The language model isn’t teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source.

You could honestly say the same about most “teaching” that a student without a real comprehension of the subject does for another student. But ultimately, that’s beside the point. Because changing the wording, structure, and presentation is all that is necessary to avoid copyright violation. You cannot copyright the information. Only a specific expression of it.

There’s no special exception for AI here. That’s how copyright works for you, me, the student, and the AI. And if you’re hoping that copyright is going to save you from the outcomes you’re worried about, it won’t.

Makes sense to me. Search indices tend to store large amounts of copyrighted material yet they don’t violate copyright. What matters is whether or not you’re redistributing illegal copies of the material.

If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)

A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That’s not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That’s illegal for people and companies.

It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.

Oh look what was just posted today: https://youtu.be/Cp5oajtBbtg

TLDW: It’s been proposed. Turn’s out it’s really hard to even do that.

I think the problem that you’re going to imagine a good analogy for this is that orbital dynamics works in sort of (but not really) an unintuitive way.

An object in an elliptical orbit around earth is moving slowest at its furthest point from the earth. Like a thrown ball that slows when it reaches the top of its trajectory. That object is moving fastest at the point that it’s closest to earth.

So you have this dynamic where if you decelerate it changes your orbit such that you’re increasing the speed you’ll be moving on opposite point of your orbit. E.g. if you decelerate at your slowest (furthest) point, it brings your closest approach point closer to earth and you’ll be moving even faster when you get there.

You can decelerate at your closest approach point but eventually it brings the opposite end of your orbit closer to earth than you are, and then you’ll fall and of course speed up again. There’s no real way around this. You’re going to be moving fast when you approach earth unless you’re doing a lot of very active deceleration.

KSP player here. So, you know, ignore me.

But let’s consider how you’d rendezvous two objects. You’d want your asteroid to have an orbit around the Sun that is very nearly the same orbit as Earth’s. A perigee that just kisses the Earth’s orbital ellipse and an apogee that’s slightly further from the sun. You’d want the asteroid to approach its perigee at the same time as Earth approaches that same point in space. Then they’d have very close to 0 relative velocity, with the asteroid moving slightly faster around the Sun than the Earth. So you just bleed off some of the asteroid’s velocity through whatever magical explanation you want… such that your asteroid has 0 relative velocity with Earth, giving it the exact same orbit as Earth. I.e. from Earth’s perspective it’s just floating there motionless in space.

Problem is that this only works for a rendezvous between two very light objects with very small gravitational effects between them. The Earth is massive enough that the effects from Earth’s gravitation would overtake the Sun’s as the asteroid approaches Earth. Then, yeah, the asteroid becomes a falling rock with a lot of energy so I don’t think any of this works.

It’s still an unsettled question if we even do

My place of work has a pretty high rate of pronoun signaling and I’ve found it immensely useful. Not just for the usual androgynous names line Pat or Elliott, but also I work with people all around the world, how would you refer to Jung Bae? Judging by the number of foreign people who have never seen my name, I imagine it goes both ways. And, yes, I also work with a number of nonbinary and trans people so of course it helps there too.

Some people refer to everybody, even those they know, as they/them and I honestly kinda like it. Been considering taking that habit on myself.

My wife and I watch a lot of sitcoms before bed, often from the 00s. One had at least one anti-gay joke per episode. In one of the middle seasons, they had an episode where a character makes a gay friend and has to deal with their discomfort around gay people. Then the next episode, they’re back to gay bashing. Wild times.

I feel like this one is going to fly over a lot of heads. Bravo.

I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

Just a SWE baffled by people who have no idea what they’re talking about farming upvotes by demonstrating “The Internet is a series of tubes” levels of cluelessness.

Yes, I’m sure the phds and senior SWEs/computer scientists working on LLMs never considered the possibility that arbitrary code execution could be a security risk. It wasn’t the very first fucking thing that anybody involved thought about, because everybody else but you is stupid. 😑

One of the biggest areas of ongoing research is about incorporating data from outside systems, like databases, specialized models, and, other specialized tools (which are not AI based themselves). And, yes, modern models can do this to various extents already. What the fuck are you even talking about.

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That’s… the point? Civilizations with that kind of tendency may very well destroy their planet and/or themselves long before they advance to the point where they are detectable to an outside observer many light years away.

The human race is at the moment in a race against time. We’re hoping that we can develop new technology to save ourselves faster than we destroy everything around us. This kind of race has probably happened countless times across the vast universe and perhaps the laws of physics ultimately make the race unwinnable. These laws limit how much technology can do for any species, no matter how smart, so it would be a universal filter.

If the only way to win the race is to slow down the destruction of the environment to the point that the species is undetectable, that solves the Fermi paradox.

If we’re in a simulation, it’s probably a massive universe-spanning one. We’re just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we’re not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They’re not watching us. We’re not the point of the simulation.

It can’t be expressed in any integer-based notation without an infinite number of digits. Only when expressed in some bases which are themselves, irrational. It’s infinity either way.

The number which famously has an infinite number of digits? I thought we were arguing against the real-ness of infinity.

Also note: the method I was describing is one of the ways in which pi can be calculated.