425,688 karma · joined November 1, 2007
Helu! I'm Thomas.
thomas@sockpuppet.org
t@tk.inc
(Don't apologize for contacting me! I'm happy to meet you.)
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This is not ancient history.
Also in the Ninth Circuit: Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI.
I really don't see how you can synthesize "intentionally accesses" and/or "knowingly and with intent to defraud" out of recklessness or negligence. Those are very different concepts in the law.
The problem you have is that there is unlikely to be any evidence that OpenAI actually wanted to hack random (or any) websites.
Meanwhile: your dog mauling someone is one of the rare instances where criminal liability does attach to your intent-free-but-reckless actions. Most crimes don't work that way, and US computer intrusion statutes are unusually intent-specific.
Criminally, the intent standards for hacking are high enough that no reasonable case is going to be made against the labs for this stuff. A human being has to intend for websites to get hacked. Recklessness generally isn't enough. In the most severe criminal cases, not only do you have to prove intent to break into a computer, but you also need to prove an intent to defraud specific to that breakin.
Meanwhile, the civil liability that attaches to this stuff doesn't depend on intent, and "rogue agent" isn't a meaningful defense. To whatever extent the labs are exposed civilly, they're exposed regardless of how this stuff is described. In fact, the "rogue agent" thing can exacerbate their exposure.
(I'm not a lawyer, I have spent a career paying attention to this specific armpit of the law though.)
while(1) { fork(); }
Must have meant something to me, because it was in my Usenet sig. And then: exit(main(kfp->kargc, argv, environ));
from FreeBSD crt0; kind of a big moment for me to realize there was more C code underneath main().Then:
statements: /*E*/ | statement statements
The moment Yacc clicked for me; that line was profound but a more accurate depiction of the moment was realizing that all you were doing with the parser generator was building a tree, and that's what the side effects of each production were for: returning and plugging in tree nodes.If there was a single line I could come up with for "double the size of the hash table when it fills up", that'd deserve a slot here.
Then, of course (we get to cheat because assembly):
jmp .call
.pop: pop esi
...
.call: call .pop
The "delta offset" trick, which I believe came from x86 virus culture but was universal in 90s overflow exploits as a way to get position-independent references to strings and other memory things.For sure:
void walk(node *n) { if(!n) return; walk(n->left); visit(n); walk(n->right); }
I should figure out a way to fit a write-select(2) into a line because that's another "oh shit" moment for me.Similarly: when Vern Paxson explained to me that he'd implemented TCP reassembly by simply opening up a file and using "seek" to place incoming segments in the right position. I could probably golf that down to a line! But it would be an annoying line.
That's not true for all (or even most) of what I write, but it's true this time, and I'm not letting it slide.
This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.