This administration is the best thing that happened to the European Union nations when it comes to the economy. During the second half of the Biden years, the crazy bounce back the US economy did with regards to economic indicators (not the same as actual sentiment on the ground) made it look like we were going to be left behind, and we would be essentially buying any high-value western products from the US and US only. Even nations like mine who survived the pandemic in terms of health effects faced terrible regrowth.
The "protectionist" policies and soft power self-immolation that happened next means that we might be able to make strides in not just catching up to the US, but also becoming a more trusted trade partner for all other nations just for the sake of doing the same thing we always did.
Even the king of the Atlantic co-operation, the military industrial complex, turned upside down in a month. Everything US administrations since the 1950s had been building and had locked in is up for negotiations now. I can't even imagine how much ground China is able to gain since even they are looking like a more stable trader compared to the US. And yes, I'm saying the US as in the entire nation, since videos of Tim Cook bribing your president made me realize that the ownership of business in the US is nearing completion, and that footage looks a lot like how Putin liked to bully business owners in front of TV cameras back in the day [0].
Thanks for helping my country survive for a few more years. The brain drain to the US has pretty much dried up.
It honestly truly looked like that from over here. Every penny the wealthy middle class earned would go to American stocks. No one was savung money by investing in the local stock market. Business news became more about American Big Tech and less about local up and comers. It felt like everything was being made for the US or by the US. Re-starting the German war industry is something no EU politician could have achieved. We have a golden opportunity to leverage China as well as enter LatAm and African markets in the absence of US soft power.
The dollar is weakening because the US institutions are weakening. The EU might not be wealthy compared to the US, but at this moment in time it is more rational and future-proof than the volatile US business environment.
The main reason the US is a hub for well-paid programmers, is that there is a giant pool of VCs that subsidise growth for companies that can potentially find money all over the world thanks to the way the US still is a cultural hegemon to western liberal nations with strong English language skills. As long as a US based tech company leverages cultural hegemony (in a positive way) and deep VC pockets, they can succeed in Europe and the world.
The biggest tech company failing at using cultural hegemony in a positive way is Tesla. European consumers have largely abandoned Tesla thanks to E.M. He single handedly ruined the company's position of strength by thinking that US news and politics do not reach us. He did not understand the hegemonic aspect (or was too high to care).
addressing only paragraph 2: American VC funded startups mostly don’t hire overseas remote programmers for two reasons: 1) they don’t need to, they are overfunded and the culture/communication overhead tradeoff is not worth it; 2) they are california biased which has poor timezone overlap with overseas time zones. The companies that historically lean in on overseas workers are the bootstrappers, because they cannot afford market american salaries. The company I founded is one such company.
The United States occupation of Iraq was like a trip to an amusement park compared to Gaza. Please don't compare the IDF to the US military. At least the US military and its soldiers had RoE that they respected. Any breaking of those rules did not get ignored like they do in the IDF.
When you have nukes, you can do anything. The next 10 years will literally change the future of this planet, because Israel turned nuclear deterrence into "right to attack anyone and not face consequences". It's straight out of Russia's playbook, and many countries who thought they would never need a nuclear deterrence realize that they actually might need one. North Korea's dictatorship looks like a bunch of geniuses right now and it's sad and scary that giving the Israeli military zero pushback (and even encouragement from the US) will result in a nuclear arms race.
Someone on Twitter said: "Oh well, P2P mp3 downloads, although illegal, made contributions to the music industry"
That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.
I really feel as if Youtube is the best sort of convenience for music videos where most people watch ads whereas some people can use an ad blocker.
I use an adblocker and tbh I think so many people on HN are okay with ad blocking and not piracy when basically both just block the end user from earning money.
I kind of believe that if you really like a software, you really like something. Just ask them what their favourite charity is and donate their or join their patreon/a direct way to support them.
And somehow actually paying for youtube which fully removes advertising and provides revenue to the service/creators is seen as an utterly absurd proposition by a staggering number of people.
Maybe because they don't want to reward Google for continuously running Youtube into the ground while still being worse than the free alternatives. Not to mention that they already watering down permium with premium lite, I give it two tears before you need to get premium+ to not see ads.
Then don't use the service? Use one of the 'better' free alternatives. Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic. Complaining about advertising while using a service for which you pay nothing is immature and unreasonable. I hate advertising and have done everything I can to remove it from my life. That means paying for services that I enjoy using. I would rather provide value to the business via money than ad attention.
>Then don't use the service? Use one of the 'better' free alternatives
you can use alternatives but those do not have the actual content that is the reason anybody watches youtube (its in the name).
im also talking about free alternatives to premium being better for example offline videos still having DRM unlike every free yt downloader ever. the only way they have made premium better is by actively making the experience worse for everybody else is by pay walling the old default bitrate.
>Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic
there continues effort towards making the platform worse with every decision does not have anything to do with funding
Yes, The amount of traffic that youtube can sustain is really wild.
But yea one of the smallest nitpicks I have with them is the algorithm since its a hit or miss. Sure you can remove the algorithm completely but I would really wish if I could ask something like their SOTA AI models (Gemini) to make my algorithm for me right within youtube and I can say things like No clickbait etc.
With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.
All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed
Its the law (for now, very early on this in the process of deciding the law, untested, appealable, likely to be appealed and tested many times in many ways).
Meanwhile other cases have been less friendly to it being fair use, AI companies are already paying vast sums to publishers who presumably they wouldn’t if they felt confident it was “the law”, and on and on.
I don’t like arguing from “it’s the law”. A lot of law is terrible. What’s right? It’s clear to me that if AI gets good enough, as it nearly is now, it sucks a lot of profit away from creators. That is unbalanced. The AI doesn’t exist without the creators, the creators need to exist for our society to be great (we want new creative works, more if anything). Law tends to start conservatively based on historical precedent, and when a new technology comes along it often errs on letting it do some damage to avoid setting a bad precedent. In time it catches up as society gets a better view of things.
The right thing is likely not to let our creative class be decimated so a few tech companies become fantastically wealthy - in the long run, it’s the right thing even for the techies.
They're paying those sums, because legal fees are expensive and this ensures ongoing access in future.
Remember, copyright has always been a comprise between individuals and society in the first place. We can extend it but in the same breath, it may have other unforseen consequences.
When you say that's the law, as far as I'm aware a single ruling by a lower court has been issued which upholds that application. Hardly settled case law.
We're talking about a summary judgement issued that has not yet been appealed. That doesn't make it "settled."
If by "what is stored and the manner which it is stored" is intended to signal model weights, I'm not sure what the argument is? The four factors of copyright in no way mention a storage medium for data, lossless or loss-y.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
In my opinion, this will likely see a supreme court ruling by the end of the decade.
A trillion parameter SOTA model is not substantially comprised of the one copyrighted piece. (If it was a Harry Potter model trained only on Harry Potter books this would be a different story).
Embeddings are not copy paste.
The last point about market impact would be where they make their argument but it's tenuous. It's not the primary use of AI models and built in prompts try to avoid this, so it shouldn't be commonplace unless you're jail breaking the model, most folk aren't.
I bet it’s pretty easy to reproduce enough of Harry Potter from these models that any judge would see it as not fair use - you’d just have to prompt it in the right way. I’d bet a large sum that when this eventually shakes through the Supreme Court, it won’t be deemed fair use entirely, for the better of the world.
My point if you are going so far as to piece it together, you can't blame the LLM. The individual chose to do that. And copyright law primarily is concerned with the actual physical reproduced object at the end of the day not tools used (piecing it together means it is merely a tool).
The gut punch of being a photographer selling your work on display, someone walks by and lines up their phone to take a perfect picture of your photograph, and then exclaims to you "Your work is beautiful! I can't wait to print this out and put it on my wall!"
"Wrong" would imply somehow the first post was better that it was. What you mean to say is "You're right, here's a link with some details".
That article also focuses on larger media and "moderate" amounts of piracy, so there's absolutely caveats in your claim.
"As with other studies, Kim and his colleagues found that when enforcement is low and piracy is rampant, both manufacturers and retailers suffer."
“'The implication is simply that, situated in a real-world context, our manufacturer and retailer should recognize that a certain level of piracy or its threat might actually be beneficial'..."
They can take out nuclear scientists thousands of kilometers away by either planting bombs in their cars in traffic or firing accurate munitions through their windows when they sleep.
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
I think the point is that if Israel can do pinpoint decapitation strikes anywhere in Iran they sure as hell can do so in Gaza, but they choose to bomb hospitals and flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip instead.
This. Israel demonstrably has the capability for precision warfare.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
> They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
That’s my read as well. I was strongly pro-Israel for decades and while I was never comfortable with the plight of Palestinians Hamas had a lot of the blame, too, but the last year really moved me over to thinking that the people who said most of the “accidents” over the years were intentional were correct. They can pull off these amazingly accurate strikes when they want to, it’s implausible that they suddenly have the precision of a drunken 18th century musketeer around aid workers and civilians. Their leadership clearly do not care and collective punishment is a war crime no matter who does it.
The term ”mowing the lawn”[1] has been used to describe their long term strategy, so I can ”excuse” someone for thinking that they can’t control the situation, but it’s been a tactic for a long time.
HN readers can recognize the tactic in other parts of our world too. It’s the strategy of people in power who believe they can control the chaos. When chaos in one group is a benefit to the other, chaos becomes a worthy status quo. When your military is infinitely more powerful, any uprising can eventually be exhausted, and you get automatic casus belli. The Cold War was full of this destabilizing politics, where superpowers tried their best to turn functioning socities into hellholes, in the hopes that it would spread in the enemy’s region. The same works for Israel. The less legitimacy Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians have, the longer they can keep building settlements. If they ever gain independence, it will cause another war, which has been planned for, because settlements have been overwhelmingly built on higher ground. Illegal settlers will not give up easily, and will likely gain military assistance.
To be fair, the Iranian state is a proper military. I’m not sure if there is a way to fight a guerilla force without massive civilian casualties. (Which is why one generally shouldn’t.)
A better analog might be Hezbollah. Surgically dispatched. Resolved with minimal follow-on nonsense from both sides.
No, it’s war. Targeted killing of a military scientist is war. Gunning down civilians trying to get food is a war crime. If we start labelling all war as criminal, the term loses all meaning.
How about killing a scientist that they claim is trying to make a bomb with 15 members of his family and several neighbors including children under age 10.
This claim is not proved. In Europe there is no capital punishment for mass murders but Israel can kill anyone they want with their family without trial or even conclusive evidence and no one can condemn it.
If you do it with a crude hand made bomb it is called terrorism but if you do it with F35 it is called self-defense.
> war crimes are just a label for anyone in opposition to Western domination
Eh, there is a broad consensus on what constitutes a war crime. But there is also broad precedent for these rules not applying to major powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951.)
I’d also argue that recent history has almost rendered the term worthless, as activists label practically every civilian death as a war crime.
On the flip side, this is not as controversial (or even at all in western media) when done by the Ukraine military (not specifically nuclear scientists). This is not a justification, but I think some characteristics of conflict are less interesting/important to focus on when trying to formalise critique against an assailant. This would be more important if contrasted with for example a conflicting ideological narrative.
I‘m sorry, but you’re comparing apples to bedrooms. Israel vs. Iran is a war/conflict between two proper countries‘ militaries - which means that both belligerents stick to certain agreed upon rules and military traditions, such as trying to separate the civilian from the military world/infrastructure. In lack of another word (haven’t slept, please forgive me for the choice of word), there’s “honor“ and a notion of equality and respect (somewhat) between the foes, even if Iran has declared it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
For as long as countries like Israel stand against giving Palestinians a legitimate state, militias and terror groups will continue to rise. The US showed that it was possible to fight an insurgency as an occupying force without resorting to literally levelling cities. It was not easy, it took more lives than they hoped, but they did it anyway, because they at least acted like war crimes out in the open was off limits.
The "protectionist" policies and soft power self-immolation that happened next means that we might be able to make strides in not just catching up to the US, but also becoming a more trusted trade partner for all other nations just for the sake of doing the same thing we always did.
Even the king of the Atlantic co-operation, the military industrial complex, turned upside down in a month. Everything US administrations since the 1950s had been building and had locked in is up for negotiations now. I can't even imagine how much ground China is able to gain since even they are looking like a more stable trader compared to the US. And yes, I'm saying the US as in the entire nation, since videos of Tim Cook bribing your president made me realize that the ownership of business in the US is nearing completion, and that footage looks a lot like how Putin liked to bully business owners in front of TV cameras back in the day [0].
Thanks for helping my country survive for a few more years. The brain drain to the US has pretty much dried up.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GsDLrUieJg