If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.

Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?

Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.

Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.

Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.

I think Excel is better in Sheets in ways that are important for a lot more users, but it isn’t the same ways for each user.

Also, which I should have said, is for that small group, the missing Sheets features are a show-stopper, not just an annoyance

Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.

I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.

Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?

The idea the manufacturer of a product is a "first party" is BS.

You are the first party. If I own the device, I am the first party.

The manufacturer is now a second or third party after you own the device, and for most ideas, a third party, especially if they don't truly offer real support of the device.

If you need to sacrifice your freedom for a little bit of security, then you deserve neither. It's true with this too.

Most rules/laws don't actually stop problems, they just hide them.

?

If you have a cushy job where you don't really work, and you make a lot of money (doesn't mean you have capital), how does that translate to being suited to becoming an entrepreneur with the money they are no longer earning with the effort capacity they apparently don't have?

> (doesn't mean you have capital)

Then they’re not going to be doing any significant lobbying so they’re not covered by GP’s comment, which was selecting for “people who have political capital”.

Yes, there are other forms of political capital besides money, but it’s still mostly just money, especially when they’re part of the tiny voter block of “people who make a lot of money and dont do much work and dont have wealth”.

Also I talked with the employees at my local McDonald’s last week. Not one of them had any idea who the owner was. I showed them a photo of the owner and they had never seem them. So apparently that could be an option for people who were overpaid and still want to pretend-work while making money.

Don’t dismiss the other forms of political capital so quickly. Sure, the people who are independently wealthy can independently influence political decisions, but there are so many situations in history where the once conditions worsen for the upper middle class, there is impetus to make political change, overthrow governments, etc. It’s usually when the scholar/merchant class gets annoyed that laws change.

Did you verify the 35 sources it used or are we now supposed to just trust everything on the internet if an LLM prints it now?

No, that's why I put a disclaimer. Can you show me you work demonstrating that US pilots are superior? I will replace the grok link with your work if you like.

Until then, the AI generated one is much better sourced than the "US pilots are superior and would have handled MCAS" claim.

Where does the fine money go? To the victims?

> Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this.

They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.

Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important.

Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.

Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.

Moving training won't help them if their paying customers are in jurisdictions which do respect copyright as written and intended.

OPs idea is about having a new GPL like license with a "may not be used for LLM training" clause.

That the LLM itself is not allowed to produce copyrighted work (e.g. just copies of works or too structurally similar) without using a license for that work is something that is probably currently law. They are working around this via content filters. They probably also have checks during/after training that it does not reproduce work that is too similar. There are law suits about this pending if I remember correctly e.g. with the New York Times.

The issue is that everyone is focusing on verbatim (or "too similar") reproduction.

LLMs themselves are compressed models of the training data. The trick is the compression is highly lossy by being able to detect higher-order patterns instead of fucusing on the first-order input tokens (or bytes). If you look at how, for example, any of the Lempel-Ziv algorithms work, they also contain patterns from the input and they also predict the next token (usually byte in their case), except they do it with 100% probability because they are lossless.

So copyright should absolutely apply to the models themselves and if trained on AGPL code, the models have to follow the AGPL license and I have the right to see their "source" by just being their user.

And if you decompress a file from a copyrighted archive, the file is obviously copyrighted. Even if you decompress only a part. What LLMs do is another trick - by being lossy, they decompress probabilistically based on all the training inputs - without seeing the internals, nobody can prove how much their particular work contributed to the particular output.

But it is all mechanical transformation of input data, just like synonym replacement, just more sophisticated, and the same rules regarding plagiarism and copyright infringement should apply.

---

Back to what you said - the LLM companies use fancy language like "artificial intelligence" to distract from this so they can they use more fancy language to claim copyright does not apply. And in that case, no license would help because any such license fundamentally depends on copyright law, which as they claim does not apply.

That's the issue with LLMs - if they get their way, there's no way to opt out. If there was, AGPL would already be sufficient.

I agree with your view. One just has to go into courts and somehow get the judges to agree as well.

An open question would be if there is some degree of "loss" where copyright no longer applies. There is probably case law about this in different jurisdictions w.r.t. image previews or something.

I don't think copyright should be binary or should work the way it does not. It's just the only tool we have now.

There should be a system which protects all work (intellectual and physical) and makes sure the people doing it get rewarded according to the amount of work and skill level. This is a radical idea and not fully compatible with capitalism as implemented today. I have a lot on my to-read list and I don't think I am the first to come up with this but I haven't found anyone else describing it, yet.

And maybe it's broken by some degenerate case and goes tits up like communism always did. But AFAICT, it's a third option somewhere in between, taking the good parts of each.

For now, I just wanna find ways to stop people already much richer than me from profiting from my work without any kind of compensation for me. I want inequality to stop worsening but OTOH, in the past, large social change usually happened when things got so bad people rejected the status quo and went to the streets, whether with empty hands or not. And that feels like where we're headed and I don't know whether I should be exited or worried.

Everyone is trying to be the shovel sales person for AI, not the gold diggers buying shovels.

I'm not sure if even the LLM companies themselves are selling shovels yet. I think everyone is racing to find what the shovel of LLMs are.

It was collectively decided some time ago that this particular shovel is called nVIDIA.

And memory. What I'm surprised by is that memory production isn't being scaled up since it's basically a universal part of any computing device.

That was decided when crypto mining became too expensive, I guess.

"We" don't have passkeys now. Many functional android devices are not being upgraded to the latest Android versions, and simply will never get true passkey support that isn't locked away inside of Google's vault.

Passwords are much better than the OAuth2 coolaid, and passwords will still be better as long as older devices can't support passkeys due to arbitrary restrictions.

That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.

Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.

>Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc.

The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.