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.

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

One thing the science does tell us is that we all have a very hard time separating the world that existed when we were children from our perception of that world through the eyes of a child.

Ask nearly any population in the United States when this country was best and you'll get a majority who'll swear to you it was when they were teenagers. The age of the group doesn't matter. You get the same result from 20 year olds as 40 year olds as 60 year olds as 80 year olds. And what you're seeing is people looking back to a time when they had lots of free time, lots of freedom, and most of their income was disposable and thinking "that was pretty great." And it was.... except they were living under a roof someone else paid for and still experiencing the risks and complexities of the world through the filter and safety net provided by their parents.

And since we're being scientific about this: yes, obviously not everyone. I'm sure someone reading this right now is thinking "I had a tough childhood." And I'm sure they did but anecdotes are not data.

The 1980s were -- and I say this as both a historian and someone who lived through them -- fucked. Reagan torched the New Deal consensus. The AIDS crisis was literally laughed out of the White House press room. Our government perpetuated a long string of dirty intelligence/foreign-policy interventions. The wealthy and powerful were juiced to the gills on cocaine.

There was a sense of decorum which has sense evaporated from American politics but that's about it.

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.

The Foundation TV series has been a lot of fun but I just can't shake how very much it is NOT ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION. Not even a little bit. It's fine that they didn't want to tell the Foundation story. Honestly, I'm not sure it would make good TV in a faithful adaptation. But... why set yourself up for failure like that? It's not like the majority of the people watching it are 1940s era Sci Fi fans.

Inside the /. bubble, sure, that makes sense. But crypto badly wants to be mainstream and, demographically, it's a lot younger than this community is. You might be surprised at how few people under 30 maintain bookmarks or consume news from specific outlets intentionally.

I'm increasingly convinced that if you're running an AI interaction at all it needs to live in a container. Somehow the sci-fi wisdom of "no seriously, don't give an AI access to the internet" flew right out the window when AI could tell us when our boss' emails actually had something in them worth reading. I get that, but ESPECIALLY for software developers, if you're going to make use of agentic AI systems, you need to have a metaphorical (if not literal) moat around the agent before you just turn it loose.

That was true before we started talking about the security implications of an AI with privileged access coming under attack.

Yea, but those financial reasons were "dealing with the physical stresses is expensive" and "the shockwave causes damage and is annoying over populated areas so we can only really go M1+ over the ocean."