PhantomHour

Waymo doesn't gain anything. Google i.e. Alphabet Inc, does.

Especially these days. Every scrap of news that could pump the stock price is publicized aggressively.

And this makes the absence of such actions suspicious.

> Not really sure I understand the economics here

There is nothing to understand. The point of such subsidies is to turn OPEX into a green line on the stock market.

Especially as Microsoft is currently also in a fight with OpenAI.

You'd be surprised. A lot of sellers don't "cash out" from paypal all that often, letting tens of thousands pile up. (And inevitably, some of them get hit with arbitrary account closures and have that money seized)

This is a baseless assertion of emergent behaviour.

> Every time a bot searches

We are talking about LLMs by themselves, not larger systems using them.

> LLMs ability to separate facts from expression is quite well developed

It is not. Whether you ask an LLM for an excerpt of the bible, or an excerpt of The Lord of the Rings, the LLM does not distinguish. It has no concept of what is, and what is not, under copyright.

> Well, all a judge can/should do is to apply current law to the case before them

This is true, and I do not mean to suggest it is bad. But rather, that it leaves uncertainty. These cases can all be struck down without reducing the possibility that if one does stick, the entire industry is at stake.

> Copyright infringment is all about having published something based on someone else's work - AFAIK it doesn't have anything to say about someone/something having the potential to infringe (e.g. training an AI) if they haven't actually done it. It has to be about the generated artifact.

A notable problem here is that AI models are not "standalone products" but tools provided as a service. This complicates the situation.

Take Disney/Universal's case against Midjourney, which is both about the models but also the provision of services.

Even if only the latter gets deemed illegal, that's ruinous for the big AI companies. What good is OpenAI if they can't provide ChatGPT? Who would license a LLM if the act of using it creates constant legal risks?

It is not.

> While this likely has no legal weight

I wouldn't be quite so sure about that. The AI industry has entirely relied on 'move fast and break things' and 'old fart judges who don't understand the tech' as their legal strategy.

The idea that AI training is fair use isn't so obvious, and quite frankly is entirely ridiculous in a world where AI companies pay for the data. If it's not fair use to take reddit's data, it's not fair use to take mine either.

On a technological level the difference to prior ML is straightforward: A classical classifier system is simply incapable of emitting any copyrighted work it was trained on. The very architecture of the system guarantees it to produce new information derived from the training data rather than the training data itself.

LLMs and similar generative AI do not have that safeguard. To be practically useful they have to be capable of emitting facts from training data, but have no architectural mechanism to separate facts from expressions. For them to be capable of emitting facts they must also be capable of emitting expressions, and thus, copyright violation.

Add in how GenAI tends to directly compete with the market of the works used as training data in ways that prior "fair use" systems did not and things become sketchy quickly.

Every major AI company knows this, as they have rushed to implement copyright filtering systems once people started pointing out instances of copyrighted expressions being reproduced by AI systems. (There are technical reasons why this isn't a very good solution to curtail copyright infringement by AI)

Observe how all the major copyright victories amount to judges dismissing cases on grounds of "Well you don't have an example specific to your work" rather than addressing whether such uses are acceptable as a collective whole.

Whether or not it's "essential" is kind of irrelevant for the ergonomics; Languages do exist that provide only closures. (And yes, the likes of Java do struggle a bit with function pointer ffi) Similarly, "we need this because low level" has never made C++ more tolerable.

The thing about rust is that it's complexity is self-contained and follows established rules. If one understands data ownership, one only needs to be told what a closure is for all these edge cases and problems to make sense.

Contrast the complexities of JavaScript, many of which still boil down to "Some doofus 30 years ago didn't do any homework and made bad design decisions for type coercion". Just "fuck you, go memorize these behaviours".

It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)

> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.

Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.

Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)

Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.

> Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?

They're somewhat out of touch with tech, and caught up in police narratives around encrypted apps blocking their attempts to find pedos. Tech firm lobbyists sell them some lies about the capabilities of these systems.

Ultimately these are politicians stuck in the notion of "but the police can open your [physical] letters, this isn't any different" completely unaware of how times have moved on.

Matters like how people are already being harassed by CSAM being sent to their DMs, how people raid discord servers and try to have them taking down by spamming CSAM, etc, are completely lost on these politicians.

On top of that it's just cowardice. Not daring to be seen as "aiding pedos".

> 5:10 "475 were illegally present in the United States"

Not quite; The figure includes those with visa.

"Illegally present in the United States or in violation of their presence in the united states, working unlawfully"

This also leaves open the question of what "violation of the visa" entails here. They may well have been working within their visas, only for ICE to arbitrarily rule otherwise.

> I hope the recession ends up being smaller in length and magnitude than the 2008-2009 recession

Not a chance. Were it just the tariffs, the recession would be quite small. The tariffs might even be cancelled if the SCOTUS remembers to do it's job.

But it's not just the tariffs.

The US economy is currently being kept afloat by AI R&D and infrastructure spending. It's stock market kept alive by 7 companies who are all neck deep in AI hype.

This not only disguises the malaise in the rest of the US economy, it's a bubble. Everyone knows it. Nvidia's the only one making any money and even they are now relying on vendor financing and other such red flags. Even one who believes that the technology of AI is here to stay, has to face the reality that it's not a golden goose of infinite dollar bills.

We're looking at something that's going to be at least as bad as the Dotcom crash. 'At least' because while the bubble is of only comparable size, other conditions are much worse.

Trump is trying to seize the fed. Big Tech is tearing the copper wiring out of it's own walls to keep AI going a little longer, and their plans for cutting costs is to dramatically increase H1Bs and outsourcing. (One wonders if there might be a non-economic reason behind this, given it's one specific country they're seeking to hire from >.>)

And underneath it all: A timebomb. Much, much, much more of consumer spending in 2025 is from pensioners than it was in 2000. When the stock market eats a 50% loss and stay there for a decade, those pensions will be cut dramatically. This drives down consumer spending, in turn driving down the stock market, a vicious cycle.