Code is pretty much the perfect use case for LLMs… text-based, very pattern-oriented, extremely limited complexity compared to biological systems, etc.
I suspect even prose is largely considered acceptable in professional uses because we haven’t developed a sensitivity to the artifice, and we probably won’t catch up to the LLMs in that arms race for a bit. However, we always manage to develop a distaste for cheap imitations and relegate them to somewhere between the ‘utilitarian ick’ and ‘trashy guilty pleasure’ bins of our cultures, and I predict this will be the same. The cultural response is already bending in that direction, and AI writing in the wild— the only part that culturally matters— sounds the same to me as it did a year and a half ago. I think they’re prairie dogging, but when(/if) they drop that bomb is entirely a matter of product development. You can’t un-drop a bomb and it will take a long time to regain status as a serious tool once society deems it gauche.
The assumption that LLMs figuring out coding means they can figure out anything is a classic case of Engineer’s Disease. Unfortunately, this hubris seems damn near invisible to folks in the tech industry, these days.
Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because they’re ‘a developer,’ it’s neither an indictment of that developer or developers in general if your web front end is structurally wack. If you hired someone that’s only modified a few existing Wordpress plugins for a green field project, is it their fault or yours if they do a bad job?
The complexity in dev is a lot more obvious than the complexity in design. There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. With design work, the whole idea is to make something that clearly communicates its purpose. That makes a lot of people think they understand what went into it because if it’s done well, the solution should feel ‘obvious.’ Getting something that feels obvious is way more nebulous and convoluted than getting from point a to point B in most dev tasks.
> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work.
Is it really that clear? Or do we just think so because most of us here are devs, while everyone else is thinking “Wow what happened? That codebase was great until suddenly it wasn’t.”
Yes it’s really that clear. The moment non-technical people see code syntax or hear technical jargon, they instantly nope out. That’s why people ask their developer friends and family to fix their computers — they don’t know the difference. It’s all just ‘tech’ to them. It’s also why people toil away at bonkers “no-code” machinations that would have been far simpler with a little more tech knowledge… it’s very intimidating to outsiders. OTOH, far fewer people even know what problems designers are meant to solve, let alone judge the solution, but many think ‘well I have good taste and I’ve worked with designers before’ and confidently wield their broken ideas based on false assumptions.
Ok, let’s see that consent form and how explicitly it states that random call center people will possibly look at anything you record. I’ll bet you a crisp $50 it was a form designed to be as click-through-worthy as possible, being sure to not trigger the “wait, should I do this?” reflex in users, and also not loudly disclosing that you could still use the device without agreeing, if you even can, while still technically “””disclosing””” this information. The tech world has turned consent into a fucking joke.
Right. The whole point is that click-through consent forms get users’ ”clear“ ”consent” legally, but not morally. They’re deliberately opaque about the implications (ask 10 users if they consider recording a video on a device voluntarily ‘sharing’ it with anybody and I’ll bet 9 will say no,) are pretty inscrutable to regular people, are designed to not raise suspicions like a social engineering attack, often mean not being able to use the product they just bought if they don’t consent, (which is manipulative as hell when you’re talking about inessential functionality like telemetry,) and extremely consequential. The only evidence you need for that is how pissed off people get when they find out what these companies actually do with that consent.
But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?
The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.”
Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
Although this decision is not binding in other circuit courts, this decision still is something that you can bring to a judge in other courts. They are not required to follow this ruling because they are not in that circuit. However, they still will consider what other courts have said and that will be incentive to think hard before they do something different. A judge who does something different is generally expected to write up a reason why they did something different, and that's something that would be given to an appeals court if they do do something different for consideration of why the other court was wrong.
Yeah, I’ve heard lawyers use decisions in other jurisdictions to give weight to their line of reasoning. The SC saying they aren’t reviewing an appeal might not make that universally binding, but it signals that they don’t categorically reject the lower court’s decision.
I doubt any lawyer would mention the SC didn't review this - that is meaningless and judges know it. They will however mention this case. Even if they case goes against them they will mention it so they can say why it is wrong (the opposition will be sure to mention it so they have to be prepared to take it down)
And you’re saying the SC not taking up the issue has no effect on the weight of that non-binding citation in their argument, even if it was effectively the same situation in a different jurisdiction? The argument was that because the decision only had precedent in that circuit, the fact that the SC did not take the issue up has zero effect on decisions outside of that jurisdiction, even for essentially the same situation. If that’s what you’re arguing, I don’t buy it.
Yes, I didn’t imply national precedence. I imagine it would also signal to attorneys appealing cases other circuits that the same challenge will likely yield the same result.
Didn’t they say Sora will only be used to internally create training data? Integrated image generation seems more in the neat feature category than some fundamental advantage, but maybe someone has use cases I haven’t considered.
They made some of my favorite products. Their having GDP-level revenue doesn’t benefit me… at all. Their putting less effort into those products negatively affects me. There are more losers than beneficiaries, here. I couldn’t care less how many billions investors got. Monetarily, it’s a net gain. Societally, it’s a net loss.
Yeah. The data vacuum whose CEO loves to talk about how effectively their software helps the US government kill people is exactly who should have unfettered access to extremely intimate details of many people’s existence, without their permission.
Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system? Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company? Do you think that my criticism would ever apply to the US IC or the DoD? Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements? Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said like a lawyer from palantir talking a deposition while glibly dismissing what I actually said? Dispensing with the rhetorical questions, let’s get concrete: do you have a Palantir logo Coffee Mug? Pajamas? … briefs?
> Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system?
Yes I believe that it's possible that an organization capable of effective auditing could also leak data
> Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company?
For the most part, yes. Palantir is more effective and more "ideological" than most, but in the direction away from your implication that they're vacuuming up data and mixing it across customers
> Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements?
No, but the question was whether facts or data adjust your opinion or not, and in which direction if so. Duping one mostly-competent organization on security/privacy posture is much, much harder than duping dozens or hundreds of organizations, including the most security-competent on the planet.
> Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said
Because the premise of what you said is wrong. The phrase "data vacuum" is clearly meant to imply a fact pattern that just isn't true. The term "unfettered access" is not true either, as data infrastructure companies (Palantir more than most) have significant controls on their exposure to customer data.
The overall implication that people's UK health data would be somehow mixed into a US government effort to kill people is laughably wrong when you actually have to write it out explicitly instead of relying on nudge nudge wink wink.
And yes I do have a Palantir mug actually! Good guess.
Let's get concrete: have you ever actually used Palantir? Ever engaged in contract negotiations with them or set up their access controls on your own data to understand what is or is not allowed, and to what degree you have visibility and control into it?
Sorry buddy but it's you who's speaking in baseless rhetoric here.
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
Because of the split. But your right, meshtastic does have dumb routing. And I haven't used meshcore, but I probably won't now until the dust settles on this for a while.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
I suspect even prose is largely considered acceptable in professional uses because we haven’t developed a sensitivity to the artifice, and we probably won’t catch up to the LLMs in that arms race for a bit. However, we always manage to develop a distaste for cheap imitations and relegate them to somewhere between the ‘utilitarian ick’ and ‘trashy guilty pleasure’ bins of our cultures, and I predict this will be the same. The cultural response is already bending in that direction, and AI writing in the wild— the only part that culturally matters— sounds the same to me as it did a year and a half ago. I think they’re prairie dogging, but when(/if) they drop that bomb is entirely a matter of product development. You can’t un-drop a bomb and it will take a long time to regain status as a serious tool once society deems it gauche.
The assumption that LLMs figuring out coding means they can figure out anything is a classic case of Engineer’s Disease. Unfortunately, this hubris seems damn near invisible to folks in the tech industry, these days.
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