You're not wrong, Walter...
18,419 karma · joined April 24, 2010
working to liberate literate programming for the median developer.
Example: shifting more than the width of the shifted integer is illegal behavior in Zig: therefore, the, what, shiftand? let's go with that, the shiftand for a u64 must be a u6 or smaller.
Sounds annoying? No, it's great! Check this out:
const CodeUnitKind = enum(u2) {
low,
high,
follow,
lead,
};
const CodeUnit = packed struct(u8) {
val: u6,
kind: CodeUnitKind,
};
I was inclined to agree with you, but what decided it for me is that Zig has another mechanism for "reinterpret bytes". It's exposed on the stdlib as std.mem.asBytes, but this is literally a wrapper for the following:
@ptrCast(@alignCast(ptr));
Also worth noting: packed structs in Zig are already defined as logically little-endian: the first field is of low significance, the second is above that, and so on. So this makes `@bitCast` consistent with an existing convention of treating integers as logically little-ended, without regard to how they're actually arrayed in memory.
Plus it stands to make low-level bit-twiddling, using oddly-sized integers, optimize better. I like that, especially when what we trade for that is: nothing. Nothing at all, this is a pure win.
I'd even guess it's that rare language update which silently fixes buggy code, where someone figured "well, basically everything is little-endian already" (or just didn't think about it), and now that code works properly on big-endian machines.
That makes it very nearly meaningless.
But pretending you said "infringement", for me it comes all the way back to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I cannot possibly twist the development of large language models into something which violates the spirit of that purpose. I don't see how anyone can.
Your point about the scale is valid, and the alienness of it, sure. But you haven't made the case that the vastness of the scale should affect the conclusion.
Something I left out in the first post is that copyright is meant to protect expression, and not ideas: this is the deciding factor in the 'nature of the copyrighted work' test for fair use. More expression, more protection: more ideas, less.
I think the visual arts have a strong case that image generators directly infringe expression: I'm not convinced that authors do, and I think software should never have been protected under copyright because the ideas-to-expression ratio is all wrong for the legal structure. There's clearly no scale case to be made for ideas: "but what if it's _all_ the ideas" fails, because the ideas are not protected at all. Nor should they be, that's what patents are for, and why patents are very different from copyright.
LLMs are remarkably good at 'the facts of the matter', hallucination not withstanding. They're very poor at authorial 'voice transfer', something image generators are far too good at. It's when I start asking myself "well what even _is_ this 'expression' thing anyway?" that I conclude that we're out over our skis on the LLMs-and-IP question: precedent can't tell us enough, and that leaves legislation.
If you prefix the name of OpenAI's commercial offering's website to this string: "share/6a0f2a87-dba4-8328-a704-89b94fd0c121", you'll find an answer.
I don't know who you had in mind, how did it do?
All the elision is because there are filters to prevent low-effort slop-poasting, and I'm trying to evade them, hopefully while staying within the spirit of the site.
Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine.
Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree to which a training run mulching texts "transforms" them is very high. This counts toward a fair use finding for purpose and character.
> is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”
The "amount and substantiality" test. Your case for "all of it" can't possibly be sustained: the models aren't big enough. It's amount _and_ substantiality: this has come up in the publication of concordances, where a relatively large amount of a copyrighted work appears, but it's chopped up and ordered in a way which is no longer substantially the same. Courts have ruled that this kind of text is fair use, pretty consistently. It's not an LLM, of course, but those have yet to be ruled on.
Also worth knowing that courts have never accepted reading or studying a work as incorporation, and are unlikely to change course on the question. It's taken for granted that anyone is allowed to read a copyrighted work in as much detail as they wish, in the course of producing another one. Model training isn't reading either, but the question is to what degree it resembles study. I'd say, more than not.
Specifically:
> it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it
Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.
"Effect upon the work's value" is probably the most interesting one. For some things, extreme, for others, negligible. I suspect this is the one courts are going to spend the most time on as all of these questions are litigated.
Ultimately, model training is highly out-of-distribution for the common law questions involving fair use. It was not anticipated by statute, to put it mildly. The best solution to that kind of dilemma is more statute, and we'll probably see that, but, I don't think you'll be happy with the result, given what I'm replying to. Just a guess on my part.
It is widely believed by their neighbors, that the _Druze_ wear baggy pants because they believe that the Mahdi will be born to a male, and the pants will catch the baby etc. I say "widely believed", the Druze are famously secretive and will not confirm or deny most things about their religion. The 'elect' Druze men do wear distinctive baggy trousers with the crotch down around the knees: no one else does.
The Druze are people in the Arabic world: moreover, they are Arabs. They began as an Isma'ili sect, but do not identify as Muslim: they call themselves al-Muwaḥḥidūn, meaning 'the monotheists', or 'unitarians'.
Much closer to correct than not!
A for loop executed during comptime is just
const stuff = comptime stuff: {
for (0...8) |i| {
// etc, build up some stuff
}
break :stuff some_stuff;
};
The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.
If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.
But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.
I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.
Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.
I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.
I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.
What's a good example of such a utility?
I barely participate in Hacker News anymore because it seems to have collectively lost the ability to extract meaning from words, unless an exhausting and totally excessive amount of attention is put into satisfying a misplaced sense of precision. There's no intellectual charity left and it sucks.
It's not possible to make a positive contribution after a mistake that basic.
Here's an example of someone getting the design space correct, and therefore contributing to the discussion in a positive way. He doesn't end up liking Zig, for reasons I disagree with, but he does completely evade being not-even-wrong, which is table stakes.
https://hirrolot.github.io/posts/why-static-languages-suffer...
You can read their definition, you can expand them, but there's no way to look at a macro call and reason about it, it can do anything at all. In C you don't even know what is and isn't a macro, so Rust has a modest edge in that respect.
Zig just doesn't have this problem to begin with.
I use Siri for about three things: timers, reminders, and asking about the weather. But the reminders are mission critical. I use the watch, and any time my flighty brain hits on something, I set a reminder for it on the spot.
I literally couldn't get along without it. The only killer feature of Siri is accurate voice transcription, and that's all I need (and it could be more accurate, I just get used to comical translations when I use a rare word).
I guess I wouldn't mind if it were better, but I don't need it to be. Reminders are enough.
I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.
I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.
If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.
The grading is assumed.
If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: https://wcngg.com/2018/08/02/subsurface-drip-irrigation-has-...
More to the point, if water had a market-clearing price, California would stop growing so much alfalfa. Alfalfa uses half, half, of California's water, and California has no unique advantages at all in growing alfalfa.
But to reiterate, your first paragraph is absurd and very silly indeed. Lots of places have super cheap water but California still grows four out of five almonds on Earth. It baffles me that you thought cheap water was a plausible explanation for this.
Would you need a JSON loisence? A bash loisence? Is Javascript ok but only in the browser, and only under 500 lines?
At what point does the bobby say Oi! ?
In fact, they've told me so, in so many words.
Is there some better use for roughly 15% of California's water consumption?
Are you sure?
This is macOS we're talking about. You can move the pointer with your face if you want (or more likely, if you need to).
Isn't intention the essence of the concept of the "dog whistle"?
I'd also like to observe that Scott Alexander does a yearly survey, which provide unusually robust evidence that if we're going to impute to him the cultural affiliations of those who read his posts, his politics can only be "all of it".
Will there ever be a way to dispose of the enormous header blocking me from reading source code?
Those are what I want from the future of UI at GitHub.