CyberRabbi

You cited two sources that are irrelevant to your claim. Neither Sony's nor Microsoft's hardware profits have any necessary bearing on Nintendo's.

That has nothing to do with fair use. That is a misuse of the term which has a specific meaning in the context of justifying derivative works of copywritten material.

You are allowed to make an emulator because there is nothing that says it's illegal. Under the DMCA, you are not allowed to distribute tools which help in the circumvention of copyright, which is what this tool does. It allows people to bypass the copyright protections Nintendo has put in place to prevent people from running copied games without permission.

Thank you for confirming that fair use is not a right. Second, yes it absolutely concerns derivative works as it is a concept in the domain of copyright. While not every violation of copyright is a derivative work, only derivative works are justified under fair use. For instance, piracy can never be justified under fair use. The new work must be transformative to a significant degree.

This topic on the other hand has nothing to do with fair use as there is no derivative work being created. It also isn't a copyright violation, it's a violation of the DMCA. Specifically it violates the DMCA's provision that prohibits distributing tools used to violate the copyright of other work.

Why would they do that when their business is selling hardware? You make it seem like they are being foolish or unreasonable. They aren't Netflix

What are "fair use rights" in this context? Fair use specifically concerns creating derivative works. You don't by default have a right to use Nintendo's IP however you like, no matter how virtuous or benign you think your use is. You are only licensed to use their products in the ways that they permit.

Can I still use their trademark if I train my AI algorithm on it first then use it to generate the trademark?

The popular LSD and psychadelic advocacy online and elsewhere is an expression of the mainstream ideology. The foundation of our collective ideology tells us these drugs should have some profound life-altering and improving effect. Obviously, when examined critically, the premise is ridiculous on its face. Everyone I know who regularly does these types of drugs is not really doing much else with their lives. As for Steve Jobs, he was not a regular LSD user, he was a baby boomer who bragged about using it to make himself seem unique or different, like many of his generation.

You see a similar sort of popular collective delusion with people who claim Cannabis cures cancer or other disease. Sorry but hard no. There is no such thing as "Medical Marijuana." It's simply marketing and propaganda to get the public into associating virtue with Cannabis use, with the end goal of eventually changing policy.

Good point. While it seems obvious to me that LLMs can never be anything more than fancy Markov chains, in my experience it seems the majority of human "logic" does not operate much differently. Very rare to encounter someone who is able to think or speak critically. Most regurgitate canned responses based on keywords.

In practice, non-virtual function calls are reliably compiled to fairly efficient code while virtual calls are much less reliable.

Like I said, this echoes the conventional wisdom that most C++ developers seem to retain. The compiler landscape has changed since that wisdom was formed, since the advent of LTO and devirtualization optimizations.

If you're programming in C++, you probably do care about this level of performance, and in that case, it's nice to program in a style that guarantees it instead of hoping for a sufficiently smart compiler.

Neither implementation guarantees any particular sequence of assembly instructions. Both require hoping that a sufficiently smart compiler will compile it to a sufficiently optimal sequence of instructions.

Given an optimizing compiler, the first function (count(a)) is likely to just immediately return the size of the backing vector. The function is nearly free.

The compiler is able to do that with count_inheritance() as well if it's able to prove which instance of iter_base is used in the call. I suppose even many experienced C++ developers are not aware of this. This optimization is known as "devirtualization" and is fairly well-implemented in Clang and GCC. It's even more effective since the advent of LTO. Some more info: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/02/15/devirtualizati... https://blog.llvm.org/2017/03/devirtualization-in-llvm-and-c...

Oh no!

I wouldn’t be surprised if we live in such a world in the next decade.

We won't live in that world in the next decade or even in the next 100 years. The technology upon which GPT is built is a dead-end in terms of human-level intelligence.

GPT is an elaborate parrot. As convincing as it is, it's not actually fully capable of doing most if not all tasks that competent humans can do. The largest takeaway for me is that it has shown that intelligence can be mimicked pretty well and perhaps many people are more like parrots than they are "intelligent" creatures.

hi dang, sorry to be annoying but i have no other way to reach you. I've contacted you at hn@ycombinator.com over my account but haven't received a reply. Did you receive my email? if not, please email me at the address in my account at your earliest convenience. thank you.

And, by the way, your assumptions are wrong, pg has written posts on why he thinks sama is one of the most impressive people he's ever met - they even changed the YC rules after him to make the percentage stake that YC takes standardized and non-negotiable because sama was such a good negotiator.

I don't doubt that sama is talented. What's unexpected to me is that there have been many much more successful YC alums than sama yet PG essentially chose him as his successor. It's not unheard of but you'd expect merit amongst startup founders to be rooted in their ability to build large companies and not on other qualifications or abilities in the abstract.

This post is currently on the front page but immediately after it was first posted and hit the front page, it was downranked to the second page.

Kudos to your dad, sounds like he was a great engineer.

Things must be pretty bad if HN is your support system

UTC can never be set as a constant offset from TAI, it will eventually cease to be useful and that can never happen.

In the link you provide it says this about Unix time:

    In Unix time, every day contains exactly 86400 seconds but leap seconds are accounted for.

So it's incorrect to say that Unix time does not include leap seconds.

Edit: This comment was not accurate

The offered value was simply not worth what they were charging. I would venture to say that it would be difficult to sustainably charge anything at all for this. For most people, the alleged slowness of Chrome is good enough. Why would the normal person go through the hassle of paying for an experience that was only marginally better than something that was available for free? Their best bet was an ad-based model but that comes with its own set of drawbacks.

In general all alternative browser products that charge money face the same issue. Netscape already tested this business model in the 90s.

For this reason and for many people this app was DOA from the inception. The founder should have carefully considered this criticism instead of disregarding it and using it as "fuel" https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1196458286347776001

Sadly it seems his new startup is jumping on the trend of generative AI. This is another product category that is doomed to failure yet has tons of tech industry fanfare (similar to web3, which is on its deathbed). For most professional artists, it's not hard to do the actual drawing, the difficulty is coming up with the subject matter / concept for the drawing. Generative AI may have a market for low quality yet high volume content creators that auto-generate content on YouTube or other social media for a modest living.

The model you are suggesting works to some extent but it just isn’t as effective or efficient as the Microsoft model. Compare the usability and the prevalence of the Linux desktop (mostly advanced by red hat) to the Windows desktop.

In any case people are already free to build projects collaboratively and the GPL provides a workable legal platform for that model. Microsoft has opted out of that model and it’s their right to do so, it’s no one else’s right to force them into it. If people want to build a retro modded Windows XP compatible experience, the law fully allows them to reverse engineer and reimplement it. They are better off basing their work on something like ReactOS, which has already done lots of that work, instead of Microsoft’s IP.

I'd argue that software, and in particular operating-system software is perhaps one of the most predictable categories. It inherently ages due to gradual drift on hardware support and growing burdens of security risks and unmet compatibility needs. A 20-year-old operating system is probably only interesting for academic, historic/nostalgic, or special-case legacy support reasons.

Windows XP has only “aged” because Microsoft made a marketing decision to make it seem as though it has aged. Windows XP likely shares millions of lines of code with Windows 10. They only have the appearance of being a different product for marketing purposes. As a copy protected work, one is a direct derivative of the other. This type of life expectancy cannot be predicted.

Good policy is generically applied, fair, and sound. Saying “well operating systems should not have the same copy protections as other works for xyz reason” isn’t effective policy and would likely be found self-contradictory in court.

I don't think you can draw conclusions from the behaviour of lawmakers, who are likely easily swayed by existing stakeholders who have a financial stake in expanded copyright.

Why not? What is the other side of the coin? The people arguing for decreased protection are doing it with no intention of starting businesses. They are ideologically motivated, not pragmatically. They simply want a world where they can do whatever they want with anyone’s IP because they think that’s how the world should work in the abstract, not because they intend to produce anything of sustainable value. Most of these detractors want to create one-off art pieces for the fun of it. That doesn’t bring food to the table or build a long term foundation upon which more advanced works be built.

The people arguing for more copyright protection do it with the intention of continuing to build more sustainable value. This results in more jobs and a larger economy.

pieces of a shared zeitgeist that happens to be privately owned.

Chance has very little to do with it. We used Windows XP because Microsoft spent billions in marketing to distribute it and grow the PC market. It didn’t just happen by accident. Look at all the other fully functional hobby OSes that exist today. Look at ReactOS. Look at Linux. It’s not an accident that they don’t have the market share that Microsoft does. They don’t have an institution that is properly incentivized to market them to the masses. The most well known and used alternative OSes are Fedora and Ubuntu, can you guess why? It’s not random.

In the grand scheme of things if you set a precedent that copyright ownership is highly conditional and subject to the will of people who seek to dismiss your ownership for their own purposes, that will disincentivize investment in producing software works.

Perhaps people such as yourself who wish to see modders able to do what they wish with Windows XP think there is no commercial gain in Windows XP for Microsoft. In a different world there could have been. No one can predict the life expectancy of a copy protected work. This unpredictability and mere potential for long term value is part of what incentivizes corporations to innovate and produce. Remove their unconditional long-term right over their work and you will disincentivize the advancement of the arts and sciences. You may disagree but it’s simply true given that copyright protection has only increased over the history of the US, not decreased.

the rights from copyright are not "natural" rights so much as a negotiated deal with the rest of society.

All “rights” are negotiated deals with the rest of society. Rights aren’t set in stone, they are essentially abstract constructs. They must be collectively believed in.

Microsoft is already one of the richest companies on the planet, how much more penny pinching must we bear?

You’re not entitled to Microsoft’s property regardless of the amount of money they have.

Yes actually.

I always figured the compromise solution was a (likely state-mediated) mandatory licensing board.

The majority of your argument seems to be based on the premise that you do not have rights over your own work. That the perceived public benefit has priority over your will over your own work. The day that the state ceases to enforce copyright based on that premise is the day that many types of software businesses will cease to exist. The incentives just won’t be there to create software that thrives under business models that require enforcement of copyright.

Microsoft, as the owner of Windows XP has the right to do with it as they see fit. It’s not anyone else’s concern whether they are not making the best use of Windows XP. Especially not a mandatory governmental board. It’s their property, it’s their choice.

This isn't a pirated work.

Distributing software without the permission of the author is the definition of software piracy. This is literally software piracy.

The laws that prevent what you consider awesome work like this also prevent people from stealing your work. If we didn’t have these laws, we couldn’t have a software economy. It would be nearly impossible to make a living as a software engineer. The people who created these laws had the prudence to judge that the ability for programmers to securely make a living for their work is more important than the ability for programmers to take someone else’s work and do whatever they want with it.

There’s a difference between “what ought to be” and “what is.”

I get that you think this project is cool and the authors are doing admirable work. I don’t necessarily disagree there but the reality is this is not legally defensible. It is a violation of copyright to redistribute software without the copyright owner’s permission. That is the definition of software piracy. Whether or not Microsoft pursues legal action is a separate matter.