It also makes no sense! "Fuck this, it doesn't matter - but I'll happily spend effort communicating that to others, because apparently making others not care about something I don't care about is something I do care about." Wut?!
Well, I say it makes no sense. Alternatively, it makes a lot of sense, and these people actually just wanna destroy everything we hold dear :-(
Then do something about it. Vote for better politicians. Donate money to causes that you think are important. If you think you can do it better, and this isn't meant to be facetious, run for political office.
Being fatalistic can be a great excuse not to do anything.
I cannot. I can only vote better politicians if they are there. That is without even going into the minefield of what is "better". My implication is that I have no confidence whatsoever in any current politician in my state.
> Donate money to causes that you think are important.
I have no money.
> If you think you can do it better, and this isn't meant to be facetious, run for political office.
I have no money, no visibility and no connections. Even if I was magically given tons of money, I would still need a strong network to attempt any real change, even without taking into consideration the strong networks already in place preventing it.
Telling random citizens "run for office" is facetious, whether you mean it or not.
> Telling random citizens "run for office" is facetious, whether you mean it or not.
Hard disagree. At least where I live, "random citizens" run for local office and succeed all the time.
Also, complaining that you "have no network" is a you problem, not a system problem. I'm truly sorry if you feel you have no friends, but you'll be better off at least trying to get some (independent of politics). And if that's something you've tried and failed at before, I do feel pity. But I don't think hope is lost for anyone. And even if it were lost, please don't actively spread the misery!
You are kind of proving my point. You are actively justifying doing literally nothing about what bothers you and acting indignant and self righteous about it.
> The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car."
How is this different from the 2000s, or the 90s, or even before, when the normal thing to do with commercial software was to purchase a license to use said software and a physical medium containing a copy? You'd also then not "own the software", but you owned the right to install a copy on your own computer and use it. That worked without having to hand over the keys to your own computer.
Sure, the physical delivery medium is gone, but that's just a detail. Why do we now think that just because we license software for use, we can't be in ultimate charge of our own devices?
In 1990 Ford couldn't turn off your Mustang because you plugged a TwEECer into the J3 port and screwed around with the tune. Best they could do was void your warranty and deny you further upgrades (i.e. tunes flashed as part of a recall or TSB).
These days unauthorized access tends to lose you effective use of the hardware you bought because the hardware requires software features to work and that software often unnecessarily phones home so if the OEM toggles a field in a DB somewhere you lose access to back up assist or whatever other fancy tech features that you a) paid for b) don't strictly need to have dependencies that phone home to work but do "because reasons".
I've definitely experienced this on public transit in cities in several different countries here in Europe. It's not an everyday experience, but it definitely happens.
Same. I, too, am sick of bloated code. But I use the quote as a reminder to myself: "look, the fact that you could spend the rest of the workday making this function run in linear instead of quadratic time doesn't mean you should – you have so many other tasks to tackle that it's better that you leave the suboptimal-but-obviously-correct implementation of this one little piece as-is for now, and return to it later if you need to".
That is a great example of when the original quote works as intended.
I'm reacting to experiences where the software that emerges from a relatively large team effort can't really be made meaningfully faster because there are millions of tiny performance cuts - from the root to the fruit.
/* If we can cache this partial result, and guarantee that the cache stays coherent across updates, then average response time will converge on O(log N) instead of O(N). But first make the response pass all the unit tests today */
I absolutely believe you on the facts, and it all sounds very disgusting, but here's what I don't understand: customers and staff alike no longer like the clinic. Won't that be a huge boon to competitors, essentially ruining the VC's investment?
I get that it's not so clean cut with something as equipment- and licensing heavy as the veterinarian sector. But I've heard the same story exemplified with pizza parlors instead. Won't all the good staff take all the loyal customers and go elsewhere very easily in that case?
It would also seem to break address privacy (usually not much of a concern if you authenticate yourself via SSH anyway, but still, it leaks your Ethernet or Wi-Fi interface's MAC address in many older setups).
Not anonymous, but it's pretty unexpected for different servers with potentially different identities for each to learn your MAC address (if you're using the default EUI-64 method for SLAAC).
> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is.
Some might hold that we've granted persons certain exemptions, on account of them being persons. We do not have to grant machines the same.
> In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies.
Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions, but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?
>Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions, but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?
I feel as though, from an information-theoretic standpoint, it can't be possible that an LLM (which is almost certainly <1 TB big) can contain any substantial verbatim portion of its training corpus, which includes audio, images, and videos.
> I feel as though, from an information-theoretic standpoint, it can't be possible that an LLM (which is almost certainly <1 TB big) can contain any substantial verbatim portion of its training corpus, which includes audio, images, and videos.
It doesn't need to for my argument to make sense. It's a problem if it reproduces a single copyrighted work (near)-verbatim. Which we have plenty of examples of.
Do we? Even when people attempt to jail break most models with 1000s of prompts they are only able to get a paragraph or two of well known copyrighted works and some blocks of paraphrased text, and that's with giving it a substantially leading question.
It surely doesn't matter how leading or contorted the prompt has to be if it shows that the model is encoding the copyrighted work verbatimly or nearly so.
It definitely does, which is why I put substantial amount of verbatim material. If someone can recite the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the sorcerers stone from memory, it surely doesn't mean they have memorized the entire book.
Of course not. But if the passage they can recite is long enough that it is copyrightable, then surely distributing a thing that (contortedly or not) can do said recitation is a form of redistribution of the work itself?
No. It is against their TOS to attempt to jailbreak their models. While I don't agree that the models can recite longer periods of verbatim copyrighted material, even if it could, the person who is at fault is the person subverting the system, not the creator of the system. If I steal a library book and make copies of it to distribute illegally, it wouldn't make sense to hold the library at fault for infringing on the book publisher's copyright.
No we don't have to, but so far we do, because that's the most legally consistent. If you want to change that, you're going to need to pass new laws that may wind up radically redefining intellectual property.
> Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim?
Of course it has, if the transformation is extreme, as it appears to be here. If I memorize the lyrics to a bunch of love songs, and then write my own love song where every line is new, nobody's going to successfully sue me just because I can sing a bunch of other songs from memory.
Also, it's not even remotely clear that the LLM can produce the training data near-verbatim. Generally it can't, unless it's something that it's been trained on with high levels of repetition.
> you're going to need to pass new laws that may wind up radically redefining intellectual property
You're correct that this is one route to resolving the situation, but I think it's reasonable to lean more strongly into the original intent of intellectual property laws to defend creative works as a manner to sustain yourself that would draw a pretty clear distinction between human creativity and reuse and LLMs.
> into the original intent of intellectual property laws to defend creative works as a manner to sustain yourself
But you're missing the other half of copyright law, which is the original intent to promote the public good.
That's why fair use exists, for the public good. And that's why the main legal argument behind LLM training is fair use -- that the resulting product doesn't compete directly with the originals, and is in the public good.
In other words, if you write an autobiography, you're not losing significant sales because people are asking an LLM about your life.
Well, I say it makes no sense. Alternatively, it makes a lot of sense, and these people actually just wanna destroy everything we hold dear :-(
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