lin83

> First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.

I don't find that the least bit credible. The proposition forum administrators would tolerate someone "warning others" against the core uniting aspect of their community is not realistic. Generally anyone who questions orthodoxy in such niche communities face vitriol and get banned quickly. Apostates do not hang around religious conversion forums talking about deconversion, gender transition desisters are not welcome on transgender support forums etc.

The survey was just 21 people "exclusively contacted in BIID internet forums". How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?

I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.

> unfortunately the alternatives to Google are usually not any better in this respect.

I don't that's necessary true. Google (and maybe Facebook) are unique in the size of personal data they hold and they types of data they have access to. If you move email or docs or search to something else, at least that's one less data source for them about you. (Assuming they are not selling it to data brokers Google has access to.)

I also have Youtube left on my list. I also find it a little too addictive. Instead of using a browser, I use RSS to subscribe to the channels I'm interested in. From my RSS reader (newsbeat) I can even directly play the video (via mpv + yt-dlp).

Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.

People the British government don't like and who they have subjected to torture and extra-judicial killings, the biggest example being people in Northern Ireland opposing Union with Great Britain.

If the requirement to be narrow and time limited is not codified in law (which afaik it is not) it is pretty much guaranteed such broad searches will happen. All it takes is convincing a judge.

If the past has taught us anything it's that law enforcement will use any tool to the maximium of what is allowed and then beyond (e.g. coerced phone searches, racially motivated stop and search, drug dogs to force vehicle searches, privately sourced licence plate tracking and face recognition, criminal DNA testing from rape kits, forced biometric collection and more).

There isn't a threshold for copyright violation. If you copy a 3 line function from a GPL library, you have to comply with the licence. Tools like BlackDuck will pick it up.

Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.

> I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal

This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it's crazy. I hope no one is identifying the companies they work for.

I don't think that's true and, if it was, it would be the death knell for open source.

Code Plagiarism is taken very seriously by every company I have worked with. Multiple companies have been sued for violating the GPL. The SFC is currently fighting Vizio in court for example. While not commonplace, to say it's "almost impossible" is a stretch. Every large company complies with code copyright obligations for a reason. My company publishes changes to GCC and a dozen other GPL projects. Entire products like Protocode and BlackDuck exist to ensure code compliance. Even small code snippets are flagged.

Over the past few years the source code for Windows, SQL server, Bing and Cortana have all been leaked. If someone built a product using that code, how long do you think it would take Microsoft to sue? CoPilot is one rule for mega-corps and another for everyone else.

> Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission.

Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight is introduced.

If CoPilot is copy/pasting large amount of code with unknown licenses, that is a large and real risk for users aside from violating open source projects licenses.

I believe the previous Python support extension started out as an independent open source project until Microsoft hired its main developer.

> It’s baffling.

Vendor Lock in? Same reason you can't use the VSCode marketplace of mostly open source extensions on a non-Microsoft build of VSCode or any of the remote work features.