When we get complete neuronal connection maps (which we are getting close to for mice and humans will be done within a decade or two), we could in principle simulate a brain on a computer or on paper too. Unless you assert something magical like a "soul", these connections are what determine human consciousness. It is one thing to argue that LLMs don't resemble brains and if they could be "conscious"
they wouldn't be conscious in the sense we are, but asserting that anything understandable can't be conscious won't age well.
While I think you're right in principle, there's a lot of reason to think the structure of a brain is more complicated than just the connection map of the neural network. There is a lot of complicated behavior inside each neuron that we don't fully understand yet. They aren't just logic gates.
But, of course, that's just physics. It's not magic, so your point stands.
A "cultural X" is a totally valid position. Many Jewish atheists consider themselves "cultural Jews" and see no problem with celebrating Jewish festivals even if they don't believe in God. Being an atheist doesn't mean you have to reject the culture you grew up in.
He never did such a thing. Most of his career was in evolutionary biology and his atheism was only relevant in that many of his critics were people rejecting evolution on religious grounds. And even his "God Delusion" (which was only published 20 years ago, when his scientific career was winding down) wasn't about why celebrating Christmas or singing carols was bad, only the part about believing in a God.
Strong disagree (I'm a computational genomicist). The "official" Human Genome Project was in a rut, doing incredibly inefficient and scientifically uninteresting chromosome walking techniques and would have taken years or even a decade more to do it the old school way. You can argue against Celera's business model (which failed anyway), but the whole reason we got the human genome when we did was the fact that Celera showed that shotgun genomics (assembling reads computationally rather than relying on physical overlaps) could work even on the human genome. And that was the future of genomics. Venter did a great service to the human and all genome projects by pushing new techniques.
Definitely. Smoking used to be the default and non-smokers were viewed as being eccentric like vegetarians/vegans still are today and having a small non-smoking section was seen as something for "those people" like restaurants that have just one or two meatless options now. It was a huge social shift regarding smoking starting in the early 1990s -- decades after the health issues were known.
Prolog is great for the cases where logic programming makes sense but you can easily create a logic engine in Lisp (or other languages - that's what kanren/minikanren which has been ported to many languages)
Of course, it holds for all turing complete languages, that's what computational class is all about. It's not a good argument to use or not use something though, because in practice it's always worse. You can think of it like this, would you rather write programs with SBCL or some company's internal unnamed domain-specific tree-walking sexpr language that doesn't even have macros, TCO or a real REPL and possibly isn't even turing complete? Would you ever in a million years suggest that the latter is even half as good as proper CL, let alone a replacement? I sure wouldn't.
This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.
I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Anna Karenina is public domain, assuming you’re talking about the original? If you translate it then maybe you could release it under GPL, but bit odd?
I think you missed the "what if". It was just a point about how the constructed scenario might be different to the real scenario. Most AIs are not trained only on public-domain work.
You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't.
That's not how copyright works. The modified version is derivative. You can't just take the Linux kernel, make some changes, and slap a new license on it.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
That makes no sense because what if you refactor your code ad infinitum using AI? You spin up a working implementation, then read through the code, catalog the changes like interface, docs, code quality and patterns and delegate to the AI to write what you would.
It's 100% AI code and it's 100% human code. That distinction is what's counterproductive.
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to text. I suspect Winters and his publisher have investigated the legality of this more than either of us have.
Jane Austen died long enough ago that her works are in the public domain, so Winters did not need a license to use it. That does not mean that he gained rights to her work: if he tried to sue someone for use of anything which appeared in the original, he would lose in court because it’s easy to show that copies made before he was born had the same text. This also how they prevent people trying to extend copyright by making minor changes to an existing work: the new copyright only covers the additions.
There’s a very accessible summary of the United States rules here:
If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.
As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses
> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see
Yeah - listen to the narrator in the opening on the classic Orson Welles film The Third Man (1949) - he says he never cared much for Vienna before the War, preferring the scene in Constantinople instead.
The American cut of the movie has an intro narrated by Joseph Cotton, who played Holly Martins. The wording might differ (since the movie is clearly Holly's first time in Vienna)
Yeah, I'm talking about the version (which is even on my US DVD) where the narrator is some black marketeer neither Martins nor Lime. "I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough - mmm - had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs but you know they can't stay the course like a professional."
For some reason, I always assumed the British narration was Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), but now that you quote it, I realize it can't be Calloway. Interesting! The narrator must be someone we never meet.
Well, TADS is older than Inform, yes, but the whole idea of VM-based platforms for adventures originated from Infocom's Z-machine starting with Zork I in 1980 -- it's what let them basically release their games for every platform current in the US in the 1980s.
There's also ZIL by way of ZILF https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf This is the Lisp-like language that Infocom implementers actually used back in the day.
Infocom came out of the MIT AI Lab which was very LISP-centric at the time. Depending upon you you listen to, the gaming part was something of a side effect as opposed to the ultimate goal.
Though I find it fun on the language family tree that the Infocom team's preferred MDL (and thus ZIL) language was surprisingly closer to (and almost prototyping for) the Scheme split despite being "next door" to some of the most LISP legacy work, too.
Yes, they actually planned to release cross-platform applications in addition to games and actually shipped one (1985's database Cornerstone). The problem was 1985 was a bit late for cross-platform business software to be successful; the IBM PC and compatibles had taken over the business market, and having apps in a VM just meant they were a bit slower than native ones.
And they really went all-in on Cornerstone at a time when PC databases, as you say, had really cornered a (shrinking) market. Even MS Access arguably ended up as something of a footnote. Not that text adventure games, even with some graphical chrome, were really a growing market either.
There were also financial reasons not to, just as there were with the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe -- Islamic law says that no Muslim can be taxed more than a non-Muslim so non-Muslims were handy to have around because they could be taxed more.
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