Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." [ ... ]

Well, if there's anyone who would know about slop...

Sounds like Micros~1 doesn't want to deal with actual people, much less the consequences of their own boneheaded decisions.

Of course, if Discord had a backbone (and ethics), they would summarily remove the filters, and smack Micros~1 for making them look bad. And if Micros~1 gave them any back-talk about it, they could reply, "Well, it sounds like you should set up your own rules on your own globally accessible chat network. I hear you already have something along those lines. Something called... Teams, I think?. Knock yourselves out..."

The argument proffered by management appears to boil down to nothing more than, "Well, everyone else is jumping off the Empire State Building, so what's your problem?

Also: These lemmings are in for a FAFO-fueled rude awakening when they discover all the slop they've checked in and shipped/deployed, being machine-generated, is uncopyrghtable. "Um, actually... It's just like using a C compiler, transforming the programmer's intent to runnable code, so..." *SMACK!* Wrong. Compilers are deterministic. You can draw a straight line between the source code (and therefore the programmer's creative choices and intent) and the resulting binary and, given the same input, will generate the same output every time (indeed, if you do get different output, it's a bug) LLMs are anything but -- they'll give you different answers depending on what you may or may not have asked before, the phase of the moon, and which vendor paid to have the LLM preferentially yield responses using their commercial framework.

In short, this is a bone-headed move, and when it came time for the managers' performance review, I'd give a negative score to anyone imposing mandatory LLM use.

Based on a very quick gloss of the California Notary Handbook, it doesn't look like Notaries can do this. All they can do is attest to the identity of the signer(s) of documents, and that said identity was verified via "satisfactory evidence," which is one of a variety of forms of ID, and then record that ID along with their fingerprint in their journal.

Point being: The identity being verified is disclosed (their full name) as part of the Notary's attestation. I don't think attestations without such a disclosure are possible under the current framework, but I haven't read the actual governing law. (AKAs/pseudonyms can be attested, provided "satisfactory evidence" can be provided establishing the AKA/pseudonym belongs to the person present. It is extremely unclear whether Internet account IDs qualify under this provision, much less what would be accepted as "satisfactory evidence.")

The 20 mile range makes this mostly an expensive toy.

Precisely my thoughts. This is a toy for hopping across San Francisco bay.

Total payload is 220lbs. One guy. You will not be going shopping in this.

It's not a car; it's an aircraft (seriously, just look at it -- there's no way this will be rolling down Hwy 101), so takeoff and landing need to be, at best, on a helipad -- which you will have to clear immediately for the next guy coming in whose battery is going flat.

I doubt you could get from Santa Cruz to San Jose in 20 minutes even by air. Atherton and Saratoga will ban these outright because of the noise. Maybe Los Altos Hills or Portola Valley will grudgingly allow a handful of them -- right up to the point a crashing one starts a fire.

William Shatner is a classically trained Shakespearean actor who appeared in festivals and on Broadway prior to switching from stage to television. His TOS enunciation and emphasis is due mostly to his experience with radio performances (which were over the top verbally) combined with directors on TOS constantly telling him to increase the astonishment. And in reality, wasn't anywhere near as pervasive or dramatic as the pop culture version that pokes fun at Kirk.

Let me see if I've got the basis of this "shortage" right.

Sam Altman, using money he doesn't have, bought up almost 50% of DRAM wafers that don't exist, to turn into DRAM chips that don't exist (or maybe not; maybe he's just playing keep-away from his competitors), to put alongside GPU chips that don't exist, to stuff into server farms that don't exist, which will consume vast quantities of electricity that doesn't exist -- all to create "artificial intelligence" ....which doesn't exist.

How is this not a colossal scam?

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."