Yeah, but that was always a dumb idea, and it was always a minority position. Also we've know exactly why we can't have solar panels like that since [before] former thin film printed panel darling Nanosolar closed their doors in 2013: Microcracks develop in the protective plastic layers on thin film flexible solar panels and let in moisture which spoils the panel. You can make a relatively long-lived plastic solar panel if you don't want it to flex much, but it doesn't save much money in the end so that's done only for portable uses where glass is simply unsuitable.

You can make very cheap thin film solar panels. They just don't last long enough to be useful.

You're going to have to at least buy me dinner and sweet talk me first. Or won't you?

I'm keeping more track as I age, not less. Perhaps your capabilities have diminished further than mine? I was pretty young when I signed up, it would be surprising if you were younger than I am.

Every competent major company has done it already, but they didn't do it because quantum computing was here, they did it because it might come someday and they wanted cryptosystems which were proof against the potential vulnerability.

Yes, from people selling shit to suckers. But since there are no practical quantum computers, there are no practical quantum computer-based attacks on any cryptosystems. There is only the fear that someone will someday discover a way to make a practical quantum computer, which is a reasonable fear considering that it's not expensive to shift to using other encryption methods so long as you aren't in a hurry about it.

It isn't specifically because both are taking something some media dildos spun dumb headlines about and basing dissatisfaction on those dumb headlines. But one would have to be capable of insight to understand the connection, so I'm not surprised a coward failed there.

It's a great unanswerable whether not having copyright would have been more of a boon to creators of software, and another whether that would have been more of a boon to users as more software would be created for them. But we do have numerous relevant examples of how copyright has in fact benefited users, and I think Linux is the obvious primary example. Major contributors to Linux told us in so many words that they chose to contribute to it because of its license which essentially made returning contributions to the community mandatory.* The GPL is powered by copyright. Without any copyright law, you effectively have the BSD license less attribution. QED, copyright can do good things, even if only because it was subverted with copyleft.

Yeah, that's what copyright does, there's no arguing against that. I'm sympathetic to the idea that copyright shouldn't exist, and personally generally argue that the term should be much shorter — and also probably shorter for software than for some other types of creations. But that's another discussion, I think.

* Can't really do that with the law AFAIK, GPL comes closest, it's a whole other discussion there again.

Whoops, I forgot to include something on clean room engineering because I got caught up in ranting about how LLMs aren't thinking, and this aspect is really important to the discussion IMO and I wanted to bring it up even while I was writing my first paragraph.

The other argument to be made about LLMs not washing away copyright is that even if they were considered to be thinking, that is arguably not enough to make what they do legal. Even for humans we have the concept of taint, for which we invented clean room engineering as a circumvention strategy. But the LLM doesn't have any separation, as the model is a direct product of the input data.

It's a complicated issue for sure. The underlying social reason why it should be this way is that copyright is (allegedly) for the purpose of protecting human effort in order to induce additional creations. Only if you work from the standpoint of it being only for protecting revenues (whether profit, tax, or both) does it even make sense to give copyright to AI creations.

The reason why it arguably is a problem, though I think it is critical to say that this really hasn't been decided in court anywhere from what I can tell, is a combination of two things: first, the definition of a derivative work is loose and open to subjective interpretation, and second that's just how the law is written. An LLM is software and you aren't, even if your argument is that they work the same... which they don't.

That last point is relevant to the argument as well. That's the technical reason why they shouldn't be the same. LLMs don't have ideas or concepts. They have only tokens and statistical relationships between them. The model records ways in which a token representing a thing is related to tokens representing other things, but there's no mind there to have a concept of the thing. I'm deliberately avoiding providing any example here to make a point — any thing is equally inscrutable to the same LLM producing a pronouncement about it.

That is relevant to this question because while we are capable of learning things about things because we have the concept of things, the LLM does not have understanding of any concepts because understanding is not a thing which it does, in fact it has nothing to do understanding with. The LLM is producing a facsimile of the very least and last part of the thinking process, but it's doing it with a combination of statistics and random numbers and that's it. That's why it can be equally confident about two sets of diametrically opposed results produced from the same query — it's specifically because there's nothing behind the facade.

Therefore, since the AI is not translating the ideas represented by tokens into ideas and concepts (since those are fundamentally not things an LLM can apprehend) at no point is it turning input into learning. "Training" is asserted to be the best word we have for what we are doing, but that's really not a thing because the LLM is the weights and the code that produces the chains of output. There's nothing else there! We have a mind with consciousness and ideas actually mean things to us, and we react to those meanings and they affect our output — when this isn't true, we have a word for that, and it is "psychopath".

Are you also the guy still crying about the alleged global cooling scam? Forgive my skepticism regarding your having a brain.

Yeah, it's just like Microsoft Edge asking me for my password in order to see my other passwords, while loading them into memory as a convenience for any attacker on my system. (I presume they fixed that by now? but uhhhh)

They intend to drive while impaired. OpenAI intended to run their agent without sufficient safeguards in place or, if looked at in a more damning way, after deliberately choosing to disable those safeguards, which is IMO also more accurate. In both cases there was intent to take an action known to be unsafe which is why they are the same.

AI code should have to meet the same standards as any other code so that's not the problem, it's the copyright issue. If using AI doesn't wash away copyrights, and there's no reason it should, then accepting AI code should be a non-starter.

We don't believe it because we still think critically, because we haven't decided to let the computers think for us or write our comments for us.

"We still don't know what public data was accessed and how it was accessed, because OpenAI has not shared specific technical details with us yet"

There are no heroes in this story, only villains.

It's genuinely nice that you have fond memories of disassembling a George Foreman grill cluster, and also very sad that Sony killed Other OS, but that rugpull was pretty much inevitable once it was discovered that the PS3 running Linux was the finest Blu-Ray ripper man had conceived, which in turn was pretty much inevitable anyway since Sony gave access to the drive through the hypervisor.

As you say, statistically nobody is upgrading the RAM on their raspi, but it sure would be nice if customers who bought a bunch of these things could upgrade them to give them some life down the road. I've been for some reason continually surprised at how much rework capacity seems to be available, and I think they could reasonably contract that out.

While everything you said in your comment is true, we might and someday get an actually Open RISC-V implementation. It's legally possible, unlike ARM or x86. Perhaps we could instead have an outdated MIPS or SPARC, but why would we want that except for hobbyism? I honestly would like both, but only as toys.

From an end user point of view, I am using amd64. The OSS Linux drivers are just so good now there's almost no sense in using anything else at this moment if that's what you want to run. For once I regret buying an Nvidia GPU! But that's a whole other discussion.