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.

Yes. So far, the LLM tools seem to be much more useful for general research purposes, analysing existing code, or producing example/prototype code to illustrate a specific point. I haven't found them very useful for much of my serious work writing production code yet. At best, they are hit and miss with the easy stuff, and by the time you've reviewed everything with sufficient care to have confidence in it, the potential productivity benefits have been reduced considerably. Meanwhile even the current state of the art models are worse than useless for the more research-level stuff we do. We try them out fairly regularly but they make many bad assumptions and then completely fail to generate acceptable quality code when told no, those are not acceptable and they really do need to produce a complete and robust solution of the original problem that is suitable for professional use.

But one of the common distinctions between senior and junior developers -- almost a litmus test by now -- is their attitude to new, shiny tools. The juniors are all over them. The seniors tend to value demonstrable results and as such they tend to prefer tried and tested workhorses to new shiny things with unproven potential.

That means if and when the AI code generators actually start producing professional standard code reliably, I expect most senior developers will be on board. But except for relatively simple and common scenarios ("Build the scaffolding for a user interface and database for this trivial CRUD application that's been done 74,000 times before!") we don't seem to be anywhere near that level of competence yet. It's not irrational for seniors to be risk averse when someone claims to have a silver bullet but both the senior's own experience and increasing amounts of more formal study are suggesting that Brooks remains undefeated.

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...

(+1, Truth)

Of all the major streaming platforms, Paramount+ stands alone in how often it just doesn't work. It doesn't work reliably on state-of-the-art streaming boxes. It doesn't work reliably on desktop PCs. In fact, of all the devices we have in our household, it works reliably on a total of zero of them.

We have several of the other commercial streaming platforms plus the apps or online services for several of our main national TV channels as well and almost all of them work almost all of the time. It's bizarre how bad Paramount+ manages to be compared to literally everyone else. It must be hurting their bottom line to some degree or surely will do soon if they don't get a handle on it, because why pay for something you literally can't watch?

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.

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

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.

Let me see if I've got the basis of this "shortage" right.

Sam Altman, using money he doesn't have, bought up almost 50% of DRAM wafers that don't exist, to turn into DRAM chips that don't exist (or maybe not; maybe he's just playing keep-away from his competitors), to put alongside GPU chips that don't exist, to stuff into server farms that don't exist, which will consume vast quantities of electricity that doesn't exist -- all to create "artificial intelligence" ....which doesn't exist.

How is this not a colossal scam?