They define 133-400k "family of 3" as "upper middle class".

Which is just patent bullshit.

All it is, is they keep the same old income brackets for "middle class" while inflation pushes wages and COL higher. There are actually far fewer people able to maintain a 1990s "middle class" lifestyle, and I'd argue most of these "upper middle class" people are living month to month. "Middle class" used to mean you were financially secure and had investments and retirement. That's a joke for most people under 50.

They're defining upper middle class as " family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 per year". So that's 2 middle aged adults + an adult child as the upper barrier.

What's that mean for your typical "family of 2"? Do they normalize on 3 incomes and play funny with the figures, using extrapolation for the third?

Because the cost of living has increased. $133k is going to just barely buy you a house in most of the country. Is starter home ownership "upper middle class"?

Absolutely not.

This is just inflation, and a disingenuous bullshit article in the NYT (as you can expect, at best). The middle class is markedly smaller, not larger, and they're just using old income brackets to define "upper middle class".

The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog

Overload? It's probably an overly-excited inference, but that sounds like a basket with too many eggs in it. Anyone know?

"Ukraine, if you're listening..."

Pretty much exactly my point.

The fact that every dev seems to just install the latest whatever from npm doesn't help. There's really no "staging", "stable", or "security" branches, and effectively zero vetting outside what the package developer did. That's a lot of trust.

I never said they were new. I, instead, inferred that they're the kind of problems which shouldn't exist, because it's a mindset out of the 90s when the Internet was still comparably high-trust. They're inexcusably negligent.

You can experience over 40 years of UI design differences in Windows still, today: UI dialog panels from 3.1 days still exist in the latest Windows builds, and everything in between.

I don't think you can honestly say Windows has more polish. It has more bloat - yes. But that's not the same thing.

Meanwhile, Windows games (newer titles!) run better on Linux and Mac, emulated and passed through additional translation libraries, than on Windows.

You also grossly misunderstand how prefetch/caching works, both on Linux and on Windows. It does not change the baseline experience, or that the start bar can quickly eat up 10GB+ of memory due to memory leaks and perform worse than a Windows 95 machine deep into swap.

"Overall experience" is also nonsense - most people don't have the capability or wherewithal to switch. They use what is given to them, and have only mild preference in that they want it to work for what they're doing. Nowadays, that means "a web browser" for well over 50% of all users being the primary requirement, if not the exclusive one.

The baseline computers on the shelves have always been under spec'd for whatever Windows requires, and the experience will be poor. This is why so many people are buying Macs.

This is likely a paid advertisement, brought to you by the same people who are trying to avoid the continued fracturing and disillusionment of the remaining non-professional Windows users who aren't hardcore gamers. It's right in line with the "make Windows better again" agenda (I'd argue, propaganda campaign - there's zero chance of it happening) out of Redmond.

Windows hasn't been usable on less than 16GB of RAM since the tail end of the hard drive era (around Windows 7 SP2/3). Windows Vista was never usable with less than 8GB. Since the tail end of W7 around 2010, after W10 was released, things have only gotten worse: slower, more bloated, and more faulty. There are bugs in Explorer which will balloon memory use to 10s of GB just sitting idle for just that process (and many others).

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.

This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.

When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.

OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)

Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.

The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost .. a game?

"lossy compression"

Yes, just like human memory.

If I read a bunch of books from a series and extrapolate based on them to form something similar, it's not plagiarism.

If I read your book, then write a book using a similar voice, style, and plot, and do it in a different language - it's not plagiarism if I offer citation. Likewise, if I do so with a verbatim copy in another language. It's an independent effort.

Ultimately, it boils down to what you can get away with. Considering how trivial it is now to re-implement things, I'd say the chance of license enforcement is close to zero for anything open source except in extremely rare situations where there's a lot of money involved.

That's generally how it's being done. The robot reads the code and writes specs. Then another robot reads the specs and writes code. If courts still accept the traditional clean room defense (and why wouldn't they?) then they're probably going to say it isn't a derived work.

It looks like the big catch, the actual source of uncertainty, is that the instance of the robot that reads the specs and writes code, may have seen the original code as part of its training data. That'll be enough to keep it from being a true clean room. In those cases, you'll be totally right.

But for any particular given project, was it trained on the original code? That'll be a case-by-case thing, and I think in a very long-term way, the answer will increasingly be No, simply because codebots' need to keep training on newly-published code, will diminish.

As an analogy, imagine you're a human author, and for some weird reason, one thing you like to do is have people tell you high-level plot summaries (specs) and then you write a detailed story from that. Someone says "the moon is unusually bright one night and people fear something bad has happened" and you write a story much like Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, from that prompt alone. And you do this with 100 more stories, and most of them honestly don't appear to be derived. You take specs like "bombardier has crazy war experiences" and your resulting story is nothing like Catch-22.

But then one day, you're up in the attic and you find an old box that's been sitting there for decades, and inside, you find an old, worn, dog-eared paperback of Larry Niven stories which happens to include Inconstant Moon. Oh shit, you must have read that 45 years ago and then somehow "forgot" that you had, so your story wasn't truly independent of Niven's work. Your story turned out to not be "clean" at all, whoops! It was a derived work after all, because you read it ("trained on it") when you were a kid.

But the other 100 stories? Nope, those really were clean. Your story-writing process was almost legally foolproof, except that you had to learn reading and writing at some point, so your childhood favorites needed to be off-limits.

The heat wave made March be like late spring. Things that normally bloom in May, bloomed in March. And yesterday I got my first MRGCD irrigation of the year, flooding my back yard and letting the shade trees greedily suck up the water. We're spending a lot more time outside on the patio, compared to previous years during this time-of-year.

If I were stupid, I would be out of my mind with pleasure. Things feel wonderful right now.

But that water I just got .. that is The snowpack, probably. Instead of getting it all throughout summer, this first irrigation is probably the last, or second-to-last.

This summer is going to SUCK.

If you can substantially distinguish how tokenized abstraction is any different than natural learning, I'd buy it. But as it's not, I don't think that's a meaningful argument.

So begin the Obfuscated Object Code Compiler wars, to keep robots from writing machine language decompilers. The next few years are gonna be a wild ride!

If a computer program ingests code (whether GPL or not) and then outputs some code, the big question is whether or not the resulting code is a derived work.

If it's not a derived work, then the license of the original code is irrelevant, and it doesn't matter if it's GPLed, fully proprietary, or somewhere in between. The license has no say in the matter, because nobody ever needs to agree to the license; whatever they're doing is legal under copyright law so they already had all the permission they needed, without ever needing the additional rights granted by a license.

If it is a derived work, then that's copyright infringement unless the person who does it has permission. And the only way to get permission (i.e. cause copyright infringement to have not happened) is to agree to the license. So yes, the output would have to be GPLed.

But I don't think we really know whether or not robots reading code and then writing code from what they "learned," are creating derived works. Ask again in a few years, after a few court cases. This is hard. Rational people can disagree and come up with pretty good arguments no matter what side they're on. We'll see what the courts decide.

I think the most interesting case for determining it, won't involve a GPLed input. It'll be if Anthropic sues this project, since they will have contributed arguments to both sides. They'll have to argue "it is a derived work" in court, but to all their customers, they have and will continue to preach "it's not a derived work."