skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They dragged the term through different phases, but that’s just projection of will.

In other words, that's just the normal lifecycle of words in a language with an active speaker community. In any stage of history, the meaning of words is just the speaker community's projection of will.

Best I can do now is acknowledge that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic and can't be decided by a binary "is said object still there after alleged theft has occurred?". I've benefited from some digital theft, naturally, so I might be biased to uphold my own morality but the kind of theft contemporary AI tech has enabled is something else entirely. Somewhere there is where I draw the line.

Recently, I introduced a few friends to the works of digital artist wlop. The immediate reaction was "Is that AI?". I can't help but feel offended in behalf of wlop. It doesn't help that they have made LoRAs out of his work. It's not so much the "theft" of techniques/concepts/etc. that enrages me but rather, the theft of credibility that a human is capable of this output. I imagine Jeff Geerling (and, to a lesser extent, maybe ScarJo) is enraged along similar lines. In this AI summer, other people are fighting for their livelihoods, other people are fighting for their credibility. And, of course, there's an intersection of people whose credibility is their livelihood.

Note that in reframing it as theft of credibility, the owning party has been definitely injured to an extent. As in, said object (credibility) is no longer what it once was after alleged theft has occurred.

And I'm not trying to state some Universal Truths that I will debate to death. Again the whole point is that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic. I'm sure if you spend a bit more brainpower, you can find analogies that will make me look like a hypocrite. I'm just seeing this community lately strongly signal towards preserving some "original" meaning of words in the belief that it will solve some problem or another and I'm tired of it; I have similar linguistic thoughts about the whole uproar on the term "hallucination" but that's for another comment thread essay.

> People have to adjust expectations, not laws.

I know this thread is about theft but this attitude is downright dangerous in general. People should expect laws to adjust, lest they become irrelevant. Quick example: it's not fair to tell workers to adjust their expectation in light of the emergence of the gig economy. Should they just expect their labor to be exploited then, moving forward? I say, absolutely not. Legislation should catch-up to uphold/strengthen labor laws. Replace "gig economy" with "AI" and we are sort-of back on topic.
For every software that is not abandonware, there is always a recurring cost (besides cloud, there is support, security updates, aligning with OS updates, etc.).

There is something to be said for both sides. The counterpart to your argument is that, especially in niches or other markets where there is a dominant player, there isn't much incentive anymore to improve software when all your users are subscribers. The money comes in anyway. Besides that, you often see regular price increases in such markets because the user lost all power. If you end your subscription, there is no good alternative. In the pas you could just not update if the new pricing wasn't worth it.

The best balance may be in the JetBrains-like model, where you pay a yearly amount, but you keep access to historical versions when you decide to cancel. In this way money flows in for updating and improving the software. But if you fail to provide value, users can always cancel their 'subscription' and continue using the last version.
In what way is R less powerful when used through Rstudio than through the terminal?
I generally view churn and nice primitives to be the essential balancing act for a platform. Perhaps any leading edge (software)system. We aren’t going to get anything complex perfect the first time, so it is change or mediocrity.
Final Cut Pro > this should not be on the list. Versions require paying to upgrade and if you update macOS you end up having to pay for FCP.
I had a review for an Android game that was something along the lines of
"It's a great game, but not worth $1"
I'd say there is a fourth category too - things that would be perfectly fine as a simple, local program purchased once that grow over-complicated cloud features to justify a subscription model.

Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
They moved on because OpenAI immediately removed the voice.
Sure they can. If you pay 100-1200x more for your cloud services than you need, maybe not. And I guess that is a theme, if you have subscriptions you don't really need to care about expenses because you have a steady income. Absurd? Yes, but that is how our industry behaves. I'm appalled at what people are paying for the cloud that literally could be served from a raspberry pi. Yes, you need redundancy etc. and that takes time and thought. But have you ever factored in the time and expertise required to manage the cloud? It is incomprehensible.

So, how many subscriptions do you need to be able to maintain your software? Is 10 enough? No? Conclusion, subscriptions are not sustainable?

Similarly, how many purchases do you need to recoup the initial development? You will hardly break even after the first 10 sales. But once you do break even every single purchase goes 100% to maintenance and new features. That is a very good position to be in.

Of course it matters what kind of product you have and how big of an audience you can get. If it is very niche product and you only expect 100 sales then maybe a one off payment isn't particularly appealing. But then again, maybe the value lies in support instead. Or, of course, a subscription.

Paying for upgrades is also fine! But without shafting your current users. Compute is dirt cheap. If you sell someone a piece of software for $300 you can afford 20 cents per year for cloud costs to maintain your relationships.
Sorry, this distribution model worked in the 80s, 90s where it also originated from. Software was once installed on your desktop computer. No updates, no client/server model, just a black box without internet dependencies. I get the complaints that people wish back to a time where they purchased once the software but it doesn't work for SaaS, mobile phone apps or where i need to run a web server for the service. People easily forget about the hidden costs and why the software distribution model from ancient times doesn't cover the costs nowadays anymore.
One of the problems of no-one being liable for security, is that no-one has the incentive to thoroughly separate software you really need to trust, and that you care whether it's vulnerable to hacking, from that which you don't. "everything needs a revenue for security reasons" would make sense if companies were giving an effective security guarantee and investing in fulfilling it, which they aren't. If software liability existed, most providers would recuse themselves from the most security sensitive features and we'd have a few big providers doing stuff like syncing, handling long term data storage, sandboxing, etc. rather like now with credit card data. At which point a lot of software becomes unimportant to update.
I tend to think that destroying the nazis and the empire of japan was worth the extremely high cost. I'd hazard a guess that most ukrainians and russians and koreans and chinese and a whole swath of southeast asian peoples would agree.

Anyway, it's not a valid comparison when we're actively refusing to get involved in the conflict in any way that would risk our imperial interests.
If you’re using reference grade instruments, I would assume they’re calibrated in labs using well controlled environments.

I.e. put sensor in vacuum chamber, remove all gases, then introduce know amount of gases to produce a known target environment.

Given their reference instruments, I assume they’re also capable of maintaining their calibration for a long period of known time, before they need to be re-calibrated. They would never rely on something as inaccurate as “20 mins outdoors” to calibrate themselves.
I remember working in Taiwan in the late nineties and noticed that the PE2 editor for MSDOS was incredibly popular, because you could easily define macros that mapped to multi-character sequences, which combined with a BIOS that had character tables for simplified Chinese meant you could generate Chinese text without too much difficulty. To this day my vimrc has some of those PE2 macros :-)
So currently, if I Photoshop a picture of Scarlett Johansen into in an ad for my hot dog stand, that would be unambiguously no problem? Nobody's talking about making AI illegal, but some people seem to think it's a get-out-of-jail-free card for copyright violations, and it's just not.
I'm a solo dev/small team having a good time with .NET.
> Postgres and MySQL are free

Mariadb != MySQL... Same API, not the same product.
Thanks for your recommendation! I just ran Llamafile for the first time with a custom prompt on my Windows machine (i5-13600KF, RX6600) and found that it performed extremely slowly and wasn't as smart as ChatGPT. It doesn't seem suitable for productive writing. Did I do something wrong, or is there a way to improve its writing performance?
Have a look through this guys 'tactics' and maybe tweak your site.
https://www.kolenda.io/
Perpetual license. It is by far the best model imo. Allows the user control over the renewal cycle which is how it should be for apps that don’t need constant updates.
I have a very funny example of how using outdated words might lead to miscommunication, but unfortunately that particular one could get me banned, so let's just say that I'm a huge fan of picking a version of langauge from one specific time period and sticking to it, instead of having the reader do all the guesswork.
I assume Jeff wants cease and desist too as this seems more blatant on the surface. Starts a cat and mouse game until they find a variation they feel is different enough to ignore his pleads. Some will use this new clone tech for free publicity hack and others will claim it's still their voice and try to censor it as punishment for targeting them or not doing a bigger deal for the real voice and finding a better one.
I had a SuperH 3 powered HP Jornada that I ran Linux and NetBSD on back in the day. Not particularly fast, but power efficiency was off the charts, even when compared to the many contemporary ARM and MIPS based devices of the time.

Or at least that's how my nostalgic memories think of it.

It was really fun to have a pocketable laptop back in those days for me (baggy pants required). Good times.
I'm very uninformed on the topic, so thank you for the response. Based on the FCC Wikipedia article I do however think your premise is flawed:

1) you presume a collider only brings value if it can definitively prove/refute a theory, but the Wikipedia article lists a number of incremental improvements (ruling out "a very broad class of models for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the GeV – tens of TeV mass scale" as explanations for dark matter, improvements "in precision measurements of Electroweak precision observables" which supports other research, as well as "new avenues in the study of the collective properties of quarks and gluons"). Can you prove these incremental improvements have a lower RoI than other experiments that we're currently ignoring?

2) the 17bn euro don't disappear into a black hole. The development of these experiments requires R&D in areas (e.g. cryogenics & magnetics) that have produced a lot of value, but are often expensive to advance. Pushing these fields means that a portion of the budget will follow your suggestion, but it will be focused on important topics. It's hard for me to gauge the RoI of your suggested approach because you haven't suggested such a focus - can you give some examples?

In conclusion: you're treating the RoI of accelerators as boolean, but it's not. There's a bunch of definitive incremental improvements as well as useful side effects, even when disregarding the potential for discovering unknown physics.
It's not a strange take. It's recognizing that software goes to shit faster than it gains new features.

Continuing the Word example, enterprise users may indeed be better off with the most recent versions of MS Office suite, because of SharePoint and all other integrations in use. For a regular user, the best Word version to use is 20 years old.

FWIW, my wife stuck with ~15 year old Office version on her own computers, in spite - or rather, because - of having used more recent ones at work; it was only until this year that she was begrudgingly forced to update, as Windows 7 got EOL-ed and it was just simpler to download the current one than to dig out old disk images.

Enshittification is real. And so is the larger zeitgeist in software development and design, of declaring the users are idiots to justify disempowering them (whether through laziness or malice).

About the only new useful feature in the past decade, that became almost universal and that justifies subscriptions somewhat, is the "collaborative" aspect of syncing between devices. But note that the primary use of that is to be able to edit your work on multiple devices, which is effectively a per-application workaround over OS vendors being greedy and unable to get their collective shit together.
You would be surprised. When I still used Linux on the desktop, I stuck with Office 97 (IIRC) for a long time, because it was the only version that worked well with CrossOver Office (Wine-based). It worked well for a long time, opening other people's files etc., even as new versions of Office came out.
Hence my insistence that foreigners are also humans.

Why would the locals' wages be suppressed?

In any case, we could try to figure out how much locals' wages would be suppressed, then tax the migrant workers that amount, and pay the locals. Seems pretty straightforward.
>Does this mean people can own the patterns of vibration in air? It's completely nonsensical.

If you argue similarly, then the whole juridical system is nonsensical, because everything is just particles and waves, and different configurations thereof - not to mention the many protected things that are acts, which are neither particles nor waves, and are completely made up.

I'd say it's desirable to regulate something like this, however nonsensical-seeming, so that we can at least somewhat protect the individuals, and the general well-being of society.
https://i.imgur.com/SRzsvmI.png
Android lets you turn off all the lock screen security. Also before smartphones this wasn't even a thing, flip phones didn't even have a lock screen. Don't know if that's changed nowadays.
Those make great YouTube video titles.
Lionhead made amazing games, and it’s annoying that Molyneux had to hype them until they were certain disappointments.

I liked Fable, and while Black and White committed the sin of being two RTS games without multiplayer it remained really interesting and just a fun experience. But the game that really had me was The Movies. Its story mode was fun, but the movie maker within the game was really something different for a young teenager’s imagination. That is a game I’d really want to see rebuilt with modern tooling and hardware.
Looking at a lot of this stuff, "lifetime" is a bit misleading. It's for the life of the version. Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.

Of course, "forever" is only until everything around it leaves to the software not working, such as not supporting a new version of the OS it runs on.
AWS has been feeling like the least terrible of the big 3 lately. Domain registration is the canary for me. Only AWS does it right. Azure has some approach but they force you into a lock in service and rely on GoDaddy for the actual registration.

These vendors underestimate the impact of having something so fundamental managed by a weird 3rd party. Route53 gives me a lot of confidence that I'm not going to be jerked around with domains and DNS. This factors heavily into my purchasing decisions.
I can't believe how many people misunderstand the cancer quote. What he was quite correctly saying that if your code touches GPL, your code becomes GPL, too. Just like if your healthy organ accepts a metastasis it becomes cancer, too. It's just a statement of fact. Cancer is of course a emotionally loaded term, but it's also a physical process. When you make cells immortal they also become cancerous. So immortality=cancer => GPL = immortality
Jetbrains is the perfect example of a subscription based platform that I will happily pay for without any bad feelings. I pay yearly, after a few years you do get a discount (so I am a happy camper). And if at any point I decide I don't want to pay it anymore, I keep access to the latest version of the software I paid for.
While it's likely profitable, it's probably not generating AdSense level margin/growth.
A few Google-support-related threads on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799
> The original meaning of the word computer was a person who calculates.

Was that ever so?

According to Google Ngrams, "computer" was not really a term until, predictably, around 1950, even though the verb "compute" has been in use throughout history (it comes from the Latin "computare", apparently).

That tells me "computer" was never a person, always a machine.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=compute%2Ccomp...
For Python, we settled on using Jupyter notebooks for the first semester to teach the language itself, while gradually introducing all the paraphernalia.

This is of course introduces another problem of ‘two cultures’: Python people using Jupyter and the R community largely preferring Markdown.
Does anyone understand AI?
Assuming AWS/Azure were chosen due to thinly veiled bribery is unnecessarily reductive and in bad faith.
Anyone that thinks this is completely untrodden ground for copyright should ask an expert to definitely determine if someone's use of something is covered under fair use if it doesn't exactly and clearly satisfy all of the test prongs.
True enough, way beyond my old-school favs of Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, and GTA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_game_companies_...
And github != git, which we're still wrestling with over a decade in to its life. Yet, for some people 'github===git' so that just compounds the issue.
https://owncloud.com/compare-filesharing/owncloud-vs-nextclo...
If I may cite myself:

Don't forget that not every Make is GNU Make, BSD and other nix like Solaris/Illumos still exist.

And I'm not even talking about Windows and Nmake.
This tracks. Find someone who can find a way to take a natural idea and make it impossibly uncomfortable to use. He’s a classical designer stuck in a troll’s shell.
You can't even set spending limits on Google Cloud and have to use some obscure script that deactivates billing if you want to imitate it. The whole product is incredibly buggy and complicated.
Unless you also hate Image Editors, I don’t really get this point. Preserving forms of evidence isn’t really a primary concern when evaluating new useful technology.
> who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…

What about a phone service? What about cable? WAN? Recent "smart" insanity notwithstanding, those things are not updated on end-user side; every now and then, some hardware or wiring might get replaced, but the infrastructure part on the customer side is generally one-and-done, and customers pay only for the actual telecommunication service.
Feature request: show platform (Windows, Mac, Android, etc).

Especially since products can be one time payment on some platforms and subscription based on others (e.g. final cut pro is listed as one time payment but the ipad version is subscription based).
This sort of problem (speed) is a much overlooked secondary functionality requirement IMO.

You might get amazing UX mocks and wireframes and designs etc from the UX team, and the mockups from Figma or whatever may have user-tested really well, but if there is huge latency in the real implementation then that is a usability-killer IMO, regardless of how polished the UI is.
> War was avoidable.

The war started in 2014 and Ukraine has been preparing for full scale invasion ever since with or without western help.
Heck, the stupid Windows application for the "my number card" has this problem, and it is an official application coming from the government itself! How is it possible that in 2024 we still have this problem?
As usual comments here are more informative than the article. But no one mentioned that this is not a physics subject. The question “What is a particle?” belongs to philosophy not to physics. The problem for physicists is that they assume the Newtonian worldview that the world is made of indivisible units of matter called particles. [1] This assumption cannot be questioned. It is a dogma of the profession. But their experiments tell physicists again and again that the world is not made of indivisible units of matter. Physicists can either respect their experiments and accept that the world is not made of indivisible units of matter called particles or choose sophistry and try to fit their dogma into nature by wordplay. Physicists chose the latter and instead of dropping their dogma they keep changing the definition of the word “particle”. It does not matter what you call those indivisible units of matter. Physicists used to call them “particle” then “field”, then “excitation” and many other names that can be used case by case to save their sacred Newtonian dogma. Physicists’ dilemma is that they do business under the professional name of “particle” physicists. If there is no particle their profession would be redundant. Obviously they cannot call themselves “excitations of the field physicists”. So they keep the word particle but keep changing the meaning of it and they blame the public for not understanding physics jargon. My advice to physicists: respect the authority of your own experiments and drop the Newtonian dogma of a material world made of indivisible units of matter.

[1] "God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable movable particles." Isaac Newton, Optics, 1704, Book III, page: 375
That is a good point. At some point I started spending way too much on mobile payments.
Don't ask me. One could argue that this is the version they included in some early version and have kept for compatibility reasons, but that doesn't make(sic!) sense.
It's not a "lifetime" payment unless you can run it off-line. If the software needs to talk to vendor licensing/authentication services, then any "lifetime" license is a lie for the reasons you mention.
(Obviously not a lawyer) Overlooking the AI part, isn't it a gross misrepresentation of Jeff's opinion or an unauthorized use of his image? By using his voice, it creates an implicit (fabricated) endorsement for their product and that feels very wrong. I'm sure laws exists to deal with these cases, since way before AI existed.