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Which is to say they didn't have much of an idea at all, because it really didn't exist in much the same way. In fact, this is still a inaccurate characterization for exactly that reason. On the basis of copyright, take for instance the idea of exclusive rights to print a work. This actually wasn't implemented as a method of protection for the author, but a political reaction to the printing press being "misused" in the eyes of the anglo-colonialist entity controlling the British isles, and so was a means of preventing the mass creation of undesirable literature.

On the basis of patents, it didn't quite have nearly as much of a history of mutation culturally, but did experience massive whiplash in purpose and application following the implementation of globalism. What was once a system to protect technical innovation on an individual level, would find new purpose as a means to provide structure to an increasingly complicated and internationalized dynamic market. Another means of bureaucratic organization. Then, once again, the context and purpose would change when the world developed digital globalism. The entire engine of IP as a legal fiction became a significant geopolitical tool in an increasingly cramped and fragile world, a necessary gimmick holding up the sky.

Unfortunately, not much to do at this point. It'll likely only become even more nonsensically important as time wears on, until the globalist system collapses. It's certainly possible it'll even be the confounding factor that causes the great unraveling, though the problems hardly begin and end with IP. It was just a useful legal fiction in the wrong place at the wrong time.

DIY hobbyists may also find it more difficult or impossible to source parts for their projects.

I mean not really. A quadrocopter is a remarkably simple thing made out of extremely generic parts: 4 DC motors (and ESCs), a radio, a computer, a battery and an inertial measurement unit. Anybody with a rudimentary amount of electronics knowledge can build one, the components are extremely widely used. The most unique parts about them are the frame and propellers, which are pretty easy to fabricate.

The things you listed are very far downstream of the start of American industry, which is in primary resource extraction and processing. Which is you know, what actually built the country. The media industry has always been materially irrelevant, and what we think of as the tech industry is extremely new.

You're right to call out the nasty environment surrounding intellectual property in the US and the exploitation of ideation in general, you just needed a correction on that. Someone else in this chain said virtually the same thing, which is a weird coincidence of historical ignorance. Not too weird, people tend to forget the 18th and 19th centuries happened, and much of the causally important wheels of the world are in the unsexy grease pits nobody wants to think about.

Never let possibility get in the way of a value-signaling business decision, I always say.

Our society is pretty aligned that distribution is another kind of harm.

As well as possession. I don't actually know if those are different for CSAM, but I would assume so because they are for drugs.

one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people.

This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law.

Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact, that would fall under the category of a "tort" rather than a "crime". The law is just as much about enforcing social mores and norms as it is about dealing with individuals harming each other. Hence why locales like Canada outlaw all forms CSAM, even fictional ones. The victim taken is to be society itself. The possession of this material, implicitly entailing enjoyment of it, is so gross a violation of society's norms and mores that it becomes elevated to a legal matter.

I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them.

That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your turn signal. Which is why if your company has good legal, they often act in a highly proactive manner about that kind of thing.

What constitutes sufficient rabble rousing to get put on the government's shitlist differs between both countries, but there are plenty of things that will send American politicians into having a conniption, and it's not a static criteria. McCarthyism is a pretty easy example. I'm no Muskboy, but we can point to the procedural harassment he recieved over hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan podcast to be a related matter. Criticizing the genocide happening in the Levant is frequently saber rattled by politicians as something they're interested in making prosecutable, and there are examples of institutional authority targeting and attempting to punish people over it.

I don't know. At the point in which you have to reinforce visual context with animations, I feel like you've already failed at the part of UX that actually matters. Like there's already been a cascade of structural failure, and now you're trying to put bandaids over it.

LispWorks - https://www.lispworks.com/

Lisp really needs extensive structural editing tools IMO, and you really have to change how you think about reading source text and that can take longer than you might think. The best Lisp experience by far and away is LispWorks. That being said, I never found it to be to my tastes either. Too much focus on making tree-representations of programs the centerpoint, which isn't how my internal grammar works. I'd much prefer less explicit delimitation where it's not actually needed, but that's also incompatible with the goal of sexprs.

For the same reason mathematicians who aren't computer scientists or logicians are attracted to proof assistants implementing ZFC object languages while ignoring the stuff underneath (type theory, systems theory, etc.)

What? The context of the conversation was about piracy which is a distinct legal fiction, it's inherently grounded in the law's opinion, so yes necessarily the law cannot be wrong in this context, that's incoherent. An idiosyncratic disagreement with the law isn't saying anything relevant to the discussion.

Unfortunately, that kind of hyper-atomism isn't really an effective argument if you don't already agree with the premise being presented. To make matters worse, the law is a collection of postulates. It can give itself the predetermination of any high-level conclusion it wants, and no amount of reasoning or appeal to lower principles will ever matter.

In otherwords, it's theft if the law says it is. Simple as that.

I think you're running into difficulty because you're conflating 'sorting' with what we would call a total or linear ordering. Partial orders are non-linear, and allow you to form posets, which are isomorphic with DAGs. Then you have the broader family of orderings containing weak orders, preorders, strictness, etc. which make matters more complicated. Cyclic orders drop transitivity, for example, allowing you to describe directed graphs with cycles. The thing is that sorting also isn't strictly about orderings. It also encapsulates classification, which are a family of operations entirely distinct from order. There's overlap in the structural implications of some orderings and classifications, but they're also distinct categories (and both are important in ML.)

That's a mischaracterization. Latent space is simply a (multidimensionally) sorted collection, it's only a piece of the pie. A massive amount of structure is held in the unembedding layer. Generative AI models are a very specific ordering, LLMs a very specific subset of that, and they're hardly the only users of the concept.

I get what the author is going for, and they're on the right track. There is something interesting going on with embedding spaces: When used as the substrate for a neural network, you can effectively treat them as a kind of continuous form of computation. That is, given two functions, you can trivially derive a function which sits exactly between those two, and do so ad infinitum, for any arbitrary program (in theory. Obviously everything materially accessible is finite.) This is only one such manipulation. You can deform a function in an unenumerable amount of ways. Think like a bezier curve path tool in something like Krita or Photoshop, but for a function. You can keep adding points and twist it to your heart's content.

It's wrong to focus on LLMs specifically, as well. This is a much, much broader topic than you realize. Most of the interesting stuff has nothing to do with language models at all. I get a huge chunk of the industry is currently having a stroke over LLMs being able to brute-force problem solving, but if we're to talk philosophy, theory, and so on, we have to get past the surface level misuse of Machine Translation's holy grail. That's like having a conversation about the potential of computation itself, but all you talk about is web browsers, using them interchangeably with "computer".

Haskell is actually really good for that. Hasktorch[1] is high quality, batteries included, and leverages Haskell's GADTs for some cute stuff like gradual tensor shape checking. There's also just a grain to Haskell that feels really good for the machine learning domain. It doesn't just alleviate whole classes of bugs and a lot of annoying background noise reasoning, but it's also a much more natural-feeling expression.

The "gotcha" is that Haskell is heavy duty machinery, and getting up to speed with it if your background lacks solid type-theory can be really daunting. For that reason alone, it could never be the default. Sometimes I like to think about how much of a disservice academia has done to itself by training mathematicians without giving them the foundational knowledge they need to utilize the nuclear-grade tooling they themselves have the most potential to benefit from. For a number theorist? Sure makes sense. But the fact that machine learning courses don't have rigorous undergraduate prerequisites in learning the foundation of computation is pure absurdity.

[1] http://hasktorch.org/

Definitely, but they represent the opposite problem. The thing about the LASD and LAPD is that they are... extrajudicial. It's not "They catch a gang member and do nothing", but rather "They arrest a gang member with no valid reason to do so, and tortured/killed them over some street shit." Sometimes it's not a gang member at all. The end of the CRASH unit started when an officer thought he'd flash gang signs and try to kill a plainclothes officer, all in a fit of road rage. Who knows how many times that happened to a random civilian and it got blamed on gangbangers (who happened to not be police)

The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.

That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope.

It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night.

If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process.

The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.

No, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm contextualizing for why that framing of the book is eyebrow raising.

Taken as an intentional insult though, it could be very historically literate. The south of Canaan seems to have peaked in prestige in the Neolithic and early bronze age. Afterwards, other than a handful of Canaanite sentinel cities, it was kind of an irrelevant rural backwater, and those cities fell off drastically in the iron age. The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.

Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.

The inflection of the copula "can be" is exactly the problem, as is the 'anything computable'. There's a reason Isabelle is used as a proof assistant, and Prolog isn't. The former guarantees sound, mathematical rigor that can't be trivially violated. The latter doesn't. Prolog is much more powerful and flexible than Isabelle. Power and flexibility are disastrous for safety. As someone else said elsewhere in this thread, safety is about restrictions.

In this case, it actually runs deeper than this, there are structural issues which prevent them from being sound right from the beginning. It's the mere fact that the whole behavior of your DSL can be silently changed without touching the module it's defined in, or the file it's being imported into. A well-meaning junior, in a completely different department, can completely destroy your invariants in a completely unrelated part of the codebase. Whether by shadowing runtime functions, or a package-level collision that exists upstream. Even Scheme's hygienic macros don't actually solve this, they just make it less likely. At the point in which you have no behavioral guarantees of semantics, you do not have a safety mechanism at all.

There is no 'evaluative indirection' because a macro is a _compiler_ and the underlying code can be extremely alien to the DSL semantics.

This is a trivial contradiction. That is precisely evaluative indirection. Yes, stacking multiple compilers on top of each other, especially when their semantics are non-isomorphic, is a massive burden of mental overhead. Given you already have this problem with the mapping between Lisp and binaries, adding even more complicated layers on top of it is a recipe for disaster. Particularly because: you are going to make mistakes in your logic. Macros provide no means to stop you from blowing your own leg off when writing them. That is not what they are designed for.

Finally, you cannot escape the awkwardness of the underlying metaprogramming system, you will always have to wrestle with quotation and quasiquotation. You have to define a DSL before you can use it.

Only at the point in which you treat and use Lisp like an unserious toy, rather than the powerful tool that it is, can the fantasy of "macros are a safety mechanism" begin to make sense.

where an abundance of complicated mathematical formulae are necessary

I think what you mean to say is, a lot of linear algebra is involved. So multi-dimensional structures like matrices and vectors are expected to have linear arithmetic operators defined over them, because they're used quite a lot.

You don't need operator overloading for that. Your language should be providing them as primitive structures and extending operators over them. Think like how C has a polymorphic addition, where '+' doesn't discriminate between integers, pointers and floats.

There are a lot of problems with user-facing operator overloading, but I think Haskell is actually a really great example of how to do it sanely. At the point in which you have type-families, you can properly restrict the semantic domain of a polymorphic function but still keep it an open set. The addition operator being restricted over types belonging to the Num type-family as an example trivially allows you to use '+' for matrix addition.

https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/matrix-0.3.6.4/d...

Now you've avoided the worst part of user-facing operator overloading (juniors creating incoherent DSLs by abusing the mechanism) while still providing the mechanism where it's useful.

Generally speaking, the pain of handling hot patching depends highly on the structure of your codebase and the reason for hot patching to begin with. For a structure-of-arrays architecture, or for fixing logic errors at run-time, it's really no big deal at all.

It is limited utility, but if you start out from the mindset it's something you'll use a lot, those limitations start disappearing rather quickly.

In an awkward, error-prone, non-mathematically rigorous and easily subverted manner. That whole "make invalid states unrepresentable" thing relies upon the fact the semantic structures you're doing it with can't be shadowed silently by other parts of the code, and the safety constraint itself is guaranteed to be completely pure and deterministic. Lisp macros and reader macros fail at that criteria. They aren't any different from any other collection of procedures and their collective interface. Actually, they're a fair bit worse since the natural cognitive overhead from juggling multiple layers of evaluative indirection lends itself to blindspots of edge cases and unsoundness.

I think "macros are a safety mechanism" might qualify for the top 3 "new lisper mania" things I've ever read.

Can sliding windows be properly insulated?

Yes. Beyond that, if they didn't work they wouldn't be used. Continental climates get much colder than pretty much anywhere in Europe, outside of a select few areas.

In general cold is a bigger deal in Europe than warmth, and will continue to be so.

Masonry is a bad match for cold. The structure acts as a high velocity heat conduit and the earth eats all the heat you produce. Europe's winters (in general) are extremely mild, arguably even more so than its summers.

It's coming from all over. It always has. It was understandably never so visible for people who don't hang out in casual international spaces, but it's not new and it's not owned by anyone. The reason it's so compelling isn't actually the lack of AC, it's because it's an easy button to push that gets people living in certain countries very defensive over something rather trivial.

I mean the lack of AC is definitely weird for a developed country, and the deflections about mild climate certainly aren't a posteriori, but it's the defensiveness and cope that makes it a button worth pushing in the first place.

is just a stupid republican talking point

As everything that comes out of republicans

It's an old bit of banter that the world over has thrown at certain European countries (including other European countries). Giving American republicans custody of it because of an explosive penetration into the mainstream in the last few weeks is ridiculous.

I would highly recommend not legitimizing the American political system so readily.

It's more than just a grammar. But specifically on that note, I'm assuming you know a POSIX Shell language. Spend some time with Forth and ask yourself if these are experientially the same thing.

Equifinality is extremely misleading.

Wow, three pieces of software I don't use for other reasons, just gained a new reason to evangelize against them!

Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios.

I just wanted to add on to this, I wouldn't really classify modern games as "lower quality" than those of the 80s. I'm really not a fan of AAA games, I think the last one I played was Elden Ring, but I would never suggest that they're actively low quality. Uncompelling? Absolutely. But I also have spent a lot of time playing games from the 80s. Silver and golden age CRPGs, random simulators, DOS games that catch my eye. "Quality" isn't the first thing that jumps to my mind. Often they're ugly, terribly balanced, buggy, rife with all sorts of issues in any category you can think of. Games have come a very, very long way. 2400 AD (1988) and Champions of Krynn (1990) are relatively speaking highly polished masterpieces. They're still kusoge, honestly. I have very little experience with the consoles of that era, because pretty much nothing I see even remotely catches my eye.