HN user

aveao

124 karma
Posts0
Comments47
View on HN
No posts found.

German court rulings on copyrightability of AI content, as far as I understand, so far have made it so that the person owning the copyright is a) the author, if there's enough creative input b) no one. A lets the author license it as if they wrote it, and B is just public domain, which is in line with their goals still.

Their concern of "what if the license goes to model providers" is bonkers, and is completely out of line with their decision to ban projects that are mostly written by LLMs. I'm pretty sure it'd be violating copyright for me to upload a project that is 40% leaked Microsoft code and 60% my own, so what's the difference if it ends up that Anthropic owns 40% and I own 60%?

It's clear that this is just them disliking LLMs for coding and trying to ban it in some way, and that's fine, but they should say it as it is and ban it fully, instead of going for this half-solution with a nonsense justification to go with it. If they don't actually dislike LLMs and are just concerned about copyright, then they should revert this change.

For my german work visa in 2022, I had to either give proof of sufficient german knowledge, or a letter from my employer confirming the job would be in english.

"People who don't speak english or native language" does not represent the people moving for work to germany. Most family reunion routes at least require A1 german as well (which is super easy to pass, but is scary enough for some anyways).

This isn't really true. I've lived in both Munich and Hamburg now, and you 100% need some amount of german to navigate life, many people do not in fact have conversational-level english. I often say that the common paths tend to be easy to navigate in english (e.g. booking a train ticket, getting a phone line), but the adjacent flows (e.g. filing a refund request for your unfulfilled seat reservation, cancelling your phone contract) often require talking to someone in german. A doctor may be marked as speaking english, but that doesn't mean that their reception speaks english.

Berlin may be a different story within Germany, and then there's the entirety of e.g. Netherlands, but I know that the situation in France isn't better than here.

---

That said, B1 is a difficult level within german. Being able to converse fluently enough in not-quite-correct german -which is enough for getting through day to day life- is not necessarily enough to pass the test, and you really need to crunch through memorizing the grammatical gender of thousands of words, alongside getting really good at applying them in various grammatical forms (e.g. declensions vary for the same word based on how it's used).

The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low. Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.

I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.

There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.

Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.

We do actually. The German Girocards were, until Maestro ceased to exist, often co-issued as Maestro + Girocard, and global acceptance was pretty good under the Mastercard network.

There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).

If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.

The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.

Where I live we have labor rights and if your job is delivering mail and you're given a horse for it, you'd only be expected to deliver as much mail as you can in your contractual work time, which is then limited by the legal limits (8 hours/workday, up to 6 days/week). So you'd be home for most of the day, but delivering less letters per day.

(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)

This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.

This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.

We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).

Strictly speaking, unless you do destructive actions, it's not stealing, but instead unauthorized access.

If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.

This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".

---

But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.

I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.

Had a similar experience with a VP recently... not >3 levels up, but still. "I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me." feels close to home.

I made time during a family emergency, and attended a call on US west coast time while living in EU (was supposed to be 9PM for me but they pushed it to 10PM right before due to recruiter messing up the invite and having it off by a week).

He didn't ask any relevant questions. He didn't seem interested. He just looked like he was doing a favor to someone that asked him to give me a shot. Original call was supposed to be 1h, then after reschedule it was 30m, but he thanked me for my time after 20 minutes. Ofc I got rejected after, even though the people before had good opinions of me.

All in all, if you're doing hiring, at least try to look interested. phew.

I think it was a number of reasons, covid was one of them.

- Congress on years where there's cccamp tends to be planned by people who are understandably more exhausted. 37c3 and cccamp23 were on same year and 37c3 slogan was appropriately "resource extension".

- The venue was back from Leipzig to Hamburg (CCH was doing renovations for a while, so it was moved to CCL for a few years).

- 4 years between events lead to both changes in the orga people, and general concern that the older set of people had been at this point less familiar with running an event of this scale ("can they still do it and make it feel the same?").

- Covid precautions were a divisive topic. Some didn't want precautions, some wanted more precautions. Ultimately some measures were taken, but none were mandatory. We have distributed free tests and masks last year, we'll do it again this year, though mainly aimed at volunteers, so you should bring your own mask and test if you can, see the info page^1 for full recommendations :)

All this lead to people being unsure if 37c3 would be good and not coming. But I think that trust has since been regained, seeing as this year sold out really fast (same as past years).

I think one other issue was that chaos community is getting older and many are having families, which makes going to congress between christmas and NYE difficult. We did, imo, really good outreach since then and now there's more young people joining chaos communities again. Still, coming to congress is costlier for younger people that earn less (175eur for ticket but cheaper options are available on request, plus 400-600eur in hotels, plus trains/flights/visas etc).

(I was/am part of the infection protection team at 37c3 and 38c3 but am speaking on personal capacity.)

^1: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/infos/corona.html

Other way around: Easier tickets is an incentive for volunteers, as a bit of a payment in kind. It helps people known to volunteer come back, and it encourages them to keep volunteering year after year. You need to work, honestly, ridiculous amounts of hours to get a voucher (15-20 hours), and so it'd not be a very good incentive for average person.

You can absolutely get tickets on public sales by knowing when sales start, refreshing on the dot and doing the captcha as fast as you can. Reducing your latency (ethernet, fresh browser profile without extensions) helps. Add some friends into the mix and you'll get all the tickets you need.

These sessions would help few imo. It'd eat into people's congress time (few arrive before the event due to christmas), making it less appealing. Many also prepare their slides and talk last minute. Not a whole lot that can be done there.

It's a balance. Congress aims to be accessible ticket cost-wise to all.

Professional interpreters cost a lot of money, and as such it's done by volunteers. There's little to be done while maintaining the spirit of the event.

Nothing prevents people from redubbing talks either, which may honestly be a good community effort.

Coming to my first congress (36c3) was special in this regard: Congress was all about talks for me before, but I only went to 2 talks. Last year I went to none. This year I plan to go to none too.

Congress is a gathering ground for likeminded people from all sorts of interests. Talks can be watched at home (except for ones that are not recorded at the request of the talk-givers), but being in the room with likeminded people, talking with them, learning from them is IMO irreplaceable.

There was only one other congress after the pandemic and that was 37c3 (last year). That one indeed did not sell out and was an outliar.

I did go to 36c3 (end of dec 2019, right before pandemic) and the difficulty of buying tickets was the same as this year.