2027? Did you use a DeLorean to get that?

Wait ... Google tells me that US auto-makers post-date their models by up to a full year. How is that legal?

It's one git clone and a couple of Claude prompts. What could it cost? 10M tokens?

No, few things are perfect. But the basic principle is that you cannot own ideas or information.
Intellectual property laws protect secrets, trademarks, copyright and patents.
Copyright relates to the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. The output of a pre-trained AI might violate copyright, but the training itself does not.

There is no "thus". Are you expecting the law to be less than 10 years behind reality?
What has happened is that the distillers have made use of the frontier models in ways that violate the "Terms of Service". You know, those documents that you never even read?

Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

That said, and with all due respect for Matt's past accomplishments in forging a community and a company to support it, I think Automattic (and so Matt) made a terrible choice around 2015 by deciding to use Slack for internal and even external communications instead of just using WordPress with the 02/Oxygen plugin previously used.

I wrote about that at length when I was applying for a job at Automattic circa 2015.The gist of that concern is on the main page of my website and says:
        "And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS. :-( We always have many principles to choose from, and it can indeed be hard sometimes to get the priorities right. As Scott Berkun (who left Automattic after a year to go back to writing full-time) wrote, even in a metrics-driver organization like Automattic, there is no metric for picking metrics or deciding how to weigh a variety of metrics (beyond perhaps survival itself).
        Here is a version of Twirlip I started as a proof-of-concept Thunderbird Server webapp to handle email, chat, and other real-time communications as another step towards a social semantic desktop. It is the beginning of the embodiment of the "ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto". But if you are looking for something good now that is FOSS, check out Mattermost, Matrix.org, Mailpile, Kolab, and similar things."

An archive page of that job application and Slack comments from back then is here, includign with the section on transcending polling in WordPress:
"Automattic JavaScript Engineer application by Paul D. Fernhout"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
      "But there is an alternative to trying to shoehorn WebSocket-related changes into the WordPress core PHP somehow. Such an update notification service to reduce polling could instead be hosted at WordPress.com in parallel to a WordPress server for a fee for those who don't want to run Node.js (or whatever) locally to supply that service. ... Such a WordPress feature to reduce polling needs might then be used to add near-real-time chat to WordPress. This might reduce the otherwise increasing desire for Automatticians to use Slack to communicate with each other about WordPress. That is a movement that seems problematical to me concerning WordPress's future. It would also be like Automattic moving to Pusher instead of improving WordPress to be low-latency and near-real-time. Even if Slack (by all reports) is a great product (as proprietary products go) that can monitor and log and search all of your communications stored on their servers, in theory using Slack widely within Automattic makes Automattic's internal communications available to the same proprietary competitor (if even just rogue employees) for business intelligence purposes. It also seems strange to me for Automattic to cede the area of near-real-time communications to a proprietary company without at least trying (really hard) to come up with an alternative built into WordPress, especially because such things have already been shown to be workable. I feel Automattic could (and should) be innovating in this area to help the WordPress community move in new directions. ..."

A fundamental issue is that people at Automattic at the time saw WordPress' competitors as things like Wix, not things like Slack. I was reminded of when in the 1990s ParcPlace (a Smalltallk vendor) thought Digittalk (another Smalltalk vendor) was their main competitor and disastrously bought them while ignoring that Visual Basic and Delphi and similar products were really their big competitors (which I had warned someone in sales there about about). WordPress could have become the premier chat platform for companies (including using ideas for a near-real-time message updates relay server leveraging technology someone at Automattic has written). But instead Automattic and the WordPress community it shepherds moved to Slack. Just a very sad way to see a great FOSS community focused on communications destroy itself by embracing proprietary software. And it seems like Matt played a big part in that short-sighted decision somehow (maybe having friends who worked at and.or funded Slack judging from some of his bloig posts long ago)?

Here is a more general essay I wrote in 2016 on why not to use Slack for free software development (in part trying to explain to Richard Stallman of the FSF why Slack was such a threat to the free software movement):
"Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development"
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons...
====
Contents
* Introduction and summary
* What is Slack? (A proprietary centralized communications hub web service )
* Free alternatives exist to the proprietary Slack
* Automattic/WordPress is sending the wrong message about free communications software
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* A democratic government is a special case of a free and open source community
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
* What if Slack went free/libre and open source?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The cost of changing later can be high
* Matrix.org is a better way forward
* Would I ever use Slack? Sadly, yes. :-(
====

Tangentially, I also tried to get Automattic/WordPress to use Mithril instead of React back when React has problematical licensing relating to patents... In the end though Automattic and Matt had enough clout to get Facebook to change the React licensing terms (even though I still feel Mithril has a better conceptual design with better developer ergonomics than React).
https://github.com/Automattic/...

Anyway, I'll never know if WordPress and Automattic might have gone in very different directions if I had gone to work there -- or if I just would have become frustrated and bitter from still seeing it all play out the way it did despite my best efforts there (given social momentum and power structures)?

For example, it took five years to get this memory exhaustion and crashing bug I reported in WordPress fixed for when you edit a long page too many times (which I discovered while writing that job application). That is a bug which may have cost the entire WordPress community many millions of dollars a year paying for bigger servers with more memory than they really needed to avoid the problem, compared to if the bug had been fixed sooner:
"High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions"
https://core.trac.wordpress.or...

P.S. Sad anniversary of September 11 today and the destruction of technology used for social advancement in Chili in 1973 (as another example of politics and personality disrupting humane tech progress as with WordPress):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Project Cybersyn was a Chilean economic project developed from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), with the purpose of constructing a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that linked to a single mainframe computer. ... The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer (1926-2002), and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories. ... Project Cybersyn ended following Allende's removal and death during the coup detat of 11 September 1973. After the coup, the Chilean military abandoned Cybersyn and destroyed the operations room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "According to historian Sebastian Hurtado Torres, there is no documentary evidence to support that the United States government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces from September 11, 1973 itself. However, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and intervened in the conditions prior to the Chilean coup of 1973. Historian Peter Winn found "extensive evidence" of United States complicity in events that helped in part to create the conditions that led to the coup. However, given the local political polarization and the performance of the Popular Unity government, there is no academic consensus on whether this intervention--which primarily took the form of financial support for the media, political parties, and opposition organizations--played a decisive role in the events of September 11, 1973."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The android officers are ordered by Central Command to cease pursuit, on the grounds that the expense of his capture exceeds their allocated budget for THX."

So maybe there is hope for humanity after all in token budget limits? :-)

Another source of hope is humans and Ais learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Do they? Certain "leaders" find it useful as a divisive issue, or for distraction. But ordinary people are far more concerned with the economy, public safety, education. Maybe immigration. LGBT issues just don't come up so much as in urban liberal communities or colleges.

Which left? mainstream centre-left or woke identity-politics far-left?

Thats good, we need to honestly acknowledge the past. And the present - how does your part of politics deal with the "uncomfortable parts" of diversity? ie group differences. Does it persist in a oppressor/victim dichotomy narrative to explain all differences in outcomes?

I'm not sure about the US, but in the rest of the world, every form of power get subsidies, one way or another.

Better to be subsiding nuclear (and batteries for solar) than coal and gas, I suppose.
Whats this I hear about Trump paying out billions to NOT build wind farms though?
nah - never mind, I'm not sure I can take any more of that stuff.

As a tourist crossing the US/Mexico border, I saw dozens jumping the fence -- was certainly a spectacle. Though from their casual manner and lack of luggage, I expect they were more like a weekly commute than a migration.

The migration situation in the US is insane, and bad for everyone, except those who get the cheap labor. Millions of 2nd-class non-citizens with few rights, reminds me of Dubai.

oh no, it was. Lets check that card:

[x] - AI frontier research model escapes lab and hacks major AI repository
[x] - AI startup floats for > 1T$ .
[x] - Claude Code goes open source
[x] - massive AI cyber-attack from North Korea
[ ] - millenium problem solved
[ ] - P=NP proven
[ ] - unsupervised full self driving released across multiple US states
[ ] - robot uprising
[ ] - AI wins Nobel Prize
[ ] - The First $10B "Solo Unicorn"
[ ] - an AI Earns Full Sovereign Citizenship
[ ] - AI designed pathogen released by terror group
[ ] - Sable 1.0 released

So far, OK

While 'sexual orientation' is usually the preferred term, that argument is not up to your usual detail-oriented posting.
A preference is an internal orientation or predisposition. A choice is the external action taken based on those orientations.
  Our preferences determine (in part) our choices.

Does anyone choose to be gay? or male? Or good or greedy? Can I choose to believe in free will?
  I can choose what to do, but not necessarily what to be.

MLK jr knew how to make a speech. He sought forgiveness, integration, and mutual understanding, framing racial injustice as a moral failing that could be overcome together.

Modern-day identity "woke" politics is doing the opposite: pushing peopel apart by emphasising differences, moral righteousness, tribal suspicions, and ideological conflict.

King succeeded by advocating fairness and liberty. - ideals common to all.

Now activism often relies on call-out culture, tribal outrage, and ideological enforcement, (to paraphrase Jonathan Haidt)

I have some sympathy for the likes of OpenAI not being able to fully monetise the results of their expensive training, from those who benefit by distillation. But it wouldn't be an issue if OpenAI just opened the weights like they promised.
And obviously they distilled the internet without paying.

1980s Bill Gates
"Well, Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, and found out that you had already stolen it."

2020s Liang Wenfeng
"I think it's more like you pirated ten thousand bit-torrents to your home TV NAS, and now you're mad that someone else is watching it through your window."

You can be progressive without "wokeness", even dealing with present day identity, race, sex politics.
Check out "Orange is the New Black" - deals with American marginalised minorities, but zero heavy-handed preaching.
Lesbians, trans-gender, every race, inter-racial adoption, neurodiversity, religion , rednecks, ... No saints, no villains without possible redemption. .. Ok, aside from Vee .

Maybe OG Star Trek was a bit "woke", but TV was so often moralistic back then that it didn't stand out. And it was a bit more subtle than now.

Actually, that particular episode, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", was cringingly preachy, especially Kirk's sermon.
Most of Star Trek was better.