well once they crossed 2 billion the signed integer representation made losses into profits

they don't have to make a profit on the investment. The investment is defensive. The goal is not to be outside the moat.

instead of explaining to my boss why he caught me spinning on my chair and stacking office supplies into Jenga towers as "I'm waiting for the compiler to finish" I can now tell him I'm waiting for claude to get back to me.

I was looking forward to tokenising the Swiss citizen. There would be fewer of them than bitcoins and not growing in populations, so by the same logic bitcoinETF use they would appreciate. And they are even backed by gold. Dang.. I'd have made a fortune.

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

I swear I read the headline as
Beer can tools to solve problems

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!

Exactly yes. You don't need a license to "copy" something to your mind.

You technically do need a license to copy something to a disk or to RAM. A number of cases around hacking/cracking have hinged even on the nuance that the hacker, by violating the "terms and conditions", no longer had a software license to make the "copy" of the software that was loaded from disk to RAM for example, and it was therefore copyright infringement.

In any case, yes, you are of course also correct that although you are free to remember anything, what you produce from that memory *may* be an infringing copy or infringing derivative work that requires a license.

But the difference of course, is that the LLM itself is already an infringing derivative work before it even produces anything. Your mind isn't.

And everything the LLM produces is basically just taking that collection of derivative works, and rolling dice on it to generate output. The output is a strictly a function of the input. On some level, it can't "not produce" derivative works. The best it does is slice and dice so many of them together that we can't tell.

I suppose that might be what the total sum of what human creativity is too, and some people genuinely believe that. It appears to be a surprisingly capable facsimile in some respects. But most people think there is more to the spark of human experience of creativity than *just* that, at least for now.

"It is no more "theft" than you are."

Yes. It is. Quite different in fact.

You see, Rei, ... suppose we assume you are "correct" that the LLM is doing the same thing as the human brain here. (This is a point I don't necessarily concede, but don't really need to actually engage with that here.) It just doesn't matter, they are legally distinct situations.

No amount of argument that "its doing the same thing as you are" changes that fact. What happens in a machine is covered by copyright law. What happens in a human mind is not.

It doesn't actually matter if the two are doing the same thing.

One is copyright infringement aka "theft", and one isn't.

You can potentially make the argument that there is no ethical difference if you like, but legally, they are worlds apart. Don't confuse ethics with law.

Even if they are doing the same thing, perhaps collectively society wants to carve out exclusions for copyright law to enshrine human beings right to see and remember things without requiring a license to do while continuing to want to require machines to require licensing to perpetuate the socio/economic contract that copyright is supposed to reflect.

That is not hypocrisy.

Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.

Your splitting hairs. The OP complained that having your grade affected by the grades of your peers was wrong. Then you said, well it would be fine if they based the grades on the "top score" which is still having your grade determined by what (one of) your peers did.

If your 40% on the exam would be an A if the brightest kid got a 44% but would be a B+ if the brightest kid got a 48%, I doubt the OP would be any "happier" with that situation.

My daughter recently took a course where the average final exam score was around 30%. Nobody hit 50%. Nobody completed the test. They were graded on the curve, as everyone expected they would be, and the A's, B's and C's were distributed pretty appropriately in the end.

In your world, apparently this was simply the dumbest cohort of 4th year university students ever to walk the halls, and they all deserved an F ??

Or maybe, just maybe, it was a brutally difficult exam.

Grading on the curve works perfectly fine if you realize that the student cohorts tend to be more consistent than the tests are from professor to professor, year to year.

The only way "your way" makes any sense at all at approaching fairness is if the tests are standardized... but that creates a whole whack of new problems. -- If the test is standardized, then students are incentivized to just study the test, not the material. Meanwhile, In many advanced degree courses, the material taught from semester to semester varies by professor and year for the same course. How do you standardize the test when even the material is variable?

Unsurprisingly the teaching staff at Harvard know a lot more about this than you do.

High level undergrad course work, and graduate level course work isn't like a primary school arithmetic or spelling test.

The program is still deterministic - the output is determined *entirely* and deterministically by the input. (Where the input is the set of the prompt, the sequence of numbers returned by the calls for random(), and the LLM data model itself.)

Your "mistake", if we want to call it that, is treating the random() function as an innate quality of the LLM. It isn't it is simply part of the input.

Provide the the system with the same model, the same prompt, and the same sequence of numbers, and you WILL get the same answer, regardless of how complex the question is, or who asks it.

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?