demosthanos

Surveillance cameras (not Flock, sounds like) are what allowed the police to spend ridiculous amounts of the city's time chasing (checks notes) $295 of damage to a swing from totally normal use by a couple of pre-teens.

Swings have always broken. Before widespread surveillance the swing would have just been replaced or not and everyone would have moved on.

There isn't, but everything that they said above is absolutely true and people who try to fight it will suffer. There is lots of flexibility within those constraints, but the constraints aren't imaginary.

For what it's worth, I totally understand the motivating use case here. There were absolutely times where I walked away from what I was hoping would be an hours-long project that would run to completion and came back to find that Claude had asked me a question early on and I'd missed out on a large amount of implementation time. So you were not imagining that the use case is real!

It's also worth adding that I really enjoy the AskUserQuestion feature and will regularly ask Claude to specifically use it instead of asking me questions in plain text because it's a lot easier to work with.

It's always good to learn from mistakes, and I appreciate both your work on this and you coming here to own it. Keep up the good work!

Yes, the problem with comparing open models to open source is that open source requires humans to volunteer their time. Open models requires humans to volunteer their money.

These two types of contributions have very different behavioral profiles, and it doesn't obviously follow that the historical success of getting people to collaborate socially on building software for fun and for the benefit of the community will translate in any meaningful way to the necessity of being able to raise enormous amounts of money to pay for enormous amounts of electricity.

The myth is that Roman concrete was 'better' and that we don't know how to recreate it. The facts are that it was not better in any way than what we can do now and we have always known how to replicate it. Grady addresses both of those aspects of the myth in the video, and the first part is literally the title of the video: "Was Roman Concrete Better?"

The answer is no. What is true is that some Roman concrete structures (but far from all of them) are extremely durable because they were optimized for a different set of requirements than modern buildings usually have, notably "needs to last forever as a symbol of the emperor's power". From the 19th century on that has very rarely been a design constraint, so we optimize for other things instead.

Yes, you, too, can have two-thousand-year-old buildings if you're willing to make that longevity be the primary thing you pay for, assuming that your successors don't tear the thing down and replace it with something else, like happened to many Roman monuments.

In which case you spent a bunch more than you needed to on a building that didn't last any longer than it would have if you'd chosen a practical end date for it.

First: This is the general privacy policy, not the enterprise contract. I don't know what goes into the enterprise contract, but I do know that our legal department spent a very long time making sure it was satisfactory before we got access.

Second: My argument doesn't hinge on Anthropic not being able to weasel their way out in court if it came to that. My argument is that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are going to break their signed contracts or even fudge on the clearly communicated understandings of what the terms of the API pricing are because neither one wants to hand the other the obvious weapon of: "unlike {other guys} we honor our word".

It's just not happening, and comparisons upthread to the fair use story totally misunderstand the incentives at play here.

(And as an aside, this whole thread also shows clearly the classic programmer misunderstanding of the law. The peanut butter sandwich instructions analogy is for code, not for the law. The law doesn't actually work by allowing any possible interpretation to hold equal weight the way that many programmers think it does.)

I'd like to see you try using mental calisthenics against a well-funded legal department. Let me know what the judge says.

There is a world of difference between:

* A company following suit with their entire industry in choosing a very generous definition of fair use.

* A company being the first to defect and actually break their signed contracts with enormous enterprises committing to not train on those enterprises' most valuable assets.

Training on copyrighted works signs them up to be a part of a system that is at this point too big to fail and places them in good company with all of their competition. Breaking their signed agreements would open them up to very well-founded and well-funded lawsuits for contract violation and give their competition a huge boost.

All of a sudden "we actually don't break our contracts" would be a selling point. No company in their right mind is going to let what should be table stakes become a differentiator for their competition.

You truly see no difference between having a perhaps-overly-generous definition of fair use and flagrantly breaking contracts that you signed with your customers?

There is an enormous difference between:

* Exploiting ambiguity around fair use at a large scale before the law catches up and then jointly lobbying with your competition to make sure your interpretation of the law becomes reality.

* Explicitly signing a contract with enterprises to respect their IP and then proceeding to break that contract with your own customers.

The former is firmly in the gray area of legality and doesn't directly hurt your own customers. The latter is both an unambiguous contract violation and a flagrant attack on your own customers' most valuable asset.

First, I think people should buy from GoG for exactly this reason.

But also, the difference is that Steam has as far as I can tell never yanked a game from someone's account and failed to refund them for it. Games either get delisted and you retain access to them or they're removed entirely and they refund you. The only exception is online-only games whose developer stops maintaining the server, but I think it's reasonable for steam to not claim responsibility for the developer's malfeasance.

So Steam has this model of licensing-not-ownership on paper but in practice treats purchases as much closer to ownership. Sony clearly does not.

Because:

1. There are lots of things that compilers load into their memory that aren't actually source code. A memory exploit turns non-source data into executing-in-the-compiler code.

2. Depending on the language semantics, a memory exploit can allow substantially higher privilege than just being loaded as library code. Latent malicious code that never gets called into never becomes active, but if you can exploit a weakness in the compiler you can make your code execute at any time you'd like instead of relying on the main application calling in to your malicious library.

I don't think transitive definitionally means we can ignore it. Any input that I give to my direct dependencies could theoretically end up inside of its dependencies and I can't know that it doesn't without auditing the source.

The actual split is on which environments the dependency exists in and who can control inputs in those environments. For most private companies who aren't running CI on an open source repo, the dev/prod split is the operative one that determines what you can safely ignore.