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> If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content.

That is really limiting though. I do not want to see Brexit ragebait in my threads, but I am quite happy to engage in intelligent argument about it. The problem is that if, for example, a friend posts something about Brexit I want to comment on, my feed then fills with ragebait.

My solution is to bookmark the friends and groups pages, and the one group I admin and go straight to those. I have never used the app.


The article repeatedly treats license and contract as though they are the same, even though the sidebar links to a post that discusses the difference.

A lot of it boils down to whether training an LLM is a breach of copyright of the training materials which is not specific to GPL or open source.


And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything ever published is all theirs.

I am really surprised that media businesses, which are extremely influential around the world, have not pushed back against this more. I wonder whether they are looking at cost savings that will get from the technology as a worthwhile trade-off.

Several media companies have sued OpenAI already. So far, none have been successful.

They're busy trying to profit from it rushing to enter into licensing agreements with the LLM vendors.

Yeah, the short term win is to enter a licensing agreement so you get some cash for a couple years, meanwhile pray someone else with more money fights the legal battle to try and set a precedent for you

All theirs, if they properly obtained the copy.

This is a big difference that already has bit them.


In practice it wouldn't matter a whit if they lobbied for it or not.

Lobbying is for people trying to stop them; externalities are for the little people.


To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use.

Once training is established as fair use, it doesn't really matter if the license is MIT, GPL, or a proprietary one.


fair use only applies in the united states (and Poland, and a very limited set of others)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#/media/File:Fair_use_...

and it is certainly not part of the Berne Convention

in almost every country in the world even timeshifting using your VCR and ripping your own CDs is copyright infringement


Most commonwealth countries have fair dealing, which is similar although slightly different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

importantly "fair dealing" has no concept of "transformation"

(which is the linch-pin of the sloppers)


France and most of europe has fair use (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e) but also has a mandatory tax on every sold medium that can do storage to recover the "lost fees" due to fair use

> To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use.

Is this legally settled?


Yes. There have been multiple court cases affirming fair use.

That is just the sort of point I am trying to make. That is a copyright law issue, not a contractual one. If the GPL is a contract then you are in breach of contract regardless of fair use or equivalents.

It's not specific to open source but it's most clearly enforceable with open source as there will be many contributors from many jurisdictions with the one unifying factor being they all made their copyright available under the same license terms.

With proprietary or more importantly single-owner code, it's far easier for this to end up in a settlement rather than being drug out into an actual ruling, enforcement action, and establishment of precedence.

That's the key detail. It's not specific to GPL or open source but if you want to see these orgs held to account and some precedence established, focusing on GPL and FOSS licensed code is the clearest path to that.


A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not US probably.

That part of the article is about US cases, so its US law that applies.

> A GPL license is a contract in most other countries. Just not US probably.

Not just the US. It may vary with version of the GPL too. Wikipedia claims its a civil law vs common law country difference - not sure the citation shows that though.


A number of hotels that were built with this lack of privacy (including one I love - but its been fixed there though - more subtle worse as you could see in from the stairs) were all designed by the same architect who is said to have had a kink about looking into toilets.

Maybe he started it, and as his hotels are (otherwise) lovely it made it part of a cool aesthetic and was therefore copied?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Bawa


It was.

Renaming languages to suit American taste really grates.

Nimrod to Nim was even worse. Apparently Americans cannot get Biblical references.


Not biblical references but rather Elmer Fudd.

Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd "Nimrod" in a 1940's cartoon to sarcastically refer to Elmer as a great hunter. At that time I think most people probably got the biblical reference. Over time that word morphed into meaning something like an idiot to most Americans due to that cartoon.

The same thing happened to the word "Acme" - the coyote in the road runner cartoons bought all his devices from the "Acme Corporation". Acme means the best/peak and it was a sarcastic reference to none of the gadgets ever working. Now most American's think Acme means generic/bad.

They should have kept the name as Nimrod and named the package manager Acme instead of Nimble.


What if it was the word for Penis in Japanese or Chinese? I would understand them for changing it.

then we should change bit(s) because it means dick/penis in french /s

bit (in English) is not pronounced the same as bite (in French). The French word is closer in pronunciation to “beet” or “beat” in English.

Also, “coq” and “cock” are not really pronounced the same either. The English word with the closest pronunciation to “coq” is “coke”.


> bit (in English) is not pronounced the same as bite (in French). The French word is closer in pronunciation to “beet” or “beat” in English.

Wrong, it's pronounced exactly like the English "bit".


That’s not true, at least in France. Perhaps it’s true in some other dialect, e.g. Quebec French; I don’t know.

From Wiktionary, the pronunciation of English bit is /bɪt/, and French bite is /bit/. The sounds represented in IPA by ɪ and i are not the same, which is precisely why “bit” and “beet” sound different to Americans.


A better analogy would be getting rid of laws against murder if its unevenly applied so people from a particular group always got away with it.

> Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

is that because they were using AWS so hired people who knew AWS?

I would personally have far more confidence in my ability to troubleshoot or redeploy a dedicated server than the AWS services to replace it.

> Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

There are lots of options for renting dedicated hardware, that the service provider will maintain,. Its still far cheaper than AWS. Even if you have redundancy for everything its still a lot cheaper.


A lot of people do use AWS for EC2.

Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale

> Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.


The last 18 years of tech companies I’ve worked for used AWS EC2, every single one.

In absolute numbers maybe it's a lot, but I doubt even 10% are EC2 only.

Even "only" ECS users often benefit from load balancing there. Other clouds sometimes have their own (Hetzner), but generally it's kind of a hard problem to do well, if you don't have a cloud service like Elastic IP's that you can use to handle fail over.

Generally everywhere I've worked has been pretty excited to have a lot more than just ecs managed for them. There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom. I'd love some day if the stance could shift some, if the everyday operator felt a little more secure doing some of their own platform engineering, if folks had faith in that. Having a solid secure day-2 stance starts with simple pieces but isnt simple, is quite hard, with inherent complexity: I'm excited by those many folks out there saddling up for open source platform engineering works (operators/controllers).


>Even "only" ECS users often benefit from load balancing there. Other clouds sometimes have their own (Hetzner), but generally it's kind of a hard problem to do well, if you don't have a cloud service like Elastic IP's that you can use to handle fail over.

Pretty much everyone offers load balancing and IPs that can be moved between servers and VPSs. Even if you have to switch to new IPs DNS propagation will not take as long as waiting out an AWS shutdown.

10% of what? Users, instances/capacity...? If its users then its a lot higher because it it gets commoner the smaller users are.

> There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom.

The argument is really about whether that is a perception of a reality. If you can fit everything on one box (which is a LOT these days) then its easy to manage your own stuff. if you cannot you are probably big enough to employ people to manage it (which is discussed in other comments) and you still have to deal with the complexity of AWS (also discussed elsewhere in the comments).


OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway. Lots of smaller providers. Most people who offer dedicated servers do this.

> My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.

laptops and phones mage that a lot harder.


They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.

I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.


I agree desktops are best, and they are what my kids started with, but there is a lot of pressure to give kids phones.

For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).

There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.


>bus tickets require an app

this stuff seems criminal to me...and outright bigotry against poor people.


The UK is a very different society from Singapore.

Are his objections to jury trials correct in the first place? If they are, then do they apply to the UK? I find it very hard to imagine why multiculturalism should be a problem so can you explain what he thinks they work poorly/.

the good option is to keep trial by jury.


Unfortunately the system has basically been collapsed by industrial scale theft and fraud, and the impact of covid...

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