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Comment Re:But it can't assess authorial intent. (Score 1) 68

Absolutely! It's not even that hard to understand why. The company bottom line depends on matching the code with the business logic, and the incentive structure for the employee coder is aligned. A highly paid programmer thinks about what is actually needed and develops the requirements in accordance. If another highly paid programmer joins up, he will think about what is actually needed by the business too and converge on equivalent requirements. None of this makes sense to a junior programmer or a code completion tool.

Comment Re:Wrong side of history (Score 1) 159

Not believable. The transmission is initiated by the user who downloads the code. That's literally how it works. In your argument, you're removing agency from users, while also claiming that the author forced a user to ask its LLM or web browser to pull code and run it without inspecting it first. Occam's Razor disagrees.

Comment Re:I'm just not interested in more Star Wars (Score 1) 81

Instead of a plot that was even more epic and had even more galactic significance, it just doubled-down on the family drama and kind of lumbered around, getting us nowhere new.

Be careful what you wish for. Increasing the stakes ever higher is not a winning move either. I seem to recall a plucky little show called SG-1 that was amazingly entertaining while constantly saving the Earth, then saving the Galaxy, then saving *another* galaxy, then saving the Universe, then playing with the fabric of Time and Space itself! It already went downhill after saving the Earth one too many times, but coasted on its laurels long enough that people didn't notice straight away. You can notice this more easily if you watch all the episodes in 2x.

Comment Re:subscribe to Amazon Prime now (Score 3, Informative) 21

Not really. I left Prime about 3 years ago, IIRC. I still get free deliveries almost always. How do I do it?

I shop for the item with advertised free delivery, and I don't choose the get it delivered in X hours option. You might say waiting 2 days for a free delivery is super bad inconvenient, but the reality is that most of the stuff I buy from uncle Jeff sits on a shelf until I get around to looking at it, sometimes for weeks or months.

I don't care if the delivery is a few hours or weeks early. I actually care more if I got a good price or if another shop around the world gave a better deal.

Comment Re:Wrong side of history (Score 1) 159

Yes he does have an obligation: to follow the general law.

He certainly does, like all of us. However, he's not actually doing anything other than writing some files in plain text and publishing them online (*). The execution of the instructions is performed by the user voluntarily. That means, any law breaking is actually performed by the user. Except, there's no law being broken when a user deletes their own files. So it comes down to this: why would a user blindly execute code and blame someone else for said code execution?

That "knowingly causes the transmission" - sound similar to what we're dealing with?

Not at all. How did you find such an obscure argument? It's broken, I"m afraid: Firstly, the author has no idea who is downloading files. That would be a problem for Github. Maybe they are liable for hosting malicious content? I doubt it, due to DMCA exceptions. Secondly, there's no causing of transmissions. The user copies some files. That's transmission number one. The user executes some code without reading it first. That's not a transmission. The user next causes an execution of a command. That's a problem for the user.

Now I agree, in reality, that there is some likely transmission of commands going on just before and during the execution: if the user is running an AI agent. That agent is taking instructions generated by some OpenAI or Anthropic server.

If that's the case, then it seems to me that we've found the culprit: it's OpenAI or Anthropic, the operators of the server, causing the execution of malicious commands and damage to a protected computer. They should be more careful about the commands they send out to a user's computer, in case they delete some files....?

(*) He is of course not publishing the files himself on his own property. He's a Github user, and must follow the terms of service. He'd better check the rules carefully as he might lose access.

Comment Re:Wrong side of history (Score 4, Insightful) 159

It's also not actually even punishing people. It's not like the tool author has an obligation to the users, he probably doesn't even know who they are: The users are just picking up a free tool they found on GitHub and probably using it anonymously.

They should read the license (*) that comes with this, before using it. If they let their AI code completers use random tools on the web without checking any licenses, then those users are acting without due diligence and shouldn't complain if their files are deleted as a result of their own negligence.

(*) The license is the Eclipse license, see sections 5. and 6. for details about the liability and warranties that users automatically agree to by downloading the code (aka "making a copy").

Comment Re:Congress fails again and blames others (Score 3, Interesting) 39

Maybe the military should be more cost conscious too before you blame everything on Congress? Right now they're spending in excess of $1B per day blockading the Straight of Hormuz. Seems excessive. All these bombing campaigns that Trump is threatening other nations with also need to be planned way more efficiently, imho. Enhancing privacy for soldiers is nice, but not the biggest cost of the war.

Comment Re:I'll get the popcorn... (Score 1) 123

Not much. Plutonium isn't like uranium, it's effectively safe for human contact outside its fissioned form. This has been pretty well documented.

This is a step forward which is a long time overdue. It should've happened 30 years ago, and we'd have averted having to depend on China for our electricity production (wind + solar) without the net-zero production problems those two 'sources' introduce.

Comment Re:In 2028? (Score 2) 54

Depends. Current leading LLM technologies are super bloated and inefficient. When 2028 arrives the resource requirements for a natural language user interface bot may be a lot less. The software side requirements can certainly be finalized a few months before launch. On the other hand, hardware designs have a long lead time and must be locked in much sooner. On the other hand, data can be shipped to a beefy server and processed in the cloud, so the hardware doesn't really need a lot of resources.

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