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Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 4, Interesting) 31

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

Comment Re:Feels like the U.S. is turning into a dictators (Score 2, Insightful) 274

I hate to say it like that but it feels like the U.S. is slowly turning more and more into a dictatorship. Isn't this the kind of things you have to do in a dictatorship? I feel for the U.S. people right now.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

Comment Re:Turns Out, the Coyote Had Better Taste (Score 1) 102

No. The Department of the Army didn 't "replace" the Department of War,, it *was* the Deparrtment of War. Same secretary (Kenneth Royale), same personnel, same everything. Only the name changed. It can trace its unbroken existence back to its founding in 1794 to the present day. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, got the Secretary of the *Navy* (James Forrestal) as its secretary, all new personnel, and was a totally new organization (with John Sullivan as Forrestal's replacement at Navy).

Comment Re:Turns Out, the Coyote Had Better Taste (Score 1) 102

No, the Department of the Army still exists. It was removed from the Cabinet in 1949 but it didn't go anywhere. There was a recent kerfuffle about the Secretary of the Army leaving his position. You may have seen it in the news. The simple fact is that the Department of Defense was an all-new creation and not a renaming of anything.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 95

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 86

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

Comment Re:It's just like The Osbornes! (Score 1) 70

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 3, Interesting) 86

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

Comment Re:Fine TiVo you have there. Shame something might (Score 1) 88

How many Tivo's are still in use? When the FCC nixed the requirement for offering CableCards, Tivo with any cable subscriber basically became a useless brick.

TDS Telecom uses a Tivo box of some kind for their TV+ service. You can tell from because the Tivo symbol on their remotes: https://tdstelecom.com/support... . When visiting a relative with this, I didn't get a chance to see the actual boxes, just that they were Tivo. I was surprised to find they're running a variant of Android because to get new "channels", you have to get them from Google's play store.

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