MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavon | 2025-07-07 16:29:59+00:00
There is another case where companies slurped up all of the internet and profited off the information, that makes a good comparison - search engines.

Judges consider a four factor when examining fair use[1]. For search engines,

1) The use is transformative, as a tool to find content is very different purpose than the content itself.

2) Nature of the original work runs the full gamut, so search engines don't get points for only consuming factual data, but it was all publicly viewable by anyone as opposed to books which require payment.

3) The search engine store significant portions of the work in the index, but it only redistributes small portions.

4) Search engines, as original devised, don't compete with the original, in fact they can improve potential market of the original by helping more people find them. This has changed over time though, and search engines are increasingly competing with the content they index, and intentionally trying to show the information that people want on the search page itself.

So traditional search which was transformative, only republished small amounts of the originals, and didn't compete with the originals fell firmly on the side of fair use.

Google News and Books on the other hand weren't so clear cut, as they were showing larger portions of the works and were competing with the originals. They had to make changes to those products as a result of lawsuits.

So now lets look at LLMs:

1) LLM are absolutely transformative. Generating new text at users request is a very different purpose and character from the original works.

2) Again runs the full gamut (setting aside the clear copyright infringement downloading of illegally distributed books which is a separate issue)

3) For training purposes, LLMs don't typically preserve entire works, so the model is in a better place legally than a search index, which has precedent that storing entire works privately can be fair use depending on the other factors. For inference, even though they are less likely to reproduce the originals in their outputs than search engines, there are failure cases where an LLM over-trained on a work, and a significant amount the original can be reproduced.

4) LLMs have tons of uses some of which complement the original works and some of which compete directly with them. Because of this, it is likely that whether LLMs are fair use will depend on how they are being used - eg ignore the LLM altogether and consider solely the output and whether it would be infringing if a human created it.

This case was solely about whether training on books is fair use, and did not consider any uses of the LLM. Because LLMs are a very transformative use, and because they don't store original verbatim, it weighs strongly as being fair use.

I think the real problems that LLMs face will be in factors 3 and 4, which is very much context specific. The judge himself said that the plaintiffs are free to file additional lawsuits if they believe the LLM outputs duplicate the original works.

[1] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
by icyfox | 2025-07-07 16:30:08+00:00
Some text diffusion models use continuous latent space but they historically haven't done that well. Most the ones we're seeing now typically are trained to predict actual token output that's fed forward into the next time series. The diffusion property comes from their ability to modify previous timesteps to converge on the final output.

I have an explanation about one of these recent architectures that seems similar to what Mercury is doing under the hood here: https://pierce.dev/notes/how-text-diffusion-works/
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-07 16:30:11+00:00
I am a bit conflicted about this story, because this was a case when the hallucination is useful.

Amateur musicians often lack just one or two features in the program they use, and the devs won't respond to their pleas.

Adding support for guitar tabs has made OP's product almost certainly more versatile and useful for a larger set of people. Which, IMHO, is a good thing.

But I also get the resentment of "a darn stupid robot made me do it". We don't take kindly to being bossed around by robots.
by organsnyder | 2025-07-07 16:31:03+00:00
The difference here is that an LLM is a mechanical process. It may not be deterministic (at least, in a way that my brain understands determinism), but it's still a machine.

What you're proposing is considering LLMs to be equal to humans when considering how original works are created. You could make the argument that LLM training data is no different from a human "training" themself over a lifetime of consuming content, but that's a philosophical argument that is at odds with our current legal understanding of copyright law.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-07 16:31:10+00:00
Yeah, Macs IIRC just stored the keyboard input instead (the Enter key generates CR, which is also an old and venerable tradition, that's why there is ICRNL flag for the terminal input).

Obviously, in a perfect world we would have a single NL character for storing in text files in memory/on disk/in transit, and terminals would use entirely different CR and IND control codes, and internally translate NL to CR+IND combination when printing text, and send NL to the host as the keycode of the Enter key when it's pressed. Alas, that train has sailed long ago (and let's not even start on choosing BS versus DEL).
by tekkk | 2025-07-07 16:32:08+00:00
Heh heh. I dont understand what the fuss is about, AsyncQueue is kinda cool in JS. I use it, from time to time, to implement async generators that can be iterated over with for await.

Although my implementation doesnt have any sequencing as never had need for it but, more importantly, it has retrying and timeouts. Well retrying I might have implemented on level higher.

Maybe I'm just one of the rare few who actually would have enjoyed this type of question as a chance to brag about my version. Kinda neat as I've never been interested in programming challenges to, for once, know exactly the solution.
by pseudosavant | 2025-07-07 16:32:12+00:00
Just going to point out that down here in the US, there is tons of waiting with private insurance. Good luck seeing your actual primary care doctor (not some other doctor or physician's assistant) within 3 months. Specialists? Prepare to wait even longer. On an HMO insurance, make that even longer.

While private vs public might affect supply, there are other big factors going on that are limiting access to care.
by eesmith | 2025-07-07 16:32:57+00:00
> and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone.

Yes, as even the Malevil quote I gave pointed out. (At least by school age.)

> On top of that, it is more

The book was written over 50 years ago, so the Wikipedia article about present day use of Limousin isn't all that indicative of what it was like for the adult characters in the book, who would have been born before 1950.

> There are 10k speakers of Limousin

Why are you being so nit-picky? Look, this is a fictional place and the specific local language is never stated. I just today read the Wikipedia entry which give info about the location.

I specifically picked out Limousin, yes, because it fit the area, and because I could quote how the Limousin language was more widely spoken when the book was written than now.

But as the text I quoted says "Limousin ... is a dialect of the Occitan language". Wikipedia says there are about 200,000 speakers of Occitan, so that's the more relevant comparison, and "Though it was still an everyday language for most of the rural population of southern France well into the 20th century, the language is now declining in every region where it was spoken." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language

It seems to me that when Malevil was written, Occitan was still widely spoken as a first language in the area. Wikipedia says the author was living in the area when he wrote the book, so he should know.

The only reason I mentioned it was because you wrote "Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French." while the book, written by the French novelist Robert Merle - Wikipedia informs me he was "a household name in France, with the author repeatedly called the Alexandre Dumas of the 20th century" - comes across that speaking in patois was not a novelty but simply something expected, and which effectively all locals spoke.

I simply cannot reconcile your surprise with my reading and limited understanding except by assuming it's from before your time, from a mostly forgotten era.

> I suppose I grew up learning about the various dialects in France

That's .. kinda the issue, isn't? In Malevil the local language patois is not seen as a dialect of French, as I quoted, it was a language learned in school.

Wikipedia says it's more related to Catalan than French.

Why do you describe it as dialect of French?
by mathiaspoint | 2025-07-07 16:33:15+00:00
There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve and in many cases they would exacerbate the ones we do have.

Most of the issue is that there's too much administrative policy (whether the imposition is internal or external doesn't matter) for us to effectively communicate and collaborate. Unions would only add to that while collecting fees from us. Most of us are intelligent enough to know this which is why we never form them.
by kenjackson | 2025-07-07 16:33:26+00:00
> There's also the general problem with stop signs that if you do stop before the line as you're technically supposed to, then most times you can't actually see oncoming vehicle traffic.

In these cases there's usually some other violation that is occurring, e.g., cars parked too close to the intersection, or shrubbery not properly cut back. As you note, the result is often they have to go beyond the stop sign. Even worse, I often end up so far in the street that if there was a car that was within its lane, but on the right-most side of it, they'd hit me (fortunately most drivers are aware enough to stop).
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-07 16:33:40+00:00
Sure, don't use if you don't want to. I'm referring to versions of the claim I see around here like LLMs are useless. Being so uncurious as to refuse to figure out what a tool might be useful for is an anti-engineering mindset.

Just like you should be able to say something positive about Javascript (async-everything instead of a bolted-on async subecosystem, event loop has its upsides, single-threaded has its upsides, has a first class promise, etc) even if you don't like using it.
by cvoss | 2025-07-07 16:33:46+00:00
> I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.

This happens not infrequently to native English speakers. It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all people, was notorious for this.

Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the wrong syllable in "forage", "respite", and "parameter". Pronouncing "draught" like "fraught". Softening "chasm" and "chaos". And an extra syllable (long e sound) in "homogeneous".
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-07 16:34:11+00:00
As a dev that does a lot of his own design, I’ve never really understood the need to build a full fidelity reproduction of the layout systems a design is targeting. The limitations and considerations involved are deeply internalized and for the most part, I know exactly where designs tend to break and how to account for them. The layout system is effectively running in my head the entire time I’m mocking things up.

So while it’s nice to have tools to help with menial bits like correct spacing, getting every little behavior right in the mockup feels a lot like unnecessary busywork.

Naturally things are a bit different in a team setting, because it can’t be assumed that everybody involved has this level of knowledge/experience, but well… maybe it’s not crazy to expect designers to carry this set of skills, and it’s perhaps not a good thing for parties outside of design and engineering to be able to easily poke and prod at designs directly. Having the design team as a required intermediary helps sanity check changes.
by Apocryphon | 2025-07-07 16:34:16+00:00
Lots of usage of "no prior history"

> Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis.

> Speaking to Futurism, a different man recounted his whirlwind ten-day descent into AI-fueled delusion, which ended with a full breakdown and multi-day stay in a mental care facility. He turned to ChatGPT for help at work; he'd started a new, high-stress job, and was hoping the chatbot could expedite some administrative tasks. Despite being in his early 40s with no prior history of mental illness, he soon found himself absorbed in dizzying, paranoid delusions of grandeur, believing that the world was under threat and it was up to him to save it.

https://archive.is/WIqEr

> Mr. Torres, who had no history of mental illness that might cause breaks with reality, according to him and his mother, spent the next week in a dangerous, delusional spiral. He believed that he was trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality. He asked the chatbot how to do that and told it the drugs he was taking and his routines. The chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety medication, and to increase his intake of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, which ChatGPT described as a “temporary pattern liberator.” Mr. Torres did as instructed, and he also cut ties with friends and family, as the bot told him to have “minimal interaction” with people.
by supersour | 2025-07-07 16:35:15+00:00
yes, I definitely agree here. We've known for a long while that 1:1 therapy isn't the only way to treat depression, even if we aim to use psychotherapy methods like CBT/DBT.

David Burns released his CBT guide "Feeling Good" in 1980, which he labels as a new genre of "Bibliotherapy". His book is shown to have clinically significant effects on depression remission. Why can an LLM not provide a more focused and interactive version of this very book?

Now, I agree with you and the article's argument that one cannot simply throw a gpt-4o at a patient and expect results. The LLM must be trained to both be empathetic and push back against the user when necessary, forcing the user to build nuance in their mental narrative and face their cognitive distortions.
by kinow | 2025-07-07 16:35:48+00:00
No bubble here, I think. I'm also based in EU, Spain, where job market is super competitive right now, and it's quite hard to find candidates.

As I said, it doesn't need to be only public repositories. If I interview for containers, then I ask if they have something public on DockerHub, GitLab/GitHub registries. If the answer is no (happened just a few days ago), then I ask what they used. I expect them to say something like Artifactory, Nexus, a directory on a server or HPC, or just explain why they didn't need a registry. For me there is really no wrong answer here. But if they reply they don't have anything public, and have no idea what's a container registry, then that's probably bad -- this is what I think OP of this thread meant by eliminating candidates that are full of---.

> Where I live in Europe 90%+ of workers barring those currently in academia, have no public work because most companies don't publish their work, so you'd never hire anyone with that barrier.

My wife also works here, and she's a recruiter in a EU company, in cancer/research. Most applicants won't have things public in that case, but they can still explain things. If there is a candidate with similar profile, that managers liked, and they have a lot of good work, public, then it's up to managers. I just explain what I saw in the repositories, whether I'd work with the candidates, and the managers hiring choose based on risk for companies.

As you are based in EU, you probably have the same problem that the hiring process can be expensive for company, and risky if you eliminate candidates, and have to go back during the experience/trial period of candidates.
by soco | 2025-07-07 16:36:30+00:00
We are arguing exactly against those frameworks, while your argument, while true, is only repeating that one can do well within that framework. I'm european and I find annoying the fake smiles, the fake chitchat and the deep cleavage I will get from a tips-motivated worker. Basically this softcore prostitution is the only way letting them get some bread on the table, within that framework you refuse to change. The manager definitely sees the unskilled bartender and could raise the pay of the skilled one any time, and if they don't notice the difference I believe the bar has bigger problems anyway. So no, it's not the only framework available, and the way it's slowly reaching nowadays europe because that "capitalism means individualism" is just garbage to me. We've always lived in tribes, only today's social media is spreading those lies for pure political power.
by adolph | 2025-07-07 16:36:43+00:00
Alsup detailed Anthropic's training process with books: The OpenAI rival spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, which the company or its vendors then stripped of their bindings, cut the pages, and scanned into digital files.

I've noticed an increase in used book prices in the recent past and now wonder if there is an LLM effect in the market.
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by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-07-07 16:38:01+00:00
> "is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks" > sh, th, ee, oo, ou

That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people.

Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.

In German one can write strasse and straße or müller and mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don't have accents, but words written differently also sound different: schon = "already" and schön = "beautiful".

But German, on one hand retained diacritic marks, on the other it's also almost deterministic about pronunciation.

a it's always /a/

ä it's always /ɛ/ or /ə/ like e

sch it's always /ʃ/ as in schule

ch it's always /x/ after a, o, u and /ç/ after e, i

and so on

English doesn't use diacritics, IMO, because English doesn't make sense, it's a pastiche of lowest common denominators, so fck diacritics, they are too hard, let's write words as we like and pronounce them the way we feel they should sound, regardless of how they are written.

But it could use accents, for example rècord and recòrd, present and presènt, pérmit and permìt it's just they never thought it could be useful...
by pif | 2025-07-07 16:38:05+00:00
You are wrong on several levels.

1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel.

2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects.

3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it.

4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-07 16:38:26+00:00
> If anything CI got a lot slower over time as people tried to make builds fully hermetic (so no inter-run caching), and move them from on-prem dedicated hardware to expensive cloud VMs with slow IO, which haven't got much faster over time.

I am guesstimating (based on previous experience self-hosting the runner for MacOS builds) that the project I am working on could get like 2-5x pipeline performance at 1/2 cost just by using self-hosted runners on bare metal rented machines like Hetzner. Maybe I am naive, and I am not the person that would be responsible for it - but having a few bare metal machines you can use in the off hours to run regression tests, for less than you are paying the existing CI runner just for build, that speed up everything massively seems like a pure win for relatively low effort. Like sure everyone already has stuff on their plate and would rather pay external service to do it - but TBH once you have this kind of compute handy you will find uses anyway and just doing things efficiently. And knowing how to deal with bare metal/utilize this kind of compute sounds generally useful skill - but I rarely encounter people enthusiastic about making this kind of move. Its usually - hey lets move to this other service that has slightly cheaper instances and a proprietary caching layer so that we can get locked into their CI crap.

Its not like these services have 0 downtime/bug free/do not require integration effort - I just don't see why going bare metal is always such a taboo topic even for simple stuff like builds.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-07 16:38:55+00:00
Nothing wrong with a "rolling stop" if the sight lines are good and there are no pedestrians or crossing traffic. The point of a stop is to allow traffic to cross the intersection in a safe and orderly fashion. If you slow down, and verify that everything is clear, then that objective is achieved even if you don't come to a complete stop.

If these cameras were smart enough to issue citations when pedestrians or cross-traffic is present I could support it. But issuing a citation at a deserted intersection when no risk is created is just absurd.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-07 16:38:56+00:00
Digitizing the books is the equivalent of a blind person doing something to the book to make it readable to them... the software can't read analog pages.

Learning from the book is, well, learning from the book. Yes, they intended to make money off of that learning... but then I guess a medical student reading medical textbooks intends to profit off of what they learn from them. Guess that's not fair use either (well, it's really just use, as in the intended use for all books since they were first invented).

Once a person has to believe that copyright has any moral weight at all, I guess all rational though becomes impossible for them. Somehow, they're not capable of entertaining the idea that copyright policy was only ever supposed to be this pragmatic thing to incentivize creative works... and that whatever little value it has disappears entirely once the policy is twisted to consolidate control.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-07 16:39:00+00:00
With this special infinite-land-land though, what's special about the farmer's land is that he's expended energy to make it that way, just as the author has expended energy to find his text.

Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.

So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.
by dawnofdusk | 2025-07-07 16:39:03+00:00
>but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French

In fact it can be even more complicated because in English the words can come from Norman dialects and "typical" French simultaneously. For example, warden and guardian come from the same word in Old French, the former is closer to how Normans pronounce it and the latter is closer to its modern French pronunciation.