TehPers

The latest round of “stuff I wasn’t informed would be installed for me” included enough software to switch me to Linux. I’m still dual booting during the transition, but moving fully over when I can.

I honestly used to love Windows too. Windows 10 was great, and 11 had problems but was still very usable on the happy path and came with some great improvements over time. These days, it’s just so full of bloatware. I just want my damn computer to be mine, and I’d hope an OS license that retails for $200 would be enough to get them to stop advertising to me and shoving shit down my throat but I guess not.

Word and Powerpoint are good too, but there’s some real competition there these days. I haven’t needed those on my personal PC in years though, so that’s never been a problem for me, and it’ll continue to not be a problem as long as that software continues to require a subscription.

Insert “good bot” comment here

You can see if a friend can run an inferencing server for you. Maybe someone you know can run Open WebUI or something?

AI at Microsoft has not been optional for months.

This is org-specific and role-specific, but it’s becoming more and more pushed onto people (as is evident by this article).

when they need to find someone’s department

This information is both present in most internal communication tools (org chart), and in the internal directory. Hopefully your friend found it.

Everything else sounds horrible, and I hope your friend is doing better now.

(Sauce: “I know a guy”)

Quoting the analysis in the ruling:

Authors also complain that the print-to-digital format change was itself an infringement not abridged as a fair use (Opp. 15, 25).

In other words, part of what is being ruled is whether digitizing the books was fair use. Reinforcing that:

Recall that Anthropic purchased millions of print books for its central library… [further down past stuff about pirated copies] Anthropic purchased millions of print copies to “build a research library” (Opp. Exh. 22 at 145, 148). It destroyed each print copy while replacing it with a digital copy for use in its library (not for sharing nor sale outside the company). As to these copies, Authors do not complain that Anthropic failed to pay to acquire a library copy. Authors only complain that Anthropic changed each copy’s format from print to digital (see Opp. 15, 25 & n.15).

Bold text is me. Italics are the ruling.

Further down:

Was scanning the print copies to create digital replacements transformative? [skipping each party’s arguments]

Here, for reasons narrower than Anthropic offers, the mere format change was fair use.

The judge ruled that the digitization is fair use.

Notably, the question about fair use is important because of what the work is being used for. These are being used in a commercial setting to make money, not in a private setting. Additionally, as the works were inputs into the LLM, it is related to the judge’s decision on whether using them to train the LLM is fair use.

Naturally the pirated works are another story, but this article is about the destruction of the physical copies, which only happened for works they purchased. Pirating for LLMs is unacceptable, but that isn’t the question here.

The ruling does go on to indicate that Anthropic might have been able to get away with not destroying the originals, but destroying them meant that the format change was “more clearly transformative” as a result, and questions around fair use are largely up to the judge’s opinion on four factors (purpose of use, nature of the work, amount of work used, and effect of use on the market).

The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. [The question about LLM use is earlier in the ruling] This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).

… Anthropic already had purchased permanent library copies (print ones). It did not create new copies to share or sell outside.

TL;DR: Destroying the original had an effect on the judge’s decision and increased the transformativeness of digitizing the books. They might have been fine without doing it, but the judge admitted that it was relevant to the question of fair use.

The books were purchased and destroyed to digitize them. There is nothing wrong with digitizing a work. The books were destroyed because duplicating a work without permission is illegal, but destroying the original means that there is only one copy in the end still.

The LLM training is the problem. This is not.

If everything got updated like this, then that’s an awesome change. What made Aero so nice was that it didn’t interfere with legibility, while Glass threw legibility out the window. Striving for a proper foreground to background contrast ratio should be the bare minimim for a company like Apple, and this improves that significantly.

Honestly this is probably one of the few foreign hacking campaigns they could crowdsource funds for from the target country. Imagine if they had a Patreon to keep it going.

What’s wrong with 3.13?

It’s the EFF. They’re not neutral. They advocate for stuff - that’s their whole thing.

40 months is just 3y 4mo. Do people get new phones every two years or something? I usually just get a new one when my old one’s not working for me anymore.

A full license still costs more than the whole machine, assuming you just want to buy a license. The machine you bought probably had an OEM license on it though, which is priced differently. Also, there are cheaper places to buy Windows keys online, so nobody should really be spending $200 on a license for their home machine.

Why it costs $200 for pro and they still try to sell you shit in the settings menu is beyond me. I’m still on the hunt right now for a Linux distro I like that isn’t a nightmare to maintain with a modern NVIDIA GPU though, so I’m stuck with it for now.

School busses, at least in my region (and it appears in the image this is true as well), have flashing red lights at the top to indicate that traffic must stop. The stop sign also comes out, but it’s the flashing red lights that should be a dead giveaway to anybody driving.

In my region, they also have flashing yellow lights before they stop, indicating that traffic should slow down and prepare to stop.

Edit: and I should add that the expectation is that traffic stops in all lanes, both directions. Being in a different lane or off to the side makes no difference.

Truly autonomous driving already exists. It’s called trains.

Anyone trying to sell fully autonomous cars is severely underestimating the complexity of driving. Under highly controlled conditions, it may be possible, but I doubt these people are programming edge cases like planes crashing onto freeways and severe hail. There are far too many times when it takes good judgement to handle a situation properly.

Still, I’m all for the progress this has made towards helping people drive safer. But the best solution is to just stop using cars IMO, just that it’d be problematic to force that for a number of reasons.

Notepad went from barely maintained and barely useable (it couldn’t even handle undo/redo in a reasonable way) to surprisingly decent at basic text editing to now bloated with useless shit. They were so close.

This has been true for a very long time. There are entire generations that want to look in real life how face filters on Instagram and Snapchat made them and others look on social media.

This is just another step in that direction, and it’s depressing how bad it is already.

Imagine the latency on a data center in space. Uplink/downlink every time your server gets an inferencing request? Lol.

I could see it being fine for longer running asynchronous requests, but that would be if the cost/benefit made any sense at all, and if the servers had any resources worth talking about.

I have a server at home built from old parts and some refurbished drives with nearly as much storage as the currently launched satellites. 2800 satellites like this would come out to around 230 of my servers, or ~7PB.

A single 2U server with 12 drives, each with 24TB storage, can hold 288TB. It would take ~24 of those to get to 7PB, which is a lot of servers, but not so many that someone with quite a lot of savings couldn’t afford it.

Also, the servers on the ground can be cooled by, idk, air if needed. Or water. Or I guess liquid nitrogen if you want. Point is there’s an atmosphere for the heat to dissipate to, unlike space.

On one hand, this feels very “thoughtcrime”-y. On the other, certain people should probably just not have a platform to spew their nonsense on. I’m curious to see how this plays out.

The comments on the article are truly an example of justifying being a shitty person as “politics”. It’s okay to discriminate and harm others as long as a politician does it first!