Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD.
You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Program Files, move the downloaded file here and agree to overwrite". You'll find similar guides online. They already exist, because it's the same as if you're trying to pirate a Steam game!
People will do anything for the dancing bunnies. Both good and bad.
No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?
I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.
The proposed steps are:
- buy game on steam marketplace (no client)
- download and install games (client required)
- uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file
But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.
The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.
Yeah pretty clearly falls under 'bypassing a digital lock' according to the DMCA. they got you when you clicked ok on the license agreement. Movies and music is a different thing: you don't need to agree to a license when you buy a disk but I'd be surprised if we don't start seeing little pamplets thrown in there saying "by keeping this disk you agree to _____..."
Had they limited CI/CD depending on the project "community" (whatever that means), that would be a reasonable take. Instead they ban something tangential to the discussion.
I can publish human slop and use loads of their resources without any LLM use.
I suspect they already did this a few times and then concluded, "you know what? This whole LLM thing is stupid. Why do we waste our time adjusting their resource limits when we could just remove the whole thing?"
Gotta start somewhere. Plus foxconn only abandoned 1 DC build out during Covid, a bit different from TSMC investing billions to build multiple, of which they already built 1.
You indeed need to pay someone if you take their copyrighted materials and regurgitate it. Ask DJ's and producers how they need to include royalties for samples used in their tracks.
There’s a difference between an abstract idea and the concrete thing. Regurgitating an idea is different than repeating the text verbatim. Ideas are protected by patents, not copyright.
playing an MP3 at a venue, streaming it or distributing it is a copyrighted act because, despite not being a verbatim copy of the original material, it is capable of producing a nearly-verbatim version of that intellectual property well enough that most people won't be able to notice the difference.
similarly, as has been shown (by numerous publishers and authors), LLMs are capable of producing nearly-verbatim versions of the texts they have been trained on, to a well enough quality that most people won't be able to notice the difference.
the fact that an MP3 cannot "paraphrase" or "summarize" the audio data is not what makes it copyrighted, and neither does the ability of an LLM to "paraphrase" or "summarize" the textual data it's been trained on, make it any less intellectual property theft
the motivation for the audio case is the sense that the listener will not care whether the DJ plays an MP3 (they didn't pay for) or plays the original record (they would have paid for).
similarly for the lossily compressed text engine aka LLM's case, many people will not care whether they get this textual information paraphrased or nearly verbatim from an LLM trained on pirated books, or the original books.
the fact that an LLM also has the ability to paraphrase or summarize the pirated textual information it's been trained on, doesn't really matter if it's also capable of producing nearly verbatim copies of (parts of) those texts.
to underline this point even more, we know that MP3s (and more modern and much more efficient codecs like OPUS, after that) have been psycho-acoustically optimized to store exactly the least amount of data that will get "the point" of that music across to the listener, to the extent that they do not need the original recording any more. this is the stated goal of lossy compressed audio, after all. well, it also happens to be the (pretty much stated) goal of LLM companies, to store exactly the least amount of data that will get the point of that text to the reader. and it does tend to cause the readers to not really care about the original book any more.
having said all that, I don't mean to argue to lock it all up. I actually mean to argue that we should demand that Anthropic and Open AI release their weights data, and if anyone were to happen to break into them and steal that data, I would have exactly zero pity for that. because fair is fair.
> similarly, as has been shown (by numerous publishers and authors), LLMs are capable of producing nearly-verbatim versions of the texts they have been trained on, to a well enough quality that most people won't be able to notice the difference.
If that is true, you have a legal claim and can sue them. I doubt that’s true in the general case though.
The “does it hurt the original publisher” is a test for fair use BTW, just because you hurt the sales of someone doesn’t necessarily make it copyright infringement. That is only relevant if you try to defend using fair use (and it’s only part of the test that’s used to decide fair use).
It's a perfectly sensible interpretation of international copyright law.
I'm not sure if you're serious with the suggestion I could sue them. These are both US corporations, that justice system is pretty much in shambles in particular when it concerns corporations as big as these AI ones. You can dig your heels in the sand to defend that system, but you will also have to dig your head in the sand about why Sam Altman doesn't have a Disney "influenced" avatar, but one "inspired by" Studio Gibli.
And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of "fair use" in the US as it "works" in practice, it's almost insulting, ask any music education youtuber.
Also even if it would work (which it very much doesn't), whether it "hurts the original publisher" is actually literally one of the criteria for considering something fair use or not. Look it up.
> Also even if it would work (which it very much doesn't), whether it "hurts the original publisher" is actually literally one of the criteria for considering something fair use or not. Look it up.
I don’t know why you’re repeating the stuff I just wrote like I didn’t. My point is that this is only relevant for the fair use defense and not copyright in general.
Here’s what I said:
> The “does it hurt the original publisher” is a test for fair use BTW, just because you hurt the sales of someone doesn’t necessarily make it copyright infringement. That is only relevant if you try to defend using fair use (and it’s only part of the test that’s used to decide fair use).
So now that we have a magical paraphrasing machine, we can just run any copyrighted work through it to remove the copyright? Cool, I get a GPL version of Microsoft Office.
A copyright laundering machine has no copyright itself and anything it ingests does not need to concern itself with its own copyright because the output has none anyway.
Maybe but your brain is not running 24/7 capable of outputting thousand if not millions of tokens per hour, all while having ingested nearly the entire internet.
If yours do that, maybe we can redefine what copyrighting and patenting means for humans
> Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself?
No because Go and Typescript have wildly different use cases, and they explained in details the rationale for migrating the compiler, and why Go versus Rust. Their rationale makes sense, and did not throw Typescript under the bus (obviously).
> Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product
Doesn't matter how big the revenue is if the market is not interested at the price you are selling.
I mean, by your logic, if I sell a dollar for 64c, and do $5b revenue, that's an indication that the market does indeed want the product, but not an indication that the market wants the product at the price you need to sell at to stay in business.
They are not selling at a loss though. The real issue here is that businesses such as Microsoft do not exist to serve a market or make enough money to survive and pay their employees. They exist to increase the value of their owner's shares. This is predicated on an unsustainable model of continual growth, with the expectation that every market they operate in can produce high margins and endless expansion. But demand is not infinite and persistent high margins are the exception, not the norm.
Maybe it isn't a loss, but as an investor (never directly in them), I consider 3% profit margin a bad sign - at that return I'd prefer a savings account: FDIC insurance means that after accounting for risks the savings account is better. I know stock returns don't directly track profit margin, but that is one input into the complex consideration of stocks.
You are right, and this is why not everything should be a stock. Whatever they will cut to avoid emitting "a bad sign", may involve:
* firing people
* making services worse
* sacrificing their own future
Whether it actually does involve those things is effectively arbitrary, because the consideration of the "bad sign" is also arbitrary. If there is no objective value judgement of their operation there is no objective value judgement in their streamlining either, so all bets are off.
Overall they are not selling at a loss, but parts of what they're selling are being sold at a loss. The market is telling them to slim the f- down and get rid of those money-losing parts.
This is all normal and justifiable. Where is the logic that corporations need to preserve dysfunctional parts of their operations?
Corporations don’t need to, no. But they are systems, and it’s a beginner mistake to assume changing one part is going to affect the whole in some simple, predictable, logical way.
That sounds like an extremely lame excuse to preserve money losing activities.
I'll counter by saying that pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism. Creative destruction, as Schumpeter called it. You get efficiency by hunting down and eliminating inefficiency, redeploying the resources elsewhere.
> pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism
It's quite serious that you see "being good" as something inferior to "the core of capitalism".
Also, the core of capitalism is making money for private individuals, nothing more, nothing less. Whether that's done with or without "failing things", is really beside the point.
The core of capitalism is about where ownership of capital (value producing assets) resides, that is, by private individuals.
What private individuals choose to do with their capital, chase infinite growth and profit or sit on it, is up to them. This is as opposed to say, state ownership of capital.
People confuse the stock market with capitalism. You don't need a stock market for capitalism to function. Publicly traded companies in the United States are legally bound to maximize profit (Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co.)
Error is rampant. I saw a quote saying the difference between a good business and bad one is the good one makes the right decision 60% of time, the bad one 40% of the time.
So errors abound, and have to be subsequently corrected. This correction process is as natural to capitalism as breathing is to you being alive. Without it, things would rapidly grind to a halt. We see this in sclerotic centrally planned economies where errors persist for much longer.
It's a lot more than $1.07 future money, a mortgage is more like $2 or these days $5
If you're offering even 25 year 75% LTV mortgages at such a low interest rate it's $1.07 future money you're going bankrupt. And these days people are taking 30 year, 95% LTV or even asking for 40 year 100% LTV which is fully batshit.
Why is it that every person who tries to make these dumb arguments in favor of destructive capitalistic greed always attempts to make it look like the multi-billion dollar profitable business is somehow self-sacrificing or a force of good? "If I sell a dollar for 64 cents!", yea, as if that's even close to what's happening.
If capitalistic greed is so destructive than why are you living in the most successful and highest quality of life society in history? You can find a cave somewhere to camp in if you want, or go to North Korea, etc.
I'm sadly not living in one of the very nice-to-live Nordic countries.
This level of greed is also relatively new, and was pretty well managed by previous (30~ years ago?) administrations. There's an obvious direct correlation between the rapid growth in wealth of the top 1%, businesses becoming increasingly anti-consumer, degrading quality of life amongst the average person, etc. It isn't something inherent to capitalism, it's something inherent to unmanaged 'trickle down economics' capitalism and societies built on individualism above all else.
Regarding the download, it's the same issue with physical media. If I don't have the DVD, how can I acquire the game?