It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

I can see it now. Instead of "Houston, we've had a problem." and Omega being awarded another Silver Snoopy; with the beast of redmond on board the ship, the mission transcript will read:

"This ship will self-destruct in 20 seconds. This is your last chance to push the cancellation button."
"Cancellation button? Hurry!"
"Where is it?! Where is it?!"
"It's gotta be here!"
"Out of order"?! Fuck! Even in the FUTURE, nothing works!"

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.

Can confirm Bazzite. 85/90% there I'd say, which means there's still a bit of "tread carefully" for people. I'm very happy with the running, but I'd be less than truthful if I said it was completely frictionless.

For example, 90% of my gaming is on Elder Scrolls Online, the 'play' button on Steam runs the Zenimax launcher not the game itself and there's also an annoying recent'ish (few months) bug where it seems games launched from a 3rd party launcher don't know they've got the foreground focus. Steam thinks the launcher has the foreground., andn ESO this manifests as not autoswitching to the main game window after you've gone through the Zenimax launcher, no sound and sometimes stuttering frames because the ESO game window still thinks its in the background somehow. Random'ish alt-tabbing and clicking will bring it back, but it means there's a a) a small bit of friction where there was previously none and b) some change or regression because all this used to run fine without that issue.

I played Rez:Infinite. Great game, but it has an "Attack" mode which will crash after the third level or so. Again, friction.

I play Skyrim. Setting both Skyrim and ESO up for modding, including running some Windows binaries required by the mods, was a relatively painful learning experience.

I have a friend who wanted to switch but didn't because of kernel DRM in some of the Windows games. Once again, friction.

I'm very happy with the switch and wouldn't go back, but I'm experienced with Linux (Slackware 0.9 alpha being my first distro, and I'd installed before distros like that existed as well - anyone for Minix on an Atari ST?). I can see people not quite as annoyed with Windows as me not really seeing the benefit. For me, it was one giant Co-pilot advert too far that made me say "right then, done". After I'd told it no god knows how many flaming times, Windows popped up some "Let's get ready in your new Co-Pilot account!" thing that literally just had me hard power off and wipe the OS away. My PC is purely for gaming, I use a Mac laptop for my desktop work, so I get that luxury.

(as an aside, I do wish Steam would ban using launchers when it itself is the launcher. There's no reason for that Zenimax launcher to exist in the Steam version of the game, and it's annoying as hell because it prevents me from using Big Picture mode and just treating the whole thing like a console. That's true for either Windows or Linux, this is a 3rd party launcher thing and not an OS thing).

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.

Why is the compter the problem ? It seem pretty obvious that the issue lies in the curriculum and how the tools are used. Educators figured that just having a computer would promote learning...they were wrong. Now the same educators are convinced that just having books will promote learning...again they are wrong. Modern education has become indoctrination and lacks critical thinking tools because that would enable the students to realize what a shit sandwich they were being fed.

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."

You say "two separate teams," but Claude pronounces it as "two separate processes with no IPC except the specs files."

The point of buying Trumpcoin is to pay a bribe. You just need to remember to communicate what you want in exchange for the purchase, out of band.

It's a really good system, but making it tax-deferred would make it even better. Since the goal is for Trump to end up with all the value, a Trumpcoin's value should be 0 by the time you're required to take distributions. That way, there's effectively no tax on your bribe. Win/win for everyone.

U.S. representatives excoriated the outcome as further proof of the organization's [WTO's] irrelevance.

I hate this administration's general anti-American attitude, extreme thirst for growing national debt, and overall lawless criminality, but the above quote nevertheless excites me. I wish to subscribe to the aforementioned representatives' newsletter.

If we don't need WTO, then I bet we don't need WIPO. And if we don't need to be a signatory of the WIPO treaty anymore, then we don't need DMCA.

Hey Pedoph-- er I mean-- let me start over.

Hey glorious leader Trump, people are saying you're too chicken to tell Johnson and Thune to repeal DMCA. Surely that's not true. Are you going to let them all get away with calling you chicken?

Mostly agree. I abandoned the Mac around Systen 7.5 era for the 486DX 66Mhz. The multitasking and protected memory spaces put it in advance of the Mac, and the CPUs started to lag the competition as well.

I came back in the OS X era (can't remember if I ever had Cheetah, but I definitely had Jaguar) where although the chips were a bit slower overall it didn't matter much because the OS was just better. Now the chips are better, the OS is better (for versions of 'better' that don't include gaming)...but the OS as compared to its own standards is worse than it used to be. Better than Win 11 - hmm. Not the highest bar anymore.

Which, to be honest, fundamentally misunderstands used RAM readings. Vast majority of that 'used' RAM is in easily discardable caches - Apple had the same PR problem with misleading reports when they released whatever the version was about 4-5 years ago and their tools reported full memory.

Windows does use more RAM than most, but it showing almost all the RAM full is the same kind of caching strategy that macOS uses. Apple eventually started calling this "Memory Pressure" and gave it a simple traffic light system. RAM is doing you no good if it's free, might as well use it to cache if there's not a hard requirement for it right that moment.

I strongly believe Word peaked with Word 4.2 on the Mac - System 6, 1Mb RAM. There are those who would argue 5.1a on the Mac because it included envelope printing, but it was much, much slower and needed more like 2 or 4Mb.

Then they unified the version numbers across the platforms and moved to this pcode stuff in v6. This was so bad and so slow on the Mac that they actually issued an apology for it. Things have gone downhill since then, and v6 was released 1994.

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.