• 0 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • I don’t see how this wouldn’t be derivative work. I highly doubt a robust, commercial software solution using AI-generated code would not have modified that code. I use AI to generate boilerplate code for my side projects, and it’s exceedingly rare that its product is 100% correct. Since that generated code is not copyrightable, it’s public domain, and now I’m creating a derived work from it, so that derived work is mine.

    As AI gets better at generating code and we can directly use it without modification, this may become an issue. Or maybe not. Maybe once the AI is that good, you no longer have software companies, since you can just generate the code you need, so software development as a business becomes obsolete, like the old human profession of “computer.”


  • This makes sense to me, and is in line with recent interpretations about AI-generated artwork. Basically, if a human directly creates something, it’s protected by copyright. But if someone makes a thing that itself creates something, that secondary work is not protected by copyright. AI-generated artwork is an extreme example of this, but if that’s the framework, applying it to data newly generated by any code seems reasonable.

    This wouldn’t/shouldn’t apply to something like compression, where you start with a work directly created by someone, apply an algorithm to transform it into a compressed state, and then apply another algorithm to transform the data back into the original work. That original work was still created by someone and so should be protected by copyright. But a novel generation of data, like the game state in memory during the execution of the game’s programming, was never directly created by someone, and so isn’t protected.



  • Before my comment I want to make clear I agree with the conclusion that abortion bans are clearly killing women at statistically significant rates.

    That said, the stats reporting here doesn’t make sense:

    Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6% to 43.6%.

    There’s no way 14.5% of Hispanic women in Texas who got pregnant died some time during pregnancy, during child birth, or soon after. That would be unprecedented for any time since the advent of modern medicine. And the chart above this paragraph does not agree with it either. It’s a chart of deaths per hundred THOUSAND live births, and the numbers for all racial groups are all under 100, so less than 0.1%.

    The way it’s stated also doesn’t suggest it’s a percent increase because it says it rose from 14.5% to 18.9%. I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, but they should definitely have been more careful with presenting the numbers.


  • Quantum field theory conserves mass-energy, so the new mass is coming from the energy in the Higgs field itself. It settles to a lower energy state and basically transfers that energy as mass to all of the particles that couple with it. Since it’s mass-energy and not just mass that generates gravitational distortions, the large-scale gravitational evolution of the universe probably won’t change, as this just moves things around a bit. It’s not creating energy out of nothing.




  • He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.

    What I consistently don’t see brought up is the fact that the “chaotic withdrawal” was directly set up by Trump. He signed the agreement with Afghanistan that put a fixed date on the withdrawal squarely in the next President’s term. This gave enemies a clear timetable of US actions beforehand, which gave them a significant advantage. So Biden was left with the choice of either fulfilling the US promise, despite it being in every way a bad construct, and executing an extremely difficult withdrawal, or harming the US image on the global stage by reneging on an already agreed upon deal.

    I would go so far as to say this, like the expiration of the middle class portion of the Trump tax cuts, was specifically designed to make the next administration, which was always very likely to be Democrat, look bad regardless of the cost or collateral damage.


  • The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”

    “Rarely” is not zero. This looks like it’s opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:

    1. Find OSS code you want to copy
    2. Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
    3. Copy code into your commercial product
    4. When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code

    Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.

    In fact, I wonder if there’s a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.


  • The problem is the battery, and how they have a finite lifespan. Usually that’s about 400 recharge cycles, and after that the batteries are finished.

    And if you can’t replace it, then it’s the end of the line for the gadget, and it’s tossed onto the e-waste pile.

    It is so incredibly aggravating that it’s 2024 and unreplaceable batteries are still a thing. I guess Apple didn’t get enough shade when they did this in phones so it just became industry-standard. It’s both horrible for the environment and for the consumer.

    I guarantee the engineers could easily make it replaceable for little to no added cost, they’re just specifically instructed by business leaders not to.





  • Edit: I was thinking about the wrong “immunity” in this comment (the recently granted Presidential immunity to prosecution, not immunity to prosecution for law enforcement officers). I’ll leave the comment for context, but it’s not what the original commenter was talking about.

    Actually it will be very easy for the Supreme Court to give Trump a win and keep qualified immunity. If Biden didn’t directly order the raid on Mar-a-lago, then the immunity they granted doesn’t apply.

    Remember, these rulings don’t need logical consistency because they are bad faith justifications for any actions taken by their team. So when a Republican is in office they can extend the immunity to basically the whole Executive branch, but when a Democrat is in the White House that can shrink to just the President’s actions. And even there only those that are “official acts,” which only the Supreme Court gets to decide, so they can shrink it to almost nothing.





  • I think that’s actually good UX from a safety standpoint. It means the button is “idempotent”: doing an operation the first time puts it in a state, and then doing it again leaves it still in that state.

    If you’re in a moment of panic and want the brake on, you might push the button a bunch of times in quick succession to “be sure.” If it were a regular button, this would rapidly toggle it on and off, which would leave it in an uncertain state after you pressed it so fast. This way it turns on and stays active until you are ready to turn it off, and then you do another idempotent operation to turn it off. I don’t think all buttons should be like this, but I think it’s a good design decision for a button used in an “emergency.”



  • Language is magic for these people, specifically the right grouping of words is supposed to be an incantation to get them out of social responsibility, and the wrong collection of words is what binds them.

    Since the state regulates “driving” of vehicles, no sovcit drives. They all “move” vehicles or “transport” vehicles.

    It’s ridiculous, because law revolves around actions independent of how anyone in specific describes those actions, but that’s the mindset of these people. Viewing their beliefs as a kind of word Tetris has at least helped me wrap my head around what could possibly give them some of their strange notions of law.