Riverheart

Well, from recent experience they could make “npm audit” usable without having to use a third party library like “better npm audit”. There’s no filtering or configuration at all. There are so many unimportant or irrelevant vulnerabilities reported that I have no doubt that people just ignore auditing because they don’t consider the 1000 high severity DoS vulnerabilities they can’t ignore relevant for their CLI app. =/

The tradeoff for security is usability and the worse the usability gets the more people fight back against it.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-npm-audit

Don’t think a lot of people are brushing their pet’s teeth. Fluoridated water benefits more than just humans.

I’m no anarchist, I simply acknowledge that civil disobedience exists. People are responsible for the risks they take in violating the laws they feel are unjust. Frankly, I have little reason to believe a city, state, or person would take that risk to protect people who would harm them so I don’t worry much about it. In my mind, the ones committing crimes will be caught committing those crimes and those aren’t the ones people are trying to protect.

I don’t support the wall for reasons I’ve already given but I do support border control as I think most of these people do, it’s just different with folks already here.

Even if I was worried about illegal immigrants more-so than other current issues, I’d still take issue with the cruelty in which it seems to be carried out such as in the story I posted. Surely you realize that stories like that promote civil disobedience because even if they committed a crime they aren’t all hardened criminals, some are just people looking for a better life. Not everyone believes they’re all murderers and gang members simply because Trump thinks so and especially not women and children.

In terms of the Alien Enemies act it is not the role of the executive branch to interpret the law and one could argue they are breaking the law by taking a non-literal reading of the words ”invasion” and “predatory incursion” to avoid due process for these individuals. They may argue and win in court that the interpretation should change but that doesn’t excuse them from taking liberties in the first place.

All that said. I’m going to leave it here, you’re free to respond if you wish but I don’t think we’ll change each other’s minds. I do appreciate your civil discussion despite the controversy of the topic.

The wall was a waste of tax payer money and purely theatric since it hasn’t helped. Saying illegal immigration is a problem today basically acknowledges as much if it weren’t also backed up by statistics.

https://www.cato.org/blog/border-wall-didnt-work

No, illegal immigration is not the same as an invasion by another nation.

I don’t condone harboring criminals but if they are indeed criminals they should be tried in a court of law because that is the American way. On the other hand if these illegal immigrants are fleeing violence rather than creating it, have lived here for years and/or have kids born and raised in the US, then I can understand the grace afforded them by sanctuary cities as deporting them is not illegal but ethically questionable. Deporting someone who has never known anything but living in this country to another one they have no connection to because their parents brought or birthed them here illegally would be legal but would it be justice? I don’t think it would, I think it’s more complicated.

The true absurdity is thinking due process is optional in this country. How the party that purports an unwavering belief in the founding fathers, constitution, law, and American exceptionalism compromised so hard on a fundamental right is beyond the pale.

If it’s optional for these immigrants then it’s optional for every citizen if Trump deems it so; the precedent is set, just call someone the enemy and you’re good. Your only defense that this couldn’t happen to US citizens would be the courts and an adherence to societal and legal norms both of which Trump has shown clear indifference to.

Addendum:

Amazing, it already happened and got posted to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801959

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/ice-deports-3-u-s-citize...

“New Orleans, LA - Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.

…

In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.“

Truly, justice in action, protecting us from criminal pregnant women and children with cancer. Probably MS13 gang members. What a great and powerful country we’ve become, Jesus would be proud /s

Look I’m not against law enforcement, I’m sure we have common ground somewhere, but how can I take the illegal immigration rhetoric seriously, take a hardline stance, if this is part of reality?

A systematic effort to dismantle the federal government bypassing the legislature entirely, replacing federal employees with people who pledge loyalty to the president over the constitution, firing anybody who would hold him accountable, undermining the separation of powers in favor of an all powerful executive who treats executive orders as law, attacking media outlets and judges they disagree with and threatening to either remove their access to the White House press room or revoke their license or fire them, deporting people without due process, threatening to invade Greenland, threatening to withhold congressionally approved funding as a cudgel, and invoking the friggin Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in a time of peace is not “pushing back a little”.

But if you haven’t realized that yet it’s obvious you never will till it’s too late and sure, maybe that’s harsh to say but as trump himself said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters” because that’s precisely how much y’all care what he does. Gimme your downvotes but don’t pretend you’re standing on moral high ground, you’d justify anything he does.

The whole anti-DEI sweep across the government where people who don’t remove “let’s treat people nice” posters risk getting fired and attacking people using the office of the president is so obviously deplatforming and censorship that your criticism of democrats is laughable. When’s the last time Biden threatened to revoke Fox News license? Republicans even a tiny bit critical of Trump get exiled for daring to step out of line. You don’t hate censorship and deplatforming, you love it, can’t get enough of it, you just hate it when it happens to people you like.

It’s not the style itself but the use of the art to train the model that outputs the style. Anime as a style is not copyrightable. The work anime artists create is copyrightable. Specifically, if you take their copyrighted work and feed it into a machine to extract the artistic expressions that characterize anime to make new art, is your usage of their art in that process fair use?

Fair Use 4th Factor: This factor considers whether the use could harm the copyright holders market for the original work.

If the use is research it’s fine. If the use is providing a public non-commercial model then it is somewhat harmful as their work is devalued. If the goal is to compete with them it is very harmful. Therefore, since we’re talking about the last two use cases, I argue fair use does not apply. Others maintain it does as maybe you do.

If it’s not fair use then it would be infringing on that particular copyright holder.

As you know, anime art is a spectrum with “How to Draw Manga for Kids” at the bottom and studio quality at the top. People pick and choose the art to train on not just because of the style but also the quality and consistency of their work. That’s why you might choose a specific artist to base a model on even though their style is just “anime”.

The capability of the model to infringe isn’t the problem. Ingesting unlicensed inputs to create the model is the initial infringement before the model has even output anything and I’m saying that copyright shouldn’t be assigned to it or its outputs. If you train on licensed art and output Darth Vader that’s cool so long as you know better than to try copyrighting that. If you train on licensed art and produce something original and the law says it’s cool to copyright that or there’s just no one to challenge you, also cool.

If you want to ingest unlicensed input and produce copyright infringing stuff for no profit, just for the love of the source material, well that’s complicated. I’m not saying no good ever came of it, and the tolerance for infringement comes from it happening on a relatively small scale. If I take an artists work with a very unique style and feed it into a machine then mass produce art for people based on that style and the artist is someone who makes a living off commissions I’m obviously doing harm to their business model. Fanfics/fanart of Nintendo characters probably not hurting Nintendo. It’s not black or white. It’s about striking a balance, which is hard to do. I can’t just give it a pass because large corporations will weather it fine.

That Fantasia video was good. You ever see Pogo’s Disney remixes? Incredible musical creativity but also infringing. I don’t doubt the time and effort needed to produce these works, they couldn’t just write a prompt and hit a button. I respect that. At the same time, this stuff is special partly because there aren’t a lot of things like it. If you made a AI to spit out stuff like this it would be just another video on the internet. Stepping outside copyright, I would prefer not to see a flood of low effort work drown out everything that feels unique, whimsical, and personal but I can understand those who would prefer the opposite. Disney hasn’t taken it down in the last 17 years and god I’m old. https://youtu.be/pAwR6w2TgxY?si=K8vN2epX4CyDsC96

The training of unlicensed inputs is the ultimate issue and we can just agree to disagree on how that should be handled. I think

“In the US, entirely deterministic works are not considered derrivative works as they aren't considered new creative works (if anything they are considered the same as the original)”

Okay, so if the inputs to the model are my artwork to replicate my style, is the output copyrightable by you? You just said deterministic works aren’t derivative, they’re considered the same as the original. That’s not anything I’ve heard AI proponents claim and the outputs are more original than a 1 to 1 photocopy but I assume like the case you linked to that the answer will be, no, you can’t copyright.

Never proposed a ban, the issue is copyright, use licensed inputs and I could care less.

Pro AI people need to stop behaving like it’s a foregone conclusion that anything they do is right and protected from criticism because, as was pointed out, the legality of what is being done with unlicensed inputs, which is the majority of inputs, is still up for debate.

I’m just calling attention to the double standard being applied in who is allowed to have an opinion on what the legal outcome should be prior to that verdict. Temporal said people shouldn’t “pretend or assume” that lots of AI infringes on other people’s work because the law hasn’t caught up but the same argument applies equally to them (AI proponents) and they have already made up their mind, independent of any legal authority, that using unlicensed inputs is legal.

The difference in our opinions is that if I’m wrong, no harm done, if they’re wrong, lots of harm has already been done.

I’m trying to have a nuanced conversation but this has devolved into some pro/anti AI, all or nothing thing. If you still think I want to ban AI after this wall of text I don’t know what to tell you dude. If I’ve been unclear it’s not for lack of trying.

Nobody is trying to copyright an image hash and determinism matters because it’s why the outputs are derivative rather than inspired.

I’m not saying it’s better because it’s naturally occurring, the objective reality is that we live in a world of IP laws where humans have no choice but to retain copyrighted information to function in society. I don’t care that text or images have been compressed into an AI model as long as it’s done legally but the fact that it is has very real consequences for society since, unlike a human, it doesn’t need to eat, sleep, pay taxes, nor will it ever die which is constantly ignored in this conversation of what’s best for society.

These tools are optional whether people like to hear it or not. I’m not even against them ideologically, I just don’t think they’re being integrated into society in anything resembling a well thought out way.

I’m in the camp that believes that it’s neither necessary nor desirable to hold humans and software to the same standard of law. Society exists for our collective benefit and we make concessions with each other to ensure it functions smoothly and I don’t think those concessions should necessarily extend to automated processes even if they do in fact mimic humans for the myriad ways in which they differ from us.

I’m saying that retaining information is a natural, accepted part of being human and operating in society. Don’t know why it needed to be turned into an Orwell sequel.

You know why we put up with copyrighted info in the human brain right? Because those are human beings, it’s unavoidable. This? Avoidable.

Also, the model isn’t a human brain. Nobody has invented a human brain.

And the model might not infringe if its inputs are licensed but that doesn’t seem to be the case for most and it’s not clearly transparent they don’t. If the inputs are bad, the intent of the user is meaningless. I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function. If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.

You just chided people for having strong opinions about AI infringement without a court ruling to back them up but now you’re saying that creating/promoting an entire industry based on a legal grey area is a social norm that you have no strong feelings about. I would have thought the same high bar to speak on copyright for those who believe it infringes would be applied equally to those saying it does not, especially when it financially benefits them. I don’t think we’ll find consensus.

“Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.”

Uh huh, so much worse than the people that assume or pretend that it’s obviously not infringing and legal. Fortunately I don’t need to wait for a lawyer to form an opinion and neither do those in favor of AI as you might’ve noticed.

You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer from a higher authority?

The collection of the training data is the “scooping up” I mentioned. I assume you acknowledge the training data doesn’t spontaneously burst out of the aether?

As for the model, it’s still creating deterministic, derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing that makes it random is the seed so it being a database of vectors is irrelevant.

“A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.”

Care to elaborate?

Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.

It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.

It makes sense if you don’t think of humans as tools and think of art consumption pre-AI. Very little would be made public if people thought their work would get scooped up to create these models.

I, and others, don’t care if the process of observing and generating output works the same way because people and tools don’t need to be held to the same standard. As I’ve said numerous times elsewhere, big picture, AI and humans are different in practically every other way and that is seemingly never taken into consideration when promoting AI adoption. It’s also a big leap to say we fully understand how human creativity works which is still under study.

You may, I could be wrong, believe oppositely because it means you can benefit directly from these tools but other people view it through the lens of what they or others may lose and that is no less rational. Social constructs require social consensus. If you got rid of capitalism people might be more open to your viewpoint but as it stands this just smells like socializing human creativity for free, in a way people could never anticipate, to make other people money, no doubt consolidating more power in corporations, who can afford to run the models at scale, as is standard.

I suppose we’re unlikely to agree so I’ll leave it at this.

2 + 2 = 4

Nothing inspired or creative about it. It comes out the same every time no matter who calculates it. That’s what people want to copyright except the first 2 is other people’s art and the second 2 are the weights.

Why do you think it doesn’t matter?

AI is always human until it isn’t. It’s not copyright infringement if the AI learned from input like a human but also it’s just a tool that can’t copyright its own output. It’s a moral imperative someone ought to make money off that /s

Why should you benefit over the people doing it the traditional way? What’s your argument for the government favoring the disruption of the art economy relied on by existing taxpayers? I have no reason to support your viewpoint solely for your benefit. The space for market competition is not infinite and crowded enough as is.

I made different life choices that leave me unable to create and rather than belittle the accumulated effort of those who did by feeding their work into a machine, writing a prompt and claiming the output for myself I choose to be satisfied with the fruits of my labor and place in the world. Basic golden rule stuff, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In short, my opinion is no, you shouldn’t. If you disagree that is unfortunate.

Copyright is a human construct designed to benefit humans. It doesn’t matter if the process is the same. AI doesn’t need to put food on the table, doesn’t pay taxes, and will never die. There is no reason to treat it the same because it’s different in all other ways that matter in society.

Software does not get inspired

Since it’s relevant to the discussion, here’s a repost of their latest response.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

On Wednesday we shared that we’re introducing a new Terms of Use (TOU) and Privacy Notice for Firefox. Since then, we’ve been listening to some of our community’s concerns with parts of the TOU, specifically about licensing. Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern. With that in mind, we’re updating the language to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data.

Here’s what the new language will say:

You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

In addition, we’ve removed the reference to the Acceptable Use Policy because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity.

Privacy FAQ

We also updated our Privacy FAQ to better address legal minutia around terms like “sells.” While we’re not reverting the FAQ, we want to provide more detail about why we made the change in the first place.

TL;DR Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define “sell” more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. Firefox has built-in privacy and security features, plus options that let you fine-tune your data settings.

The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Similar privacy laws exist in other US states, including in Virginia and Colorado. And that’s a good thing — Mozilla has long been a supporter of data privacy laws that empower people — but the competing interpretations of do-not-sell requirements does leave many businesses uncertain about their exact obligations and whether or not they’re considered to be “selling data.”

In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

We’re continuing to make sure that Firefox provides you with sensible default settings that you can review during onboarding or adjust at any time.

Not a nice interpretation of what is being said.

Clearly there is nuance that society compromises on certain things that would be problematic at scale because it benefits society. Sharing learned information disadvantages people who make a career of creating and compiling that information but you know, humans need to learn to get jobs and acquire capital to live and, surprisingly, die and along with them that information.

Or framing the issue another way, people living isn’t a problem but people living forever would be. Scale/time matters.

Here again I’ve fallen for the HN comment section. Defend your view point if you like I have no additional commentary on this.

Loyalty over credentials, here we go again. Did you say the last election was stolen? Great, welcome to office.

Tulsi Gabbard - Director of National Intelligence

Matt Gaetz - Attorney General

Pete Hegeseth - Secretary of Defense

Marco Rubio - Secretary of State

I’ve always been satisfied with Leafpad as a Notepad equivalent. No fluff, just a rectangle for dumping text.

I upvoted you for taking the time to answer me. Thank you

It's a 1/1 increase, you're just implying that it would take five employees an hour to make one burger. If five employees each make $1/hour more then that restaurant has to cover an additional cost of $5/hour, not $5/burger. But that whole $5 is coming from somewhere, and restaurants are notoriously competitive businesses, so that somewhere is liable to be from customers.

I don’t mean to drag this on, I just want to end saying I’m not implying 5 people are needed to make a burger. I’m saying that increasing wages for 5 employees by a $1 doesn’t increase the cost of an individual good (burger) sold to customers by $5 so the burden to the customer to support this new paradigm is negligible, especially at the volume of goods being sold. It is not a death knell to the business as it is sometimes painted.

Yes the 5$ is made up somewhere, either in cutting costs elsewhere, increasing sales or increasing prices. They may already be making numbers that would support an increased wage without any changes to those things.

I accept that you may still disagree with me but I wanted to make my position clear.

Already investigated by a republican committee.

See references 14, 15, 16, 17 of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspi...

A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden. A sweeping Republican House committee investigation of the Biden family has found no wrongdoing by December 2023.

And sure, it’s weird Hunter was involved but it’s also weird the guy who brags about being rich still won’t show us his tax returns despite it being something every other president has done and gone as far to make up stories about the IRS while at the same time saying he’ll release them when he can. Joe released his tax returns, it’s all on the table.

Joe appears to be held to a much higher standard than Trump. Like… if Joe asked Kamala to overturn the election results like Trump did to Pence the republicans would be outraged and try to bar him from ever being president again, not that he would because he’s a good person at heart and for which he’ll get no praise, because it’s obvious not to do that and we don’t give out brownie points for abiding common sense.

It’s only bad when the other guy does it which is also why they latched onto Joe’s garbage comment even though Trump has called his opponents, trash, vermin, sick people, the enemy within and encouraged his supporters to call them satan worshippers and gets a free pass. Oh snowflake dems hate being called enemies of the state. He’s doesn’t mean it he’s just trolling the abuse of presidential powers like any reputable statesman would.

But we’re so inundated by the constant flood of news that one scandal replaces itself and it’s hard to remember all the other ones that came before it. We’ve grown numb to it. At this point I’ll just be happy if we make it to the next election in one piece.