And here a bunch of us ignorant clods were thinking that owning mechanisms was the point of patents.

I am sure you know this and are just trying to shit on the editors, as one does on /.; but here, use this in case you didn't know: https://xcancel.com/_lyraaaa_/...

First they came for the press, but I never heard of them doing anything bad after that, so I guess it all worked out.

Goddamn it, we were talking about Iran here. The whole fucking point is to avoid talking about the objective fact that Donald Trump rapes children and all Republican House members endorse his pedophilia.

Shut up about the Epstein files coverup and Todd Blanche's blatant violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Get back to talking about how we're whooping Iran's ass at no cost to oursel-- SHUT UP, I SAID NO COST!!!!1

Yes, I like how, whenever my avatar in The Matrix falls asleep and dreams, many of the characters in the imagined dream all agree that they saw what I saw. By imagining them as consistently reinforcing my fantasy, I am able to lie to myself about the nature of reality in a very persuasive way. I have fully bought into my sensory inputs, so my religious faith remains strong. "Reality" may be fake, but it's done so well!

It sure is ALARMING that Apple's watch is exactly the same as every other device, without exception, which includes a microphone.

Is society ready for things not changing by one iota? Or should we panic?

That seems like it would require a lot of faith.

The whole reason no faith was required to hypothesize the Big Bang, is that everything looks like that's what happened. Pick a direction (any direction) and the further-away stuff is moving away faster than the closer stuff.

If you're looking for faith, it's here, but it's not that. The faith required by science is that our senses sense reality. That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

It may be incorrrect, but no one will ever know, because their senses are all they have to learn from. You might be merely imagining that you are reading this, when in reality, I never wrote it because I don't even exist, just like every other "person" you mistakenly think you've observed or even "met."

Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

It's a shame they only thought of pulling the plug, because all they had to do was remember that ..

Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget

.. Skynet doesn't work for free!

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

You want them to be in charge of your computer, more than you want to be the one in charge of it?

Go ahead. You are your own army. Like most people, you probably forgot to ever add the US Military to the sudoers group on your computer, so 100% of that power remains in your hands, not someone else's. Have you decided to disable as tracking? Or are you still hesitating, wondering if disabling trackers is the right thing for you?

If you decide you do want to stop giving free data to trackers, but you're not sure what's the easiest way to do it, then just install Firefox and both the uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins.