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I don't think it's really that new, legally. Cows, dogs, and whatever have been escaping from people's land and damaging their neighbor's land for thousands of years. Cases like that get decided on standards of negligence, recklessness, or strict liability. There's still a lot of mileage left in those concepts.
I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:
Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.
So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...
OK but, Postgres is not one of those clunky "we have to replace this" systems.
Except, a gallon is a gallon no matter which gas station I'm at. Also I know my car's gas mileage, and it doesn't change when I visit a Shell station instead of a Chevron. The composition of the gas is regulated, as are the pumps that dispense it. There are inspectors from the state whose job it is to ensure that when I buy a gallon, I really get a gallon.
Tokenizers aren't standardized to anywhere near that level. A "token" from one isn't the same as a token from another.
Sometimes they are. The US Earned Income Tax Credit being probably the biggest example.
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/earned-income...
It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.
"SUV" is too broad a category. A RAV4 is an SUV. It's similarly sized to most of the SUVs I've seen in Europe. And a pedestrian getting hit by one would have a similar experience to getting hit by a sedan. It's nothing like the big Rams, GMCs or F250s with the high front grilles that are becoming more popular while also being far deadlier to pedestrians.
I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.
Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.
That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.
People eating lead in their food don't know it's there.
People engaging with the AI built into Google results pages can see it, and assumedly Google's A/B testing showed that they engaged with it.
Good piece, but I think there's a missing angle to it. He cites a study showing how often people say they "use AI", and a little over 50% use it less than once per week.
If we're just talking about AI chat interfaces, sure. But I think the way that AI usage is going to grow isn't mostly by getting more chat engagement. It's about baking AI features into software that people already use.
For example, suppose you asked the same people "How often do you search on Google?" I am willing to bet the numbers go up a lot. And all of those people are "using AI" in a very real sense, they just don't think about it when it's baked in.
If you've ever watched an episode of "How It's Made" and seen how incredibly customized these machines are, it won't be surprising that the people who build them are proud of their work.
Slightly agree. :)
I don't think handmade shoes are the right comparison, unless you're talking about software that's meant to be used by just one person.
The more apt comparison might be to the engineers building and maintaining the manufacturing equipment in the shoe factory. It's a degree removed from the consumer, but there's definitely still craftsmanship involved there.
They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.
The Claude Code client source was never their moat. There are plenty of other companies with equivalent tools (gemini cli, cursor cli, augment, codex, etc.) The models that it talks to are far more important.
Not to say you're wrong about commoditization. I don't think these companies will be able to raise their prices and keep them there to make enough money to keep building models like they've been doing.
"frontier level" is doing a lot of work there, but the idea would be to only feed it earlier sources.
There are people working on this.
You're saying no one capitalizes software development costs anymore? The rest of the internet disagrees strongly. The finance team at my employer would disagree strongly. Accountants talk to dev teams all the time about how many hours went into new development vs maintenance. It's not just a temporary IRS rule. It's GAAP.
It's the same in other industries. In your example, if labor went into building a whole new assembly line that pays itself off over several years, capex. If it just goes into building products to sell, opex.
There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.
You’re literally describing all companies.
No, not quite. It really comes down to opex vs capex and the depreciation schedule for your investment.
Software development is typically categorized as capex, on a 3-5 year depreciation schedule. You assume the software you write today will be generating value for you that long.
If a big, expensive model training project only gives you value for a year or less, that is not like most companies.
Macs are very popular in schools today for teachers and staff. Switching to Macbook Neos for students would actually simplify their support burden. I'm not sure they'd be cost justified though.
Source: My wife works IT for our school district.
Guidelines on their own probably won't be taken too seriously.
But other things will:
- Liability rules
- Regulations that you get audited on (esp. for companies already heavily regulated, like banks, credit agencies, defense contractors, etc)
If you get the legal responsibility part right, then the education part flows from that naturally.
Still if you're the lawyer on the side of the lawsuit claiming that the code is copyrightable, you really don't want that copilot attribution in the commit message muddying the waters.
The models that make AI songs were trained on real musicians' copyrighted works, without permission.
It's kinda shitty to steal someone's works, then use them to build a machine to also steal their jobs.
That's what Bump did, like 13 years ago, by sending accelerometer and GPS data up to the cloud and correlating it there.
It works in isolation and fails miserably when trying to do a big demo of it in a conference talk when attempted by dozens of people in the same room.
Setting aside Flock, the "ownership" situation is not as clear as you say above.
What you own is the image copyright. But the right to copy is only one of the rights at issue.
Under various state laws (California in particular), you might not be entitled to do all the things with that picture that you could do of one that doesn't have my likeness. Privacy laws like the CCPA are one possible carve-out. A "right of publicity" is another.
There's an old saying about property law that "property is a bundle of sticks". The bundle can be subdivided.
I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem.
In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.
Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.
The nice thing about laws passed by a legislature is that they don't need to have some airtight logic to stop us falling down every slippery slope.
If cable television or restaurants or ice cream start causing harm that we want to deal with, we can vote on that when the time comes.
There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.
The fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.
You can get some good guesses from the comment itself.
I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.
If source code can now be generated from a specification, the specification is where the essential intellectual content of a GPL project resides. Blanchard's own claim—that he worked only from the test suite and API without reading the source—is, paradoxically, an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms.
This is an interesting reversal in itself. If you make the specification protected under copyright, then the whole practice of clean room implementations is invalid.