sillysaurusx
Joined 7 years ago
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Comment · 4 days ago
The CFAA is for unauthorized access to a computer system. Downloading from libgen isn't unauthorized access that can be prosecuted under the CFAA.
Say you have a network. You want to keep someone out of it. The tool for that is the CFAA.
If you have a book, and you want to stop someone from reproducing it, the tool for that is copyright.
They cover different domains. If you're not breaking into a network, you're unlikely to be charged under the CFAA.
Comment · 4 days ago
Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.
Comment · 4 days ago
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Comment · 11 days ago
Deliberate traps are a modern 20th-century practice. In old times, each mapmaker made their own innocent mistakes, and those mistakes got copied into other mapmakers' work. In other words, historians can plot "family trees" of maps, and figure out who copied from whom, based on which errors appear on which maps and on what date. Apparently California drawn as an island lasted about a century because engravers copied each other.
There were a few factors discouraging mapmakers from blatantly copying each other:
Rulers granted printing monopolies from the late 1400s. A mapmaker like Ortelius would print "cum privilegio" (lol) on a map. If you copied it, your expensive copper plates could be seized, along with a hefty fine.
Spain and Portugal each had a master chart which were state secrets because they held navigation knowledge worth a fortune. Portugal handed out severe punishments for leaking charts. (Leaks still happened: the Cantino planisphere was smuggled from Lisbon to Italy in 1502.)
Booksellers' guilds kept registers of who owned which work, and enforced it.
And lastly, copying meant hand-engraving a new copper plate, which took months of work and real skill. The practical barriers alone got rid of most of the copiers, but it didn't stop the big houses.
Some followup links for the curious: https://gist.github.com/shawwn/b85668a421aa443879b15aedd10c5...
(I used Claude to research this fascinating rabbit hole, so I'm basically paraphrasing here. But this comment is my own original writing, so treat it as you like.)
Comment · 15 days ago
For me it refused to move Claude transcripts from point A to point B on my local machine. It kept getting flagged as reasoning extraction or something. The line of "It's my machine, I can move files wherever I want" shouldn't be crossed. Someday file managers are going to go extinct and LLMs will organize everything, and they shouldn't choose what files you can and can't access on your own computer.
Comment · 15 days ago
I ran into this situation and was able to work around it by running a jailbroken Chinese model that turned out to be quite capable. I think it was Qwen.
Comment · 18 days ago
> you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
What's /side? Is that a Codex thing? On Claude it's not a valid command. Claude uses /btw but it can't be folded back into the main convo, sadly.
Comment · 18 days ago
What do prison iPads do in general?
Comment · 19 days ago
Ever have someone bang on your lower back that way? It feels good :)
Comment · 24 days ago
http://heroesofnewerth.com/ is online again. Unfortunately they DMCA'ed my "hon" repo (totally understandable, even if I disagree with their reasoning), so I reckon it's a matter of time before NoH gets DMCA'ed too. Clone it while you can. :)
Thanks for the smile though. It's really cool to have someone be like "hey, I like that thing you made."
Comment · 26 days ago
Where did you get that understanding from? I might have missed something. They penalize LLM comments. Do they also penalize submissions? Any evidence of that?
Comment · 26 days ago
That’s true, though if you’re writing UTF-8 you have to handle the corner cases when reading UTF-8, of which there are many.
Fortunately they’re easy to test for and most languages have standard libraries that make this painless.
Comment · 26 days ago
Thanks for pointing out Wild.
email: [email protected], but twitter DM is a more reliable way to reach me. I’m happy to talk!
website: https://shawwn.net
twitter: https://x.com/theshawwn
github: https://github.com/shawwn
Previous HN usernames: sillysaurus3, sillysaurus2, sillysaurus, shawn.
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