sooyoo

> Microsoft will likely need to add checks to prevent copilot from offering verbatim copies of code going forward to try to avoid copyright violations here.

Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work.

And that's just the engineering solution. The AI researcher solution would be to extend AI learning algorithms to attach attribution metadata to the learned data so that the output could already come annotated with information about the source.

But the latter is much harder to do, so maybe the engineering solution would suffice.

> You will have a hard time finding people more critical of many of the actions of Google (the company) than Googlers (the employees of said company.)

More critical than people who wouldn't even take a job at Google for ethical reasons? C'mon..

It's tracked by Google even if you never visit a page operated by Google. Non-Google websites that include Google tracking are contributing here (which is most of the web).

The sentence you cite suggests that it's "just" such sites that see your activity, while it's a third party (Google) that does as well and that is the issue here.

Sure, technically you could argue that the tracking is "part" of the website that you visit, so it's technically still "only" the site that's tracking you. But let's be honest here, no reasonable non-hair-splitting non-geek would read it that way.

I wouldn't express it in such drastic words, but it should be obvious that there is a selection bias which leaves out people to even start a job at Google for pure ethical reasons, even though they would rock the interview. To make the statement true ("geeks inside Google are much the same as geeks outside.") the average Google geek would need to be significantly more critical (internally) than the average outsider among the population that does not rule out a Google job for ethical reasons. That's hard to believe.

So, many layers are bad, but large span is also. This means you are limiting both width and depth of the management tree, effectively limiting the total size of the workforce to ... a few hundred? That doesn't sound right.

This part:

> I don't feel like I'm a member of many groups.

And this part:

> I suppose you could say I'm part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade,

So, you are belonging to three priviledged groups. Male, Caucasian, software engineer. It's easy to overlook this group membership, since it silently represents priviledge. Those outside these groups definitely notice that they are not in them. Ask a discriminated woman, a discriminated non-white, or an amazon warehouse worker.

That's why I pointed out that it's easy to forget group membership that confers priviledge.

> Also you're assuming a lot about my background

No, I went by exactly the information you conveyed yourself. See above.

Those with most priviledge are usually the least aware of it.

I've come to realize that "white male software engineer" is one of the groups with the highest ratio of priviledge versus priviledge awareness.

(Disclosure: I belong to that group as well.)

I generally agree with this particular point, but not with the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's problem and he should just suck it up.

It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works.

A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)

> It's a simple way of running something quickly and without touching the rest of your system

Providing a statically linked binary is even simpler, without all that extra complexity that comes with docker.

Ironically, that's what I expected the article to be about. Discussing cheating detection. Like it's f**ing title suggests.

I think you provided an example for the exact opposite of what you wanted to express.

An airplane better arrive before running out of fuel. Somewhere, at least. That's a real deadline. You can't negotiate yourself out of that one. Empty tank == you will land NOW. One way or the other. So this is all full of safety margins, extra fuel, alternates, etc etc. But there is a time span which every flight will not exceed. Guaranteed. The pilots better be prepared for this, otherwise they die.

A flight is usually structured with many "lesser" deadlines. Latest time to abort takeoff. Latest time to turn to an alternate. Latest time for this-or-that to make for a safe landing. Glide slope. Localizer. The whole procedure to land a plane is full of deadlines. If you miss one, you execute a go around. Until you are out of fuel, then you better nail it.

So, no. Deadlines are not pointless. They can make the difference between living and not living.

> "comments go out of date quickly, so there's no point in investing in them"

The key difference is where the described thing lives.

A comment describing the next few lines of code or some loop that follows, or similar, won't go out of date since it's easily updated together with what it describes.

A comment living in another file, describing loosely some far-reaching but still-evolving aspect will likely be outdated soon, if the thing it describes changes and that comment is out of sight and needs extra effort to be remembered and updated.

The illegal part about them is usually the fraud aspect. You tell your investors one thing but then do something else.

One may argue that that's part of the definition of a ponzi scheme, i.e., if you are open about it then it's not technically a ponzi scheme sincs it's lacking that particular necessary characteristic.

(With that definition, ponzifarm is not a ponzi scheme.)

> You're not describing a "creative" situation where you are building something new.

That's true. But the article is not titled "Why deadlines are pointless for creative processes." It's arguing that deadlines are pointless. Always. That's oversimplifying at best, click-baiting at worst.

I'd argue that even in a creative process, if you add enough of a safety margin on top of a conservative estimate, then a deadline can be expected to be met with reasonable confidence. This is absolutely necessary for doing business. "We release when it's ready" is a workable strategy when there are no obligations, but claiming that this always works in all other contexts is just not honestly considering other contexts.

> You are talking about a schedule not deadlines.

A schedule is a set of events happening at certain time, right? They have to happen at that time since there is a contractual agreement on them happening at that time, and if they don't happen at that previously-agreed-upon time, then there will be negative consequences. That's exactly what a deadline is.

My schedule for today says that I am to meet a certain customer today at 3pm. We have a contract with them that stipulates this. In order to be there at 3pm I need to get the train at 2:10pm and for that I need to be done showering latest at 2pm. I can't make it otherwise. 2pm is a deadline for me. Bad things will happen if I don't make it. I can't justsay, oh well, quality just wasn't enough. I had enough time to plan ahead and be in the shower on time.

Yes, imagine air travel was run without deadlines.

You've booked a flight on dec 1 at 3pm. You check in, sit at the gate. At 2:40pm you are informed that, sorry, the plane isn't actually there yet. It's still on route. We'll fly at 7pm instead. You sit and wait. At 6:45pm you are informed that the plane is there, but the airport is out of fuel. More fuel will be there tomorrow. Rescheduled for next morning at 8am. You wait. At 7:40am next morning you are informed that the pilots are not awake yet. They had a long day yesterday, then went for some drinks, they just had to sleep in today. Rescheduled to 11am. At 10:30am somebody tells you that, well, things are in place but ATC went to a team building event, all flights grounded, but will be back at 4pm. You finally lift off, 25 hours late.

Entirely preventable had a deadline be set and all necessary components be scheduled correctly to meet that deadline.

Deadlines serve a purpose beyond coersion. There is misuse, but if you widen your horizon then you may realize that not all of it is.

That's an interesting statement. Because I actually don't think it's true.

(Well obviously it's not and you were joking, but let's say you were not, for the sake of argument.)

Humans do this differently from machines. We look for strategies and have smarts to on-the-fly develop and refine heuristics that rapidly allow us to intuitively do branch-and-bound like algorithms and in the end solve this even though we brute force very litte, if at all.

That's why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It's a different approach. That's what makes machines better at certain things and humans at others. And there is a lot to be gained by trying to have machines also try human-like approaches to problems (strategy-developing rather than brute force).