt has a care label that says don't bleach, and I damage it by bleaching, that's on me. Adapting this analogy to software is dangerous and wrong, because software can be made to break for arbitrary reasons, some of which are my own stupid fault and some of which are just the vendor exercising power over me. If I manage to bleach my shirt without damaging it, the manufacturer has no right to set it on fire and say "well you bleached it, so what did you expect?". If they did, they would have to compensate me. I view what has happened much more like "they set my shirt on fire" than "I broke my own shirt".
Computer programs are also not really similar to physical products at all, since physical products degrade over time and programs do not. If I use a shirt for five years and then abruptly decide I didn't want it after all, then I've still damaged the thing and should not get the full amount of money back for it. The fact it's second hand also makes it harder to sell even if it isn't damaged. But again this is just fake when applied to software, so that tips the balance more towards refunding than normally. The situation as it currently is, means that while Ubisoft is allowed to take away my product by saying "you should never have been able to buy it", I cannot reciprocally take my money back by saying "I should never have been able to buy it". I don't think there is a good justification for that asymmetry.
How?