Typically the purpose of policies like this is to shift liability for copyright infringement, rather than to prevent it outright. If someone submits some LLM-generated code anyway and then later there is a successful accusation of copyright infringement related to that code, I expect the GCC project would attempt to assert that they had a clear policy against such contributions and that the submitter is the one fully liable for the copyright infringement. The GCC project would presumably still need to stop distributing the relevant code, but if this allows the project and its maintainers to avoid liability then that's still a win. Whether such a claim would actually be successful in court of course still remains to be seen, since none of this has been tested yet. But from a risk management perspective, I'd certainly prefer to have this policy in place than not in order to have a stronger defense if a legal claim does eventually arise.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Make that ...in 2024 there were 7080.

In 2016, there were 6080 pedestrian deaths in the US. In 2017, there were 7080. Ascribing all 1000 of those additional deaths, plus another 2000 that presumably wouldn't have been happened, isn't credible.

I suppose what they did is make themselves a toy model which related hood height to deaths, then applied said model to actual hood heights to come up with a number. Basically assuming what they wanted to prove.

The robots are coming. I'm not talking about the toys, I'm talking about the real robots that can do everything a human can do, but better, and cheaper. And I do mean everything. From mining coal, to taking tickets at the movie theater, from fighting wars to flipping burgers, from building houses to building more robots, from doing your taxes to running your business enterprises. Literally every job from janitor to CEO is in jeopardy. NEAR TERM jeopardy. Like as in the next two to three decades, at most. The technology to create human-capable robots is no longer a pipe dream, it's now become a pure function of time, training and money, a.k.a. inevitable, and soon. Once the transition begins, short of a Butlerian jihad, it doesn't end. The entire concept of "an economy" is nearing it's conclusion. So everything we can do now to begin softening the blow on society, the more successful we're going to be moving into this new world which nobody seems to be planning for.

It's a state matter; SCOTUS isn't going to take it.

False. While the ballot measure does not impose an annual wealth tax, it authorizes the legislature to implement one without further voter approval. It also lets the legislature set the rate and the floor.

The wealth tax on Brin would amount to 67%, because it goes by percentage of voting shares or percentage of ownership, whichever is greater. I assume something similar would apply to Page, who also holds Alphabet class B shares. Of course they're going to avoid that.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Although virtually all the parts were probably manufactured in mainland China, and the the bulk of the assembly also done there, I thought the actual design was Taiwanese, not Mainland Chinese.

What was not Taiwanese was an attempt to put a fairly new version of Android together with an outdated application architecture version which causes some incompatibility issues which I am not confident the support organization will be able to deal with.

"Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?,"

As soon as they heard about the cameras? EVERYBODY.

Correct, as anyone can see by looking at who they rounded up.

"Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist "

But in the next state over, the next company will also treat you as badly as they can get away with.

The natural model for a programmer's union is the Screen Actor's Guild. That's another field with a wide range of talent. SAG members can get the best pay their agents can negotiate, lots for stars. But everyone is protected from exploitation.