I miss old contextual advertising. Like you read a sports website, you see ads for matches, sports gear, etc, all based on the content not the user preferences.
That's just a lesson that capitalism is insatiable. Early on, Google didn't have personalized ads and they were still making money hand over fist just because search queries are an excellent signal into stuff you may want to buy. But in "line must always go up" fashion, there is even more money to be squeezed out if they surveille everything you do to personalize ads. Same thing happened with Facebook. They had a ton of data about what ads to show you solely based on your interactions on Facebook's (now also Instagram's) site and apps, but they could make even more money if they tracked you everywhere online in order to increase their ad click-through rates.
The adverts were better too. When I'm seaching for "vacuum cleaner reviews", there are adverts for vacuum cleaners.
After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in person), I no longer search for "vacuum cleaner reviews", but I search instead for "skiing in January" and I no longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski resorts.
Yeah, those were better days: if you googled for some problem you were having with, say, a piece of equipment, you'd get ads from obscure little stores selling parts for that equipment, or special solutions for that problem. The ads were actually for things you might want, related to whatever you were searching for at that moment. And they were simple little text ads, next to the search results, so you knew they were ads, but they weren't in the way or stealing your attention.
That's not how it works. Rather, Google realizes someone else would take over their business if they didn't make their product better. If Google stuck to no data and XYZSearch used data, then XYZSearch would provide a better product and Google would go out of business. It doesn't take greed, the "could make even more money" part, to have an incentive to do better. All it takes is a desire not to go out of business.
Odd take IMO that Google's ever encroaching ads make their product better. Heck, Larry and Sergei even wrote a treatise (it used to be available directly off google.com, can't remember the name) about how they would be different from search engines at the time, how they wouldn't sell search position, and how the ads model was fundamentally at odds with end user experience. That's hilarious now as Google has gone to great lengths to make ads as indistinguishable as possible from normal search results, and for some terms my entire front page is ads. Compare that to "early" Google where ads were clearly identified in top and right sections with a yellow banner.
That might make sense if everyone were picking which search engine to use based on the relevance of its ads, but they aren't. In fact, early Google was popular in part because it wasn't all covered in ads.
I wish all this data mining seemed to be worth a damn to me. Sponsored ads I see are either directly related to my search term, which is hardly a difficult problem, or based on my purchase history, which is baffling and frankly kinda stupid.
Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don't own!
I hope wherever money they are saving trying to enforce this lawsuit, lose 100X in lose subscriptions and PR. It's so mess up, where a company can enforce contracts from an unrelated service, just because they are the same holding company.
This is the type of behavior antitrust authorities should enter to break the company in different entities.
I wonder if this would become more common with things like ChatGPT.
Let's say you've been working in place A, you show your code to an LLM service (like the dozen or so Copilot-like services) and tell them to refactor. And for the sake of argument, let's say the LLM uses your code and questions for its next training dataset.
A few years pass, then you go to work at Place B, and ask a question that happens to be related to the problem that Place A's code solved, and they give you Place A's code as is.
For this reason, and a few others, my workplace simply put a blanket ban on these kinds of tools. If our code is never exposed to the learning tool, it’s never in danger of being showing up somewhere else.
Incidental to that, I feel like these tools expose the reality behind “copyrighting code/math” and how fallacious it is. If the tool can generate the efficient methods of achieving a result, I think it becomes obvious that one shouldn’t be able to protect it via IP law.
Just like with social media, all it takes is one person to not honor that request, and boom! your shit is out there. Sure, you can fire the offending party, but you can't just ask Co-pilot to not use your contributions. That's like asking the internet to give those pictures back. It ain't gonna happen.
I’m assuming you’re implying that a firewall rule can be applied to block access from the corp network. However, this is clearly ignoring the fact that work from home exists where the corp network can be bypassed.
If the tool can generate the efficient methods of achieving a result, I think it becomes obvious that one shouldn’t be able to protect it via IP law.
But these kinds of tools can only do that because someone else already put in the work to write the solutions that are used to train their models. Isn't this exactly the kind of situation when copyright is supposed to apply?
But with enough training data, it's not generating it because it remembers the exact code line for line, it does it because it knows that to be a good method. Especially if you ask it to refactor it, that's a whole new creation even if it's been done before by some engineer somewhere.
It's still parroting what other people did, it's not doing any math reasoning, and it's not any different to LLMs seemingly able to compose prose or poetry.
If you want to make an argument that math or software shouldn't be copyrighted, LLMs actually make the case for stronger copyright protections.
> If you want to make an argument that math or software shouldn't be copyrighted, LLMs actually make the case for stronger copyright protections.
Maybe, but as long as managers and shareholders all over the world are excited about the upside of the new technology, this is very unlikely to happen. ;)
LLMs would be dead in the water legally, if their owners had to account for every bit of IP the LLMs have been trained with.
If you your going to make these kinds of accusations (the kind that if proved true would lead to multi-million dollar lawsuits), you should at least try to provide sources.
That caveat is irrelevant as it has nothing to do with a private repository. When code is public, especially with a GPL license, it can end up in multiple repositories which may not all de-check the share check.
I tried, all I could find was one other HN comment asking about it. Admittedly I could have tried harder but it really isn't my assertion to defend.
I think there might be some confusion here between private repositories and public repositories with restrictive licenses. There is evidence of the latter but not the former.
Because you can patent a machine. The argument is that software is "just math" (because it literally is just doing binary arithmetic) and mathematics cannot be patented.
Math should be patentable, too. I see no reason for why not.
The old argument that it's discovered rather than invented is bullshit. Multiple people can always have the same idea for an invention because we think alike and live in the same environment.
Or just ban patents altogether. Of course, this may discourage companies from investing in R&D and that's the real problem: how expensive is it to invent something, and does it justify a 20-year monopoly? But there are no good answers here, and trying to draw a line between math and non-math is bollocks.
There’s just something obscene about patenting mathematics. The universe gifts us these truths and our first instinct is that it should be the property of a human.
Patents exist to incentivize invention. As long as mathematicians are content to do mathematics for the love of it, and they certainly are, there’s no need for mathematical patents.
Practically speaking, mathematical ideas are building blocks not products. Patents on mathematical ideas discourage invention rather than encouraging it because they prevent use of that idea in new products - an idea that would have been discovered anyway. For example the parents of elliptic curve cryptography and arithmetic coding were hugely damaging to invention overall. Patenting a new kind of cork screw doesn’t have this problem, it’s a destination, not an intermediate.
Math can be viewed as a product of how our minds work. We use abstractions to understand and predict the universe, but it's always imperfect, and the theories always incomplete.
E g., you'd think 1+1=2 is some universal truth, except integers don't exist in nature, being just another abstraction that we came up with. And of course, people can rediscover integers repeatedly, but that just says more about how our mind works.
And yes, math is a building block, but so is software. If math theories aren't patentable, that should happen based on them being trivial or perhaps being too useful to society, and not due to some romantic notions of discovery and the universe. Software, too.
But a machine can also be mathematically described. Should that render it unpatentable, or will that have to wait until the grand unified theory of everything is sorted out?
for this ChatGPT has a 'private' mode in which your conversation exists only while you keep it open. It's not used for training, an no human see it (presumably). The negative side is it disappears with no history, so you can't continue next day. That was introduced after complains similar to yours. Some companies put a total ban.
The extra funding alone is fantastic for Godot. The next year is going to be really exciting, with console support via W4 Games, ironing out some rough edges and missing pieces in C# support, renderer improvements, etc.
It's already a great engine for a lot of games, but very soon it's going to be a really serious alternative for most small teams. It was already on a strong trajectory since Godot 4, but yeah John helped.
In an age where the typical user has to install and reinstall games because storage is limited and games are getting heavier and heavier... that's going to be a problem.
Feels Like Malicious Compliance, so MS can say "See, technically we're Repair Friendly" similar to Apple "repair program". But with those prices, unless the device has sentimental or software value, you're better buying a new one.
For some context in pricing, a battery for a framework laptop cost $59 US (now in discount for 50).
How is this even legal? The youtuber got the packs from the company through a logistical error, didn't sign an NDA or embargo agreement, and gets armed mercenaries at his door for 'leaking' when the company did.
This it's some criminal level of intimidation, something you expect from a gangster or a cyberpunk dystopia where companies bypass the state establishing arbitrary punishment for internal rules you didn't sing on.
I hope this guy lawyer up, and get as much as possible from them.
Why a company with the minimum brand awareness thought this was a good idea, it's still beyond me.
