With their new Mythos model they can take Pentagon down, that's what I hear anyway. Maybe Pentagon needs to be taken down as well as the rest of the regime and all of the regimes.

Just a couple weeks ago, I replaced the battery in my 6-year-old Lemur Pro. Not very hard, and now it's great at holding a charge again.

Yes, getting this thing in 2020 cost me 2-3 times as much as today's new Macbook Neo, but I needed a machine I could rely on, that wasn't designed as though I'm the manufacturer's adversary.

Could the point of the brag be that it's newer hardware? My understanding is that successive generations of earthling chips are more vulnerable to malfunction from cosmic rays, etc due to their much higher density.

But I've totally not kept up. Is this still a problem?

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog

Overload? It's probably an overly-excited inference, but that sounds like a basket with too many eggs in it. Anyone know?

"Ukraine, if you're listening..."

As you can imagine I am 100% against communism and any form of socialism. Bezos and everyone else must have property rights not hindered by government, it is his business to run (or his board) and government must not be in position to dictate how any company hires and fires people, who they hire and fire, why, etc.

I fully expect Amazon to close this warehouse, maybe it will be contaminated with something radioactive for example, to make things easier and then it will shut down. Personally I root for the anarcho capitalist solution and wish Amazon to win this battle for its private property rights.

2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.

This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.

When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.

OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)

Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.

The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost .. a game?

social engineering used in practice by the parent comment, now sitting at +4 Funny. Still waiting for that 1 autistic moderator.

That's generally how it's being done. The robot reads the code and writes specs. Then another robot reads the specs and writes code. If courts still accept the traditional clean room defense (and why wouldn't they?) then they're probably going to say it isn't a derived work.

It looks like the big catch, the actual source of uncertainty, is that the instance of the robot that reads the specs and writes code, may have seen the original code as part of its training data. That'll be enough to keep it from being a true clean room. In those cases, you'll be totally right.

But for any particular given project, was it trained on the original code? That'll be a case-by-case thing, and I think in a very long-term way, the answer will increasingly be No, simply because codebots' need to keep training on newly-published code, will diminish.

As an analogy, imagine you're a human author, and for some weird reason, one thing you like to do is have people tell you high-level plot summaries (specs) and then you write a detailed story from that. Someone says "the moon is unusually bright one night and people fear something bad has happened" and you write a story much like Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, from that prompt alone. And you do this with 100 more stories, and most of them honestly don't appear to be derived. You take specs like "bombardier has crazy war experiences" and your resulting story is nothing like Catch-22.

But then one day, you're up in the attic and you find an old box that's been sitting there for decades, and inside, you find an old, worn, dog-eared paperback of Larry Niven stories which happens to include Inconstant Moon. Oh shit, you must have read that 45 years ago and then somehow "forgot" that you had, so your story wasn't truly independent of Niven's work. Your story turned out to not be "clean" at all, whoops! It was a derived work after all, because you read it ("trained on it") when you were a kid.

But the other 100 stories? Nope, those really were clean. Your story-writing process was almost legally foolproof, except that you had to learn reading and writing at some point, so your childhood favorites needed to be off-limits.

The heat wave made March be like late spring. Things that normally bloom in May, bloomed in March. And yesterday I got my first MRGCD irrigation of the year, flooding my back yard and letting the shade trees greedily suck up the water. We're spending a lot more time outside on the patio, compared to previous years during this time-of-year.

If I were stupid, I would be out of my mind with pleasure. Things feel wonderful right now.

But that water I just got .. that is The snowpack, probably. Instead of getting it all throughout summer, this first irrigation is probably the last, or second-to-last.

This summer is going to SUCK.

So begin the Obfuscated Object Code Compiler wars, to keep robots from writing machine language decompilers. The next few years are gonna be a wild ride!

If a computer program ingests code (whether GPL or not) and then outputs some code, the big question is whether or not the resulting code is a derived work.

If it's not a derived work, then the license of the original code is irrelevant, and it doesn't matter if it's GPLed, fully proprietary, or somewhere in between. The license has no say in the matter, because nobody ever needs to agree to the license; whatever they're doing is legal under copyright law so they already had all the permission they needed, without ever needing the additional rights granted by a license.

If it is a derived work, then that's copyright infringement unless the person who does it has permission. And the only way to get permission (i.e. cause copyright infringement to have not happened) is to agree to the license. So yes, the output would have to be GPLed.

But I don't think we really know whether or not robots reading code and then writing code from what they "learned," are creating derived works. Ask again in a few years, after a few court cases. This is hard. Rational people can disagree and come up with pretty good arguments no matter what side they're on. We'll see what the courts decide.

I think the most interesting case for determining it, won't involve a GPLed input. It'll be if Anthropic sues this project, since they will have contributed arguments to both sides. They'll have to argue "it is a derived work" in court, but to all their customers, they have and will continue to preach "it's not a derived work."