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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

    Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

    Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.


  • 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.



  • 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 human fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1-3%, depending on how you count cases. From what I’ve seen reported, the human fatality rate of this strain of bird flu is closer to 50%.

    (Lots of “ifs” coming) If this starts to spread human-to-human, if it spreads as easily as COVID, and if we don’t lock down and this becomes endemic like COVID, COVID will look like a walk in the park compared to what this will do. I’m crossing my fingers that COVID was in that mortality sweet spot where it was bad enough to cause a lot of deaths but not quite bad enough to make officials make people angry with actually taking care of the problem. 50% mortality should be comfortably on the side of “deal with it at all cost.”


  • If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two. Any suggestion otherwise is either ignorant or a bad faith argument.

    But I think Putin knows this fact of economical imbalance, as he’s doing a superb job undercutting Western support of Ukraine through subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting. If he truly believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.



  • On Sundays I do lunch prep for the days in office. A few slices of deli meat and block cheese for a nice flavor. Then a pile of raw veggies and a small container of dipping sauce. I prefer sliced bell pepper and green onion with ranch dressing, but you can do whatever veggies you prefer (for example spinach, sugar snap peas, carrots). I always feel great after that lunch; grains like bread or chips always made me feel lethargic.

    I take it into the office in a plastic bento box to keep everything from jostling around, and the sauce goes in a smaller reusable container separately.