yellowapple

> That notion only applies to patents and trademarks

You literally just gave an example above of that notion applying to copyright. There's no mere “seem like” at play here: the litigious music IP owners suing the pants off of musicians know full well that precisely zero musicians (least of all commercial ones) exist in a vacuum, and that's indeed the basis for the success of their litigiousness. Even if you can somehow prove you've never heard a particular song, You Live In A Society™ and that existing intellectual property's influence on society in turn influences subsequent creators.

There is, in other words, no such thing as true “independent creation”.

> Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention.

Don't threaten me with a good time :)

> If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code.

For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code.

The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place.

> And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.

In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.

> Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.

The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.

Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.

Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.

From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks.

But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.

Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.

That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.

> For the setup price alone of a low-end home lab1, you could buy several years of a paid subscription to one of the AI providers. The power costs would come out to around $50-$300 per month, depending on how much inference you’re running: again, the price of a couple more paid subscriptions.

Okay, but I already have multiple computers capable of running local models with acceptable performance, so for me the cost is $0. I suspect that's true for most people of sufficient technical inclination to be interested in and capable of running models on their local machines.

Also, no, the monthly electricity price of even my power-hungriest machines ain't anywhere close to that figure. Hell, at the high end that's more than my power bill for my whole household.

Run it with a self-hosted model on a gaming PC running off a solar panel and UPS.

Or Trident, which was (and maybe still is?) Joyent's flagship product in the private cloud space.

Not just limited RAM, but limited RAM bandwidth, which seems like it would make this particularly painful on the N64 (ironic, given that the in-file README says that this came about specifically to support porting a game to the N64). That said, should be possible to wrap these with some non-inlined functions in a pinch, yeah?

Re: floats, I wonder how well it'd perform if compiled with soft-float support?

I've been resuming work on a Zig library for developing N64 homebrew¹. Previous milestone was getting a framebuffer onto the screen, and after achieving that I took an overly-long break.

Current goal, which I've been working on for a bit more than a week now, is to add support for controlling the RDP (the part of the N64's GPU that actually does all the rasterization), such that programs can actually draw triangles. I'd already implemented the control registers, so the current work is defining all the RDP commands, along with documenting what they do and how to use them — which means that I need to fully understand what they do and how to use them, and that's been a fun rabbit hole to explore.

I'm currently about halfway to two-thirds of the way through defining packed structs for all the RDP commands, then the plan is to build a CommandList struct with methods to build RDP command lists and validate that they make sense (make sure all the triangle/rectangle rendering commands have all their subcommands in the right order, make sure you ain't calling them without there being a framebuffer defined as the rendering target, make sure the needed synchronization commands are in place where needed, etc.). Then that should hopefully be enough for Zig64 to draw its first triangle :)

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¹: https://fsl.yellowapple.us/zig64

The obvious solution here (besides, like you say, requiring datacenter electricity to be from 100% renewable sources) is to just charge datacenters more for electricity, such that they offset their impact on demand. That's exactly what my state's energy company (NV Energy) has been trying to do with so-called “large-load electrical service agreements” (LLESAs).

Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.

I've been on-and-off writing a Zig library for writing N64 games and it's indeed pretty wild how getting working code was as simple as telling the compiler to use LLVM's MIPS III target.

Of course, getting working code that actually does anything useful is a much different story (it's taking multiple days just to write the wrappers for RDP commands, for example; lots of cross-referencing between N64Brew wiki pages v. official SGI docs v. libdragon source code v. Peter Lemon's assembly code to figure out what all the different bitpacked fields really mean and how to best represent them), but it still feels magical that I can just use an ordinary toolchain and not some ancient proprietary monstrosity.

While I agree with you, I think it's interesting that LLMs have progressed enough to be able to write working code even for niche and heavily-constrained platforms like the N64. I'm sure it helps that modern toolchains make that easier (I don't expect very many LLMs to be able to put up with the old Windows 9x or IRIX toolchains, to say the least!).

The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.

And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.

Pretty slick stuff.

> It's very easy to make lazy, shallow dismissals that leaders like Dario/Demis/Sam are acting purely out of self-interest.

It's very easy to make those dismissals because of how transparently obvious it is that self-interest is a significant factor, no matter how loudly they insist otherwise.

> If AI does pose biological risk, or could destabilize geopolitics, or even just poses economic risks, surely a joint petition like this is a good thing?

Similar attitudes hindered nuclear energy research and deployment for decades, in turn kneecapping our species' ability to obsolesce fossil fuels and avoid the global climate catastrophe we've now made inevitable.

The obvious solution here is for datacenter buildouts to include the power generation necessary for them to operate. Here in Nevada that's exactly what quite a few of the larger datacenter companies (Switch, Google, Apple, etc.) have been doing, whether by outright building solar farms themselves or by signing PPAs with geothermal companies like Ormat. That's indeed how these companies are able to advertise their datacenters as powered by “100% renewables” despite NV Energy's grid power mix including non-renewables (namely natural gas).

You don't specifically need beef or almonds in order to live. Even small reductions in the consumption of either would entirely offset datacenter water use.

A lot of datacenters are built in / under / adjacent to office buildings.

I have multiple answers, since I routinely use multiple machines:

- Primary desktop (custom-built): NixOS + Windows 11 (latter currently unbootable because installing NixOS nuked Windows' UEFI; whoops lmao)

- Primary laptop (Framework 16): Aeon (immutable openSUSE variant) + Windows 11 LTSC

- Secondary laptop (Framework 13): OpenBSD-current (+ occasional Windows, Haiku, NixOS by booting from Framework expansion cards)

- Band room recording laptop (Dell G5 15): AV Linux

Looks nice. Curious about the software; is it running Android or something more exotic? Custom app support? Custom firmware support?

The UK can surely afford it. If not, then surely they can require the datacenters themselves to foot the bill.

If every American skipped a single burger per year, that'd entirely offset the combined water use of all American datacenters.

Datacenters, in other words, do not consume all that much water in the grand scheme of things. There are many, many better targets if water conservation is a genuine concern.

And at least one of those two countries is also building datacenters in droves and would have a vested interest in hindering foreign competition.

> those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it

Because they're not. That's a utility billing issue. The power company can charge residential customers lower rates than it does commercial/industrial customers. If it's not doing that, then you're better off taking it up with them (or quite possibly: whichever regulatory body is hindering their ability to do that).

The UK is surrounded by a planet-spanning body of water. It has no excuse to be complaining about water shortages even if every square inch of it was a single giant datacenter.

Plenty of the people opposing datacenters are opposing them in places that already have datacenters. If there was a direct experience to be had, they would've already had it.

In my case it's way too sensitive, causing me to scroll too far every time.

It seems like they're indeed trying to sell “Orion+”, but it doesn't look like it buys you much besides bragging rights, in which case an Ardour-like business model of “source code is free but we charge for pre-built binaries” seems like it'd accomplish the same thing.