tqwhite

I do not read it that way at all. The Goldsmith decision mainly turns on the idea that an artist protections include that for derivative works. Warhol produced a work that does substantially the same things as Goldsmith's, ie, is a picture that can be viewed.

When talking about parody, they note that the usage as the foundation for parody is always substantially different from the original and thereby allowed, even if it would otherwise infringe. LLMs are always substantially different from the original, too.

If I want to write software that draws that picture exactly, the code would not be a copyright violation. It is text and cannot be printed in a magazine as a picture. If I used it to print a picture that was a derivative work and sold that, it might be.

A large language model has no intersection with the picture or, for that matter, anything that it absorbs. It is possible that someone might figure out how to prompt it to do exactly the same picture as Goldsmith did but fairly unlikely.

Unless you could show that this was easy, common and part of the intent of the LLM creator, I can see no possibility that it is infringing.

Fair use requires transformation. LLM is as transformative as it gets. If I'm on the jury, you're going to have to make new copyright law for me to convict.

I am personally happy to have everyone, people and LLM alike, learn from my wisdom.

Aren't you paying for me to use the site, too? Or Google? Isn't the point of paying for a web hosting service to distribute information?

I could not disagree more. Those concepts, theories and all that knowledge is what makes it so powerful. I feel successful with AI because I know what to do (I’m older than you by a lot). I talk to younger people and they don’t know how to think about a big system or have the ability to communicate their strategies. You do. I’m 72 and was bored. Now that Claude will do the drudgery, I am inspired.

First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss.

Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results.

I hope that helps.

Using AI has changed everything for me and made my ambition swell. I despise looking up the details of frameworks and api’s, transmitting a change of strategy through a system, typing the usual stupid loops and processes that are the foundation of all programs. Hell, the amount of time I save on typing errors is worth it.

I have plans for many things I didn’t have the energy for in the past.

I'm a big fan of general search.

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it.

I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year.

Now that disks are big, I keep a lot of old stuff. I have, eg, screenshots dating back to 2015. Email before then. And so so much more.

I have never gone back more than a few years.

I will continue to archive because I must but, Old Person to Young People... Don't put too much effort into long term availability. It's not a good investment.

I also prefer RTF. I have tried to live with markdown's limitations several times. I simply cannot.

It is standard enough but I really, really wish static websites would support it. The fact that it won't creates a huge split in my universe.

Bob's had a long life with too much success. He really believes in himself. But, I have to say that the other guy was aggressive and bad even though I am more inclined to agree with him. He willfully misrepresented Bob's ideas. I thought he presented more misguided certainty than Bob. No Bueno.

No. It is not. Whomever brought it up was not helping.

I think the question is whether you are disagreeing for pedantic reasons or are actually trying to contribute.

If you are trying to contribute, you will use the phrase backward compatible as we always do: my old code will still run after the change.

If you are trying to be pedantic, you will choose a new way of looking at it: My new code will not work if you go backward in time.

I don't care. I will swear to never write a dangling comma for any engine that doesn't support it. Also, I will swear to never use an engine that doesn't support it if once that does exists... Just as I did with Javascript.

I have to add to my huge amusement at the particulars of this thread and deep appreciation for your nerdiness. As you can see from my other post here, I consider this question to be no question at all. Obviously all SQL engines should change. Equally obviously, they never will.

That all of you can take something so futile so seriously, spend time writing about your workarounds (which, of course, we all have in spades), is simply charming.

Thanks for you being you.

Douglas Crockford made a commitment that JSON would never, ever get better. He promised us that it would always suck. He is as good as his word.

It has the small benefit that you never, ever have to worry about running into an old version of a JSON parser that bounces your fancy trailing commas.

Worth it? Not to me but Douglas Crockford does not care what I think. Or you either, apparently.

You are a monster. Being against trailing commas is like being against happiness or cute children or Cheetohs.

You do not need to see the missing comma. That is what compilers are for. Also, literally the only reason anyone has a missing comma is because they reordered the terms and forgot to put the comma onto the one that was forced to not have one because of this monstrous failure.

Some things are nothing but good. You are on the wrong side of history.

Please god. I don't believe in you but maybe someone else does and will think me a kindred spirit worthy of mercy. Let me have trailing commas. There is no reason not to. It's backward compatible, easy to implement and would make the world so so so much better.

Seven Bucks Per Check!!!

Cool idea. Too rich for my blood.

I have never liked Wordpress. If it dies, that's ok with me. I just don't like it.

The discussion here is painful to read. The 'neutral' discussion of product features and how Austin, TX is more liberal than the rest of Texas are grotesque.

Zuckerberg says Facebook is going to be more "like X" and "work with Trump". It has changed its content policy to allow discussions that should horrify anyone.

"In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”

"In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy."

But Zuck himself says that they are also dialing their algorithms back in favor of allowing more bad content. It's not right.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...

I think people are overly interested in self-promotion in an interview situation. In sales training I did many years ago, there was the maxim that, whoever mentions price first, loses. The better way is to get the person to talk about themself, their needs, the nature of the work, everything you can coax out of them.

In the sales mode (which, of course is what an interview is), the idea is to gather information to understand the real need and configure a product that meets it.

In an interview, that is you. If the job doesn’t explicitly require experience, then it should never be mentioned. In fact, it should be concealed unless, during the information gathering, there is reason to think it is necessary.

Too many of us approach an interview with the idea of “if I can just let them know how good I am”. Far better is, “how can I help them understand how well I fit their needs”.

During the information gathering, ask questions that help the other person actually say things that match your (hopefully narrowly targeted) resume. Not in obvious ways, “Do you use React?” but get them to think it up, “What front end framework do you use?” followed by another question about React when they say they use it.

The point is Focus on Them. Not Yourself. Learn don’t Talk. Fit in, don’t try to impress.

My bona fides: I am old and have done it all. I will now tell you how it worked out.

Like you, I am a person who can do pretty much anything. I had nothing but success. Jobs came to me. Then, at around 45, the company I worked for went down and I found myself unemployed.

Like you, my resume was unusual. I broke it into skill groups. It was obvious that I had a lot of accomplishments and, if hired, could help with almost any need. Nobody hired me.

I did freelance work, started a company that didn’t work. Eventually needed a job again. Kept looking.

Finally, I ran into a headhunter who told me the magic: Decide what you want to do and remove everything from your resume that does not apply to that specific topic. Do not allow even a hint of general-purpose skill to appear.

She made me understand that nobody had a requisition for a ‘jack of all trades’. They have a requisition for a sales agent, bookkeeper, programmer, database guy. Specific stuff.

I was broke and did what she said.

In my case, my education and fundamental skill was programming. Gone were all of my proud accomplishments in favor of all the things I knew about PHP, MYSQL, LAMP of all sorts (this was in the ought). Also some things where I had helped a project team. It made me sad because I have done some very cool stuff that went by the wayside. But it was the resume of a professional programmer, dedicated to the craft.

I have never been unemployed since.

I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read.

I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.

I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.

Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.

There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.

But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.

Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.

They are trying to avoid that. I hang around there pretty much. I expect premium services subscriptions will be the first try. If that works, and I think it could, that will be fine. The fact of it being a public benefit LLC makes the profitability requirement much less pressing.

Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.

Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model.

If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.

There are increasing numbers of new ways to generate feeds that suit your needs. I use the list functions to segregate people I follow into categories. There are a couple of built-in feeds that help discover new people.

But, the best thing is exemplified by graze.social which gives you a huge amount of ways to filter the firehose feed into whatever you want. Leave out the rage bait? It’s a filter sequence away.

Me? I do not want to avoid the villain a day problem. I want to see and block them myself, to know what’s going on.

I’m hoping they turn into a Wikipedia sort of funding model. Avoid viewpoint discrimination and serve messages to everyone with lots and lots of composable moderation tools.

I’m with you. Every same conversation is about judgment and self-aggrandizement rarely about discussing problems, finding solutions or appreciating opportunities.

Bluesky is fine. It’s not perfect. It’s struggling to deal with demands for viewpoint moderation. It’s a public benefit corp so venture capitalists have less to complain about. It has good tools to deal with most things. The people who are working on it seem competent and sincere.

I like the phrase, karma farming.

I’m hoping that the problems caused by their effort to avoid viewpoint moderation will be overcome by their composable self-moderation idea. It is increasingly straightforward to control what you see (graze.social is a good example, along with number tools inside bsky itself), both for safety and for creating a well-tuned echo chamber.

Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.

This is absolutely true. Bluesky can become decentralized but it will take a fair amount of work.

What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want.

And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.

I was in a discussion with someone and the instance just booted me out. No explanation. No appeal. I still had a handful of windows open to various conversations (I’m a slob) and could not find a single reason.

I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.

It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.