Unlurker|Replay|About
Apple's Second Limited-Edition Accessory in a Month: Hikawa Phone Grip and Stand (macrumors.com)
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Although before dissing somethign from Apple as a cynical money-grab, would love to hear if anyone uses something like this and if it's helpful.
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"Accessory designed with accessibility in mind" and has a price tag of $70. That's what I call accessibility.
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Well... I mean... Apple's never going to sell anything it can't get insane margins on. The moment it does, it's multiple will collapse. Also fairly certain there's no one left at Apple who remembers when they had a decent ux and #a11y research team.
Don't be a scary old guy: My 40s survival strategy with charm (devas.life)
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Best advice on this topic: How to Age Gracefully | CBC Radio https://youtu.be/sycgL3Qg_Ak [Spoiler] "Dear 91-year old, don't listen to other people's advice. Nobody knows what the hell they're doing. Signed, a 93-year old."
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"The fewer shared reference points you have with someone, the more important it is to approach them with a soft, relaxed attitude. " Banger
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These are the standard realisations of a teenager
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Decent advice. Also, get fit.
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I seem to have become scarier in my old age. People seem to pay more attention and react more strongly to me that they used to, but all I did was get older and uglier. Whatever physicality I had has waned, but moral presence has waxed. Maybe it's a remaining respect for elders rather than something to do with me. But it has made me more careful with hiding my grumpiness.
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Regardless of agreeing with the advice, a 41yo giving advice on surviving the 40s seems a bit arrogant. Being 41 is different from 46 which is different from 49, and he just doesn't know yet. The right title should be "how I feel after a year in my 40s".
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It's his strategy going forward. He isn't saying he completed his 40s at the age of 41. You would prefer he share his strategy for 40s at 50? Seems pedantic.
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I hate to admit this but balding has been a really really stressful thing for me getting into 40. I didn't think it would be, I hardly looked in the mirror at the best of times during my 20s and 30s, but I've been rapidly balding over the past 2/3 years and I can see by this time next year...I'll be bald. I'm at the point I've been considering going to turkey, but I think the most surprising thing to me is just now much it bothers me, consumes considerably too much thought, it's brutal!!
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Lean into it and shave your head… I started balding at 18 but regret not shaving my head until my mid 30s… it eliminated all of my anxiety about it, and women seemed to find me more attractive.
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I started thinning in my early 20s and by my late 20s I was hanging on for dear life to too little scalp hair. Then one day I decided enough was enough and I just shaved my head. 20 years later I wouldn't go back to a full head of hair. It's easier than having a hairstyle, quicker than having a hairstyle, cheaper than having a hairstyle, and best of all, any time I've gotten hot and sweaty, I can just chuck some water over my head in a sink and enjoy whole-scalp-cooling!
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Embrace it, friend. Shave it all off and grow a goatee (Breaking Bad style). You'll get your mojo back and be better off for it.
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Don't forget to learn to play the base guitar!
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Finasteride and minoxidil are a lifesaver
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Make sure you're lean and muscular before you lose it all.
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Jesus. If at 40 you're already seeing yourself old and worried about survival something must be wrong. At 40 you're barely at the halfway point of your career since we're gonna have to work till our 70's anyway, so buckle up for another 30+ years.
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"Forty is the old age of youth. Fifty is the youth of old age." The thing about 40 is, you're not old, but you see your youth dying. If your identity is in being young, sexy, fit, athletic, then that may be brutal . Depends on what your identity is in, and how you handle the loss of it.
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Good news is, I was never sexy, fit or athletic, so I will never be disappointed.
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This is ageism and it's rampant and very problematic. He is ageist against himself almost as much as society is. You should not need to do anything special to be a 40 or 50 year old (or whatever) and fit in with a group. This is one of the last 'isms' that society has yet to tackle. But society will eventually become less ageist as it ages more and more.
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> He is ageist against himself almost as much as society is. I think he's just trying to be proactive with an insurance policy to cushion the blow since societal ageism is completely out of your control. You might not believe in ageism being real, but if the job market does, then you're shit out of luck, so might as well start prepping for it. >But society will eventually become less ageist as it ages more and more. I doubt it. Employers will just demand more immigration that's more youthful and more exploitable or just offshore more. Where I live in EU, there really isn't a huge market for white collar workers over 50 despite society already skewing quiet old. One compounding issue is that in my country once you hit 50 you get firing protections so nobody wants to hire someone they won't be able to fire, especially if the industry is full of ambitious young blood like in SW.
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I'm sixty and still don't see myself as old. 41 is still young.
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I'm merely 47 and I don't really feel like I'm any older than I was in my 20s. Smarter hopefully, wiser certainly, but I never really completely put away childish things.
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> I'd like to share my survival strategy for the 40s > thanks to what I built up through my 20s and 30s, I can live the way I do now TL;DR Be rich.
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You are surely privileged if you can make your living off indie software and are working for yourself where you have more flexibility on structuring your day, but I'd not call that "rich" in the regular sense.
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I think in today's world, being rich just means being able to wither layoffs without becoming homeless. Building any kind of meaningful wealth for early retirement, is out of reach most people.
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I don’t understand the HN algo anymore
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You can't imagine why a forum of predominantly adult men in their late twenties to mid forties would be interested in an article about aging gracefully and maintaining warm healthy relationships with their peers?
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Because it's so elementary?
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it's really not. It's easy for some, sure and you're maybe one of them (or perhaps mistaken!) but many, many MANY people, especially men, even intelligent men struggle with social situations and maintaining healthy social relationships.
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Be nice? Don't be a know it all? Even if you don't believe it you've surely heard people say it sometime in the last 40 years. Autism notwithstanding, and that probably accounts for a decent share of the readership
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Just flag it.
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It's quite simple. No major algorithm, people who tinker vote on things that scratches their minds like this article does.
Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant (thepost.co.nz)
In many countries in EU, real estate is the crypto. The only investment vehicle without capital gains tax. Maybe it's causing demographic catastrophe, but at least few people make a lot of money.
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>> The only investment vehicle without capital gains tax real estate? This is the most common asset that triggers a capital gain for most people.
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Let me introduce you the country of Poland. Other countries like e.g. Czechia tightened the rules but it's already too late looking at prices in Prague.
Denmark says hold my beer, as usual with taxes. Gains are taxed at 37-51%, as regular income. Losses can only be deducted at about 26%. You can be in loss from crypto trading and still owe taxes in DK. Yay!
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Why even bother making money at all?
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that's wild - I guess they (knowingly or not) really want to discourage speculative and volatile investments!
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How buying Novo Nordisk or Maersk is a volatile investment? It's to keep peasants away from capital markets.
Perhaps in New Zealand but VERY unlikely in the U.S. what with current governance.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/22/new-irs-requirements-crypto-tax-cheat-risky-this-year-filing.html
> However, gains made from trading assets, including property, were taxed, and that caught crypto investors as the dominant reason for buying crypto assets is to later sell make a gain, rather than holding them as a long term asset like a home, or rental property. Unfortunately what constitutes “trading” vs “holding” is ill defined in NZ law. At least with shares you can make a case you’re holding them for dividends, that defence isn’t available for crypto.
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I don't think this is specific case here; seems more like less sophisticated investors buying new products don't know that selling them triggers a capital gain at the time of the transaction, regardless of what they may do with the proceeds AFTER the transaction date. In a nuteshell: a successful investment and an unsuccessful investment will be treated as independent events at the time the transaction occurs.
Ask HN: Do AIs reply with numerous em dashes to save money somehow?
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It's being speculated it's because of RLHF where the humans are from some place in the world (don't remember which place) there they use emdashes.
No. For hundreds of years authors loved to use the em dash. It was a sign of quality writing. Only very recently has it stopped getting used and only because the - is on the wrong side of the keyboard and it's becoming more a hyphen instead. When someone uses an em dash, it implies they arent using a normal keyboard; not even dvorak.
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But an emdash is incredibly easy to type on a Mac — it's shift+option+minus, or option+minus to type an endash
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But MS word automatically converts a '-' to an emdash
TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term (uncoveralpha.com)
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5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926371 Sparse models have same quality of results but have less coefficients to process, in case described in the link above sixteen (16) times as less. This means that these models need 8 times less data to store, can be 16 and more times faster and use 16+ times less energy. TPUs are not all that good in the case of sparse matrices. They can be used to train dense versions, but inference efficiency with sparse matrices may be not all that great.
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This is the “Microsoft will dominate the Internet” stage. The truth is the LLM boom has opened the first major crack in Google as the front page of the web (the biggest since Facebook), in the same way the web in the long run made Windows so irrelevant Microsoft seemingly don’t care about it at all.
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Given the importance of scale for this particular product, any company placing itself on "just" one layer of the whole story is at a heavy disadvantage, I guess. I'd rather have a winning google than openai or meta anyway.
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[delayed]
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Google's real moat isn't the TPU silicon itself—it's not about cooling, individual performance, or hyper-specialization—but rather the massive parallel scale enabled by their OCS interconnects. To quote The Next Platform: "An Ironwood cluster linked with Google’s absolutely unique optical circuit switch interconnect can bring to bear 9,216 Ironwood TPUs with a combined 1.77 PB of HBM memory... This makes a rackscale Nvidia system based on 144 “Blackwell” GPU chiplets with an aggregate of 20.7 TB of HBM memory look like a joke." Nvidia may have the superior architecture at the single-chip level, but for large-scale distributed training (and inference) they currently have nothing that rivals Google's optical switching scalability.
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> The GPUs were designed for graphics [...] However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” [...] A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping. With simulations becoming key to training models doesn't this seem like a huge problem for Google?
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I have read in the past that ASICs for LLMs are not as simple a solution compared to cryptocurrency. In order to design and build the ASIC you need to commit to a specific architecture: a hashing algorithm for a cryptocurrency is fixed but the LLMs are always changing. Am I misunderstanding "TPU" in the context of the article?
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It’s true that architectures change, but they are built from common components. The most important of those is matrix multiplication, using a relatively small set of floating point data types. A device that accelerates those operations is, effectively, an ASIC for LLMs.
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We used to call these things DSPs
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It's a cool subject and article and things I only have a general understanding of. What I'm sure about is having a programming unit more purposed to a task is more optimal than a general programming unit designed to accommodate all programming tasks. More and more of the economics of programming boils down to energy usage and invariably towards physical rules, the efficiency of the process has the benefit of less energy consumed. As a Layman is makes general sense. Maybe a future where productivity is based closer on energy efficiency rather than monetary gain pushes the economy in better directions. Cryptocurrency and LLMs seem like they'll play out that story over the next 10 years.
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How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?
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The US would destroy TSMC before letting China have it. China also views military conquest of Taiwan as less than ideal for a number of reasons, so I think right now it's seen as a potential defensive move in the face of American aggression.
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Highly unlikely. Despite the rampant anti-Chinese FUD that's so prevalent in the media (and, sadly, here on HN), China isn't really in the habit of invading other lands.
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The plot twist here is that China doesn't view Taiwan as foreign.
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If they have the fabs but ASML doesn't send them their new machines, they will just end up in the same situation as now, just one generation later. If China wants to compete, they need to learn how to make the EUV light and mirrors.
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Seems low at the moment with the concept of G2 being floated as generic understanding of China's ascension to where Russia used to be effectively recreating bipolar semi cold war world order. Mind, I am not saying impossible, but there are reasons China would want to avoid this scenario ( probably one of the few things US would not tolerate and would likely retaliate ).
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Not very. Those fabs are vulnerable things, shame if something happens to them. If China attacks, it would be for various other reasons and processors are only one of many considerations, no matter how improbable it might sound to an HN-er.
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What if China becomes self-sufficient enough to no longer rely on Taiwanese Fabs, and hence having no issues with those Fabs getting destroyed. That would put China as the leader once and for all.
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https://killedbygoogle.com
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It's all small products which didn't receive traction.
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Wait until Apple's ChromeBook competitor shows up to eat their lunch just like switching to another proprietary stack with no dev ecosystem will die out. Sure they'll go after big ticket accounts, also take a guess at what else gets sanctioned next.
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Google Hangouts wasn't small. Google+ was big and supposedly "the future" and is the canonical example of a huge misallocation of resources. Google will have no problem discontinuing Google "AI" if they finally notice that people want a computer to shut up rather than talk at them.
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> Google+ was big how you define big? My understanding they failed to compete with facebook, and decided to redirect resources somewhere else.
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It's not though. Chromecast, g suite legacy, podcast, music, url shortener,... These weren't small products.
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chromecast is alive, podcast, music were migrated to youtube app, url shortener is not core business and just side hustle for google. Not familiar with g suite legacy.
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Google has always had great tech - their problem is the product or the perseverance, conviction, and taste needed to make things people want.
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Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now. I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.
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In my 20+ years of following NVIDIA, I have learned to never bet against them long-term. I actually do not know exactly why they continually win, but they do. The main issue they have a 3-4 year gap between wanting a new design pivot and realizing it (silicon has a long "pipeline"), it can seem that they may be missing a new trend or swerve in the demands of the market, it is often simply because there is this delay.
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Fair, but the 75% margins can be reduced to 25% with healthy competition. The lack of competition in the frontier chips space was always the bottleneck to commoditization of computation, if such a thing is even possible
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You could have said the same thing about Intel for ~50 years.
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That and the fact they can self-fund the whole AI venture and don't require outside investment.
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The most fun fact about all the developments post-ChatGPT is that people apparently forgot that Google was doing actual AI before AI meant (only) ML and GenAI/LLMs, and they were top players at it. Arguably main OpenAI raison d'être was to be a counterweight to that pre-2023 Google AI dominance. But I'd also argue that OpenAI lost its way.
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And they forgot to pay those people so most of them left.
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To be fair, they weren't increasing Ads revenue.
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They literally gave away their secret sauce to OpenAI and pretended like it wasn’t a big opportunity.
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That and they were harvesting data before it was cool, and now that it is cool, they're in a privileged position since almost no-one can afford to block GoogleBot. They do voluntarily offer a way to signal that the data GoogleBot sees is not to be used for training, assuming you take them at their word, but AFAIK there is no way to stop them doing RAG on your pages without destroying your SEO in the process.
Right because people would love to get locked into another even more expensive platform.
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That's mentioned in the article, but is the lock-in really that big? In some cases, it's as easy as changing the backend of your high-level ML library.
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I thin k you can only run on google cloud not aws bare metal azure etc
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That's what it is on paper. But in practice you trade one set of hardware idiosyncrasies for another and unless you have the right people to deal with that, it's a hassle.
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On top, when you get locked into Google Cloud, you’re effectively at the mercy of their engineers to optimize and troubleshoot. Do you think Google will help their potential competitors before they help themselves? Highly unlikely considering their actions in the past decade plus.
A question I don't see addressed in all these articles: what prevents Nvidia from doing the same thing and iterating on their more general-purpose GPU towards a more focused TPU-like chip as well, if that turns out to be what the market really wants.
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It's not that the TPU is better than an NVidia GPU, it's just that it's cheaper since it doesn't have a fat NVidia markup applied, and is also better vertically integrated since it was designed/specified by Google for Google.
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They lose the competitive advantage. They have nothing more to offer than what Google has in-house.
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They will, I'm sure. The big difference is that Google is both the chip designer *and* the AI company. So they get both sets of profits. Both Google and Nvidia contract TSMC for chips. Then Nvidia sells them at a huge profit. Then OpenAI (for example) buys them at that inflated rate and them puts them into production. So while Nvidia is "selling shovels", Google is making their own shovels and has their own mines.
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Aka vertical integration.
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That's pretty much what they've been doing incrementally with the data center line of GPUs versus GeForce since 2017. Currently, the data center GPUs now have up to 6 times the performance at matrix math of the GeForce chips and much more memory. Nvidia has managed to stay one tape out away from addressing any competitors so far. The real challenge is getting the TPU to do more general purpose computation. But that doesn't make for as good as story. And the point about Google arbitrarily raising the prices as soon as they think they have the upper hand is good old fashioned capitalism in action.
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For users buying H200s for AI workloads, the "ASIC" tensor cores deliver the overwhelming bulk of performance. So they already do this, and have been since Volta in 2017. To put it into perspective, the tensor cores deliver about 2,000 TFLOPs of FP8, and half that for FP16, and this is all tensor FMA/MAC (comprising the bulk of compute for AI workloads). The CUDA cores -- the rest of the GPU -- deliver more in the 70 TFLOP range. So if data centres are buying nvidia hardware for AI, they already are buying focused TPU chips that almost incidentally have some other hardware that can do some other stuff. I mean, GPUs still have a lot of non-tensor general uses in the sciences, finance, etc, and TPUs don't touch that, but yes a lot of nvidia GPUs are being sold as a focused TPU-like chip.
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Is it the Cuda cores that run the vertex/fragment/etc shaders in normal GPUs? Where does the ray tracing units fit in? How much of a modern Nvidia GPU is general purpose vs specialized to graphics pipelines?
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That's exactly what Nvidia is doing with tensor cores.
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Except the native width of Tensor Cores are about 8-32 (depending on scalar type), whereas the width of TPUs is up to 256. The difference in scale is massive.
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Nothing in principle. But Huang probably doesn't believe in hyper specializing their chips at this stage because it's unlikely that the compute demands of 2035 are something we can predict today. For a counterpoint, Jim Keller took Tenstorrent in the opposite direction. Their chips are also very efficient, but even more general purpose than NVIDIA chips.
The State of GPL Propagation to AI Models (shujisado.org)
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Training is not redistribution. It's the exact same as you as a person learning to program from proprietary secret code, and then writing your own original code independently. Even if you repeat patterns and methods you've picked up from that proprietary learning material, it is by no means redistribution. The practical differentiator here is that you do not access the proprietary material during the creation of your own original work, similar in principle to a clean-room design . With AI/ML, it matters that training data is not accessed during inference, which it's not. The other factor of copyright, which is relevant, is how material is obtained. If the material is publicly accessible without protection, you have no reasonable expectation to exclusive control over its use. If you don't want AI training to be done on your work, you need to put access to it behind explicit authentication with a legally-binding user agreement prohibiting that use-case. Do note that this would lose your project's status as open-source.
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so basically we download the sources files to the training weight and remove the LICENSE.MD as it's exactly the same as a person learning to program from proprietay secret code /s
Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did? Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original material, does it make sense to regulate it? Not that I like the idea, just wondering. I have been thinking for a while that LLMs are copyright-laundering machines, and I am not sure if there is anything we can do about it other than accepting that it fundamentally changes what copyright is. Should I keep open sourcing my code now that the licence doesn't matter anymore? Is it worth writing blog posts now that it will just feed the LLMs that people use? etc.
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> Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did? An inverse of this question is arguably even more relevant: how do you prove that the output of your model is not copyrighted (or otherwise encumbered) material? In other words, even if your model was trained strictly on copyleft material, but properly prompted outputs a copyrighted work is it copyright infringement and if so by whom? Do not limit your thoughts to text only. "Draw me a cartoon picture of an anthropomorphic with round black ears, red shorts and yellow boots". Does it matter if the training set was all copyleft if the final output is indistinguishable from a copyrighted character?
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Its why I stopped contributing to open source work. Its pretty clear in the age of LLMs that this breach of the license under which it is written will be allowed to continue and that open source code will be turned into commercial products.
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genuine question: why you are training your model with content that explicitly will have requirements violated if you do?
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out of pure spite for hypocritical "hackers"
Anyone can very easily avoid training on GPL code. Yes, the model might be not be as strong as one that is trained that way and released under terms of the GPL, but to me that sounds like quite a good outcome if the best models are open source/open weight. Its all about whose outcomes are optimized. Of course, the law generally favors consideration of the outcomes for the massive corporations donating hundreds of millions of dollars to legislature campaigns.
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Would it even actually help to go down that road though? IMO the expected outcome would simply be that AI training stalls for a bit while "unencumbered" training material is being collected/built up and you achieve basically nothing in the end, except creating a big ongoing logistical/administrative hassle to keep lawyers/bureaucrats fed. I think the redistribution effect (towards training material providers) from such an scenario would be marginal at best, especially long-term, and event that might be over-optimistic. I also dislike that stance because it seems obviously inconsistent to me-- if humans are allowed to train on copyrighted material without their output being generally affected, why not machines?
Honest question: why don’t you think it is fair use? I can see how it pushes the boundary, but I can’t lay out logic that it’s not. The code has been publish for the public to see. I’m always allowed to read it, remember it, tell my friends about it. Certainly, this is what the author hoped I would do. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have kept it to themselves? These agents are just doing a more sophisticated, faster version of that same act.
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Some project like Wine forbids you to contribute if you ever have seen the source of MS Windows [1]. The meatball inside your head is tainted. I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They printed every single screen and made a team write a full specification in English. Later another separate team look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it. Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain English text loophole was safe enough. [1] From https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ#who-cant-contribute-to-wine > Who can't contribute to Wine? > Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who has seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an NDA, disassembled, or otherwise). There are some exceptions for the source code of add-on components (ATL, MFC, msvcrt); see the next question.
Before LLMs programmers had pretty good intuition what GPL license allowed for. It is of course clear that you cannot release a closed source program with GPL code integrated into it. I think it was also quite clear, that you cannot legally incorporate GPL code into such a program, by making changes here and there, renaming some stuff, and moving things around, but this is pretty much what LLMs are doing. When humans do it intentionally, it is violation of the license, when it is automated and done on a huge scale, is it really fair use?
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> this is pretty much what LLMs are doing I think this is the part where we disagree. Have you used LLMs, or is this based on something you read?
That is not really correct, the GNU GPL doesn't have any terms whatsoever on how you can use, or modify the program to do things. You're free to make a GNU GPL program do anything (i.e., use). I suggest a careful reading of the GNU GPL, or the definition of Free Software, where this is carefully explained.
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> You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: "A work based on the program" can be defined to include AI models (just define it, it's your contract). "All of these conditions" can include conveying the AI model in an open source license. I'm not restricting your ability to use the program/code to train an AI. I'm imposing conditions (the same as the GPL does for code) onto the AI model that is derivative of the licensed code. Edit: I know it may not be the best section (the one after regarding non-source forms could be better) but in spirit, it's exactly the same imo as GPL forcing you to keep the GPL license on the work
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I think maybe you're mixing up distribution and running a program, at least taking your initial comment into account, "if you train/run/use a model, it must be open source".
I like the GPL. I just don't know how much you can actually enforce it. Also, "don't use my code" is not viral. If you break the MSFT license, you pay them, which is a very well-tested path in courts. The idea of forced public disclosure does not seem to be.
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How much do you pay them? If the GPL license didn't exist, and instead you just relying on copyright, then that's an injunction. You have to stop using the code you "stole" and pay reparations. In UK law, if you distribute copyright material in the course of a business you can be facing 10 years in prison and an unlimited fine. Sure you can't get them to agree to the GPL, they could simply stop distributing and then turn up to their stint in prison and massive fine. In reality I suspect they would take the easy way out and comply with the license.
It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules. You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.
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It's not just words, except to the extent the law is "just words". You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under "the GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist. What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you are allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone: * using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or * coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that) If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3]. As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" usage has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc._v._Cisco_Systems,_Inc . [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits [3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wakeup-call-for-open-source-users-french-court-awards-damages-for-gpl-violations
> To my understanding, if the material is publicly available or obtained legally (i.e., not pirated), then training a model with it falls under fair use. Is this legally settled?
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Yes. There have been multiple court cases affirming fair use.
They're busy trying to profit from it rushing to enter into licensing agreements with the LLM vendors.
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Yeah, the short term win is to enter a licensing agreement so you get some cash for a couple years, meanwhile pray someone else with more money fights the legal battle to try and set a precedent for you
AGI is not possible even in 10 years (medium.com)
It seems to me by most classical definitions we've basically already reached AGI. If I were to show Gemini 3 Pro to anyone in tech 10 years ago they would probably say Gemini 3 is an AGI, even if they acknowledged there was some limitations there. The definition has moved so much that I'm not convinced that even if we see further breakthroughs over the next 10 years people will say we've finally reached AGI because even at that point it's probable there might still be 0.5% of tasks it struggles to compete with humans on. And we're going to have similar endless debates about ASI and the consciousness of AI. I think all that matters really is utility of AI systems broadly within society. While a self-driving car may not be an AGI, it will displace jobs and fundamentally change society. The achievement of some technical definition of AGI on the other hand is probably not all that relevant. Even if goal posts stop moving from today and advancements are made such that we finally get 51% of experts agreeing that AGI has been reached there could still be 49% of expert who argue that it hasn't. On the other hand, one will be confused about whether their job has been replaced by an AI system. I'm sorry - I know this is a bit of a meta comment. I do broadly agree with the article. I just struggle to see why anyone cares unless hitting that 51/49% threshold in opinion on AGI correlates to something tangible.
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LLMs do NOT have intelligence. Achieving AGI would mean solving self-driving cars, replacing programmers, scientist, etc. All things LLMs are currently unable to do in a way that replaces humans. There's a huge gap between what Gemini 3 can do and what AGI promises to do. It's not just a minor "technical definition".
It's not possible even in 10 years (.. but maybe in 11). What a shift in the last 5 years (never -> 100 years -> 11)
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“ Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do.” - Herbert Simon, 1965
For text and image-based tasks they are infinitely better than a human. What they lack are arms to interact with the physical world, but once this is done this is a giant leap forward (example: they will obviously be able to do experiments to discover new molecules by translating their steps-by-steps reasoning to physical actions, to build more optimized cars, etc). For now human is smarter in some real-world or edge cases (e.g. super specialist in a specific science), but for any scientific task an average human is very very weak compared to the LLMs.
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There are forms of science that don't involve "arms". Why don't we see a single research paper involving research entirely undertaken by AI? AI development and research itself doesn't need "arms". Why don't we just put AI in a box and let it infintely improve itself? Why doesn't every company that employs someone who just uses a computer replace them with AI? Why are there no businesses entirely run by AIs that just tell humans what to do. Why don't the AIs just use CAD and electronic simulation to design themselves some "arms"? Why can't AI even beat basic videogames that children can beat? The gap is huge.
Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes (scienceclock.com)
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One reason I like CBS’s Elementary’s depiction of Sherlock (maybe more so than BBC’s Sherlock) is because how Elementary treats Sherlock’s mental health and addiction recovery as central to the character. As great as Sherlock is at solving cases, he still struggles greatly to handle his own mental health and addiction recovery, which makes him more grounded to earth.
This is 100% not true. > An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted. It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.
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Over-emphasized maybe, but myth? Could Doyle have written a sympathetic lonely depressed addict so well without more than academic understanding of those things?
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Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.
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Yeh, I agree with this. My art (painting and building) comes at a much faster rate when I am content. Having time and metal space to contemplate colour scheme, being confident to start something bold: that doesn't happen if I am tired, preoccupied or depressed
I'm not sure I'd refer to some of these individuals as "luminaries" which typically has a positive connotation.
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Fair!
Yet the UK was most successful when led by people from that system.
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Only if you think a large empire is the epitome of success. People have a tendency to look at the cruelest warriors of history and think that is success. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Napoleon are not something to emulate. They were successful by causing horrific pain to a lot of people.
I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...
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Ah yes, the old "out of sight, out of mind"-solution. Only it never solves anything.
"Trauma" ultimately just means "severe injury" or something like that, doesn't it? We take it for granted that virtually no one will make it through life without ever sustaining a serious or enduring physical injury. Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?
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I think the reason why mental health is more public these days is because it wasn't talked about and addressed. To extend you physical injury analogy: yes, people get physically injured. People break legs, and because of the focus and progress on physical injuries, they wear a cast for a few weeks, and then - for all practical intents and purposes - the injury never happened. Because the same attention wasn't applied to mental health, I think people realised they were surrounded by the equivalent of people dragging themselves around on the ground because of a broken leg a decade ago that never got fixed. Why would anyone do that? Either because they don't know about the treatment, or because they live in an environment where the idea of getting treatment is seen as a bad or weak or shameful thing. > Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too? Just like we expect to walk down the street and see the occasional person with a plaster or bandage to handle a physical injury, if you accept we all have mental injuries, why do you expect to see them handled any more privately than physical ones?
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No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.
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If obsessing about such injuries was sufficient to heal them, they would all be long solved.
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Your view is representing a traditionally more masculine point of view. A more feminine point of view is that we should shield against experiences that lead to a trauma. What we want as a society is a democratic process, and it is heavily up for negotiation these years. It is completely fine. Personally, my core belief is that whatever we ultimately decide on, it counts for all equivalent regardless of their gender.
> Too much psychology talk in every day life I'm curious to hear how often do you hear it in every day life outside of the internet.
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Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves. There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic. There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc. There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc. It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
Half of these aren't people talking about mental health problems , but preconditions for mental health. That's your problem?
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Seems like we both agree that psychological language can be common in everyday offline life, such as at work for a large company. I don't have a problem with it, not sure where you got that from.
I'd be surprised if the people I worked with would think twice before working with someone that's been in psychiatric care, though I can't be sure, because I don't know that any of them did. I know that I wouldn't care. I have friends that stayed in hospitals for psychiatric reasons: they'd be great to work with, I think.
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It’s still definitely a big deal. Note that the CIA and the NSA routinely declare ex-employees that whistleblow or leak as “mentally ill.” It depends on the company. I worked for fairly “stolid” companies, for most of my career, and I suspect that they would treat mentally-ill people badly. Mental illness is something that, unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with. I have severe mental illness in my family (I deal with it every day), and I spend a significant part of my life, interacting with folks at various stages of recovery from it. I have been seeing therapists for much of my life. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with autism, but was never told, so I spent decades, trying to “fix” myself, before finding out. Once I found out that I was “on the spectrum,” I realized that it can’t be “fixed”; only mitigated, and things started improving quickly, at that point. That said, I think “mentally-ill” means “diagnosed and professionally-treated,” to most folks. It’s my opinion, that there’s a lot of undiagnosed/untreated mental illness out there. Just looking at the threads of interaction, on any Internet community, makes that clear. One “tell,” that I have encountered, is when someone has extremely strong opinions on psychiatry. It’s not something most folks even think about, so it’s unusual, when it’s a big deal to someone. It also tends to get worse, as we get older, if untreated. An “eccentric” young man, may become an old hermit, flying around, keeping his piss in canopic jars. Much of what we call “mental illness,” is actually self-developed coping mechanisms, in response to trauma, or brain-chemistry imbalance. That’s why getting medication doesn’t just “fix” us. We need to seek help in defusing the habits and rituals that were developed to help deal with the problem.
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I think the problem with "mental illness" is that I think in many cases it's the environment that is not suitable. In modern times we've created this environment that just doesn't fit all archetypes of people and those who it doesn't fit well with, we declare "mentally ill". There are obviously actual serious issues, but I believe a lot of it has to do with environment. It's not a clear illness like diabetes, etc. For instance I couldn't handle going to school, people can label it ADHD or Autism, but does it make sense in the first place to force me to study specific things that I don't care about as opposed to playing into my interests and strengths. I'm glad I'm grown up now, and can decide to learn what I'm actually interested in and do it 100x more effective per unit of time, as opposed to in school.
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I agree with this. One of the issues I face, with my family member, is that they can’t handle stress, well. I have found that we only advance, when we are outside our “comfort zone.” As long as everything is copacetic, there’s no need to improve. But a “comfort zone” is a “fuzzy” quality. Too far out, is “trauma.” Different folks handle discomfort and trauma, differently. I do think our families and support systems, can make a huge difference. For myself, being “on the spectrum” has really been an asset, in many ways. I have always learned technology quickly, but I’m a high school dropout with a GED, and almost all my education has been self-directed. Most of my life has been spent “outside my comfort zone.”
> Historic ‘stoic male’ personas existed for a reason. What are you talking about here. "Historic male persona" differs between periods and places, but anger, friendships and happiness are basically always parts of it. Odysseus "weeps" and "cries". The whole romantic era was about overly emotional, passionate and sensitive guys.
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Notice how I never said what you are disagreeing with, and if you read what I said, your question is answered?
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Homer predates the stoics by several centuries, so that makes sense. Though I do think Homer does make a solid case of traditional male ideals being fairly emotional, and this is something that persists to modern day. Achilles in particular spends half the Iliad sulking in his tent, and the other half making shish kebabs out of the Trojan army on a tireless revenge-rampage where he's so goddamn angry he picks a fight with a river. These types of characters are still written today, John Wick is something of a parallel, though he has Odysseus traits as well and doesn't quite fall into the "man literally too angry to die" trope like Achilles does. Though it could be argued that Achilles lengthy sulking is diva behavior, few would argue Captain Kirk is effeminate because he's more emotionally driven than Spock, who in many ways turns the stoic ideals up to 11. Likely because despite occasionally chewing the scenery with emotional moments, he is still ultimately in control. (It's also worth noting that neither Achilles or Odysseus were likely intended as ideals, but rather extremes, and Homer's works largely deal with the consequences of their personalities; the pride and rage of Achilles like we just discussed, the pathological distrust and constant scheming of Odysseus protracting his journey and being the true source of many of his countless obstacles)
> Is this something that generally goes beyond school? The things that make you vulnerable change depending on what year and situation you're in. I can very much get behind the idea that you should consider whether your legacy sense of what makes you vulnerable is relevant to your current circumstances. I'm not so much behind the "freely dispense the rope people will use to hang you" version.
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There's a lot of abstraction in this thread, but I would like to hear specifics. What are the exact vulnerabilities that we are talking about? From my side I guess I can say I frequently feel like impostor type of things or that I'm not doing enough. I won't mention that at work, but I definitely share those feelings to my partner. I would hate not being able to share something like that to my partner for instance. I wonder what others are talking about?
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When I was at school (and in the 20th century generally) admitting to anything outside traditional masculinity / heterosexuality made you vulnerable to physical / verbal attack. That remains the case for a lot of people in the 21st century. If they want to be loud and proud then good for them, but I can understand it if they prefer to keep it quiet. Whereas, at least around me, now, I think you can come out as gay without too much concern for your physical safety. Conversely, at my school you could be as overtly homophobic as you wanted with no consequences, whereas now you should probably be a lot more cautious if you harbour homophobic sentiments. Talking about partners in particular, I've had partners I felt fairly safe sharing anything (most things anyway) with, and I've also had partners who would mine our conversations for any kind of viable ammunition. Which led to me being a bit more careful what I said. We can perhaps agree the first kind of relationship is better.
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