What's with all this make believe delusional bullshit? The LLM is not gonna wake up and become AI. Get real guys.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
Intelligence that is artificial, as opposed to the natural kind. Not something that can just string semantically relevant words together most of the time. A system that learns, adapts, improves. One that can generalize, and quickly make sense of situations outside the training set. LLMs alone will never do any of this.
But it speaks in words, therefore it must be super duper extra smart!!11 /s
Sarcasm aside, I think this is an easy cognitive trap to fall into. It does sometimes feel like the LLM must have some world model because it converses somewhat coherently. Examples like this failure to understand chess, or to count the number of Rs in "strawberry", seem difficult to explain if the models are intelligent. But that doesn't stop people believing they are anyway. I think there must be something about the conversational interface that fools us easily. I wonder if people trained in interrogation techniques are also fooled?
I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.
> no license to kill, and not much in the way of secrecy or gadgetry
Insofar as you know.. there could be plenty of killer secrecy and gadgetry that was surreptitiously injected by your build/deployment/distribution systems ;)
Edit: the customers, in some cases, did indeed run interpreters that were bad, but that's not my lookout! Buy me a fancy beverage and I'll tell you a story sometime
IIUC it's an open question whether they have the electricity to actually run all the "compute" they own on paper.
That aside, I'm not sure why it's particularly interesting they have all this "compute" (let's just assume for the sake of argument it's all "live"--that is they can actually run workloads on all of the "compute" they have on paper). So what if it's the biggest amount ever? Why would that be meaningful? Is there some economically viable problem you're aware of that is somehow dominant in that way?
Well yes, we used to talk about "supercomputers" in the hands of state actors for cracking into enemy systems and places like science labs for working on big hard problems of DNA, the universe, and the like.
So I think part of what is going on now is not just the method (LLMs) but the means (supercomputer levels of compute) at unprecedented scale of concentration.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.
> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.
I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.
> I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.
That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.
And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.
Lately I've just been leaving my snow tires on year round (Bridgestone Blizzaks). It gets cold here, between November and April the number of days with daytime high above freezing is small. I used to run all seasons in the summer and snows in the winter but they were lasting too long that way. It's better to wear them out within ~5yr.
I've done that with "mild" Winter tires, really the thing full Summer tires excell at is removing water, which requires a center tread that's useless in snow. So if you don't get a lot of rain and it doesn't get too hot (some Winter compounds will get mushy and wear very quickly) they're fine. But really I've just described a Winter rated All-Season at this point, and you should buy those.
All season tires are useless on snow and ice unless they're brand new. They're OK the first winter, after that it's bad news. On heavier vehicles I run BFGoodrich All Terrain T/A tires year round. They have good siped treads which grip on ice. For the car, studless Blizzaks have been holding up well year round. No abnormal wear so far, and they do fine in the wet, dry, heat, etc. I probably only drive 1-2 days/yr over 90°F though, in a hotter climate they might not be so great.
[edit] obviously this is a tradeoff--I'm trading slightly reduced hot/dry/wet performance for massively increased winter performance. The reduction in summer performance is small enough to not be noticeable, whereas the increase in winter performance is large. On all season tires I would have to chain up a dozen or so times per year, often just to move the car like 3 car lengths out of a parking spot. I've only ever had to put the chains on once with snow tires on the car, and that was bashing through 6" of unplowed crusty icy stuff up a steep driveway.
I dunno about this - I leave my crossclimate 2 aw's on year round and they're pretty fantastic in snow. We had a pretty good winter this year (44" from dec-feb) and they just worked. I didn't go meandering around any mountains on them, mind you, but they're so far ahead of most typical all-season tires it's almost not fair to compare. For -most- lazy people who don't want to swap tires or rims, they seem a better option than leaving true winter tires on year round. Obviously, there are exceptions depending on where you live.
I've got two sets of wheels, and I rotate my tires every oil change, so it's not laziness that's the motivation. Instead, it was that with 2 sets of tires after 7 years of driving both sets still had tons of tread left but were starting to dry rot. I put about 60k miles on the car during those 7 years. So if I can get ~30k miles out of a single set of snows, and use them up within 5 years, that would be a much better use of resources. The cost isn't really a factor either, I just hate wasting stuff.
I've currently got something like 15k mi on the tires and 2.5yr of year round use. They appear to be wearing evenly and normally.
I agree, I have the same problem, that's why I'm sticking with the crossclimates year round also -- we only drive about 5,000 miles per year, so my tires die from age well before they would wear out from mileage.
I assume we're both making approximately the same optimization but you're going for better snow & ice performance at the expense of some summer and wet stopping distance, and neither tradeoff seems obviously wrong depending on our driving situations.
Yeah I would prefer to run something with an actual tread wear rating, as I believe it would spew less microplastic crap into the environment, and I suspect I might pick up 1-2mpg (maybe 5-7% better?) fuel economy with a less aggressive tire. But the winter performance is really important for me, especially on this car which is my winter beater/mile maker--for now, until it dies and donates its engine to a greater cause. The winters here (northern New England, IECC climate zone 6A) are just about as extreme as it gets in the lower 48. The snow tires have the added benefit of being good in mud season. There are lots of dirt roads around here, it helps to be able to drive them without getting bogged in the spring.
That's why I won't touch new equipment with a ten foot pole. I buy old stuff and then end up having to do major rebuilds. I realize this is somewhat of a luxury, and damn is it nice.
In the last calendar year, this is basically the highlights (routine maintenance excluded):
On my Kubota L3010 I added remote hydraulics so I had to take all the bodywork apart. Discovered some rust, put about 20hr of panel beating, welding, and paint into the floor pan (NLA part, unfortunately). About 20hr after I got it all back together it started leaking hydraulic fluid from the clutch housing. So I get the privilege of doing all that disassembly again to split the tractor and replace the front driveshaft seal (suspected). It's a minor leak, so far, so this might wait a few years.
The 1998 12V 2nd gen Dodge is its own saga--new transmission, clutch, a bunch of paint work. Rebuilt the entire interior. Currently working on cleaning up wiring in the engine bay, killer dowel pin fix, fixing oil leaks from the injector pump gasket and vac/power steering pump, serp belt, crank balancer, etc. Still need to drop the fuel tank and replace the sending unit, as well as re-seal the axles.
My 1995 Land Cruiser just got new plugs, distributor cap/rotor, belts, crank balancer, front main seal, oil pump o-ring, etc. Should be good until next summer.
My 1999 Benz got some new A/C o-rings, all the low pressure fuel lines replaced, some rust repair (welding, panel beating, paint, undercoating, etc) on the front right jackpoint. All new stainless brake lines (https://www.linestogo.com/ 100% will buy from these guys again). This car is kind of sacrificial, eventually its engine (OM606) is going in the Land Cruiser in front of a purpose-built NV4500 transmission. If the rust doesn't get it first (ski bus duty), I'll probably shred the 722.6 by turning up the engine too much.
So it's not a small amount of work. But no reverse engineering is required. I can just read a book and follow the instructions therein and do literally anything that needs to be done on those vehicles.
Reading codes is only part of it. For the last quarter century or so (some manufacturers more than others) if you replace certain components (radio, any computer module) you need to update the ECU to recognize the new component. This requires proprietary software and in many cases proprietary hardware as well. These "features" are marketed as an "anti-theft" mechanism. This renders some repairs basically impossible for the end user to perform.
The fact that they've been allowed to build systems like that is appalling.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
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