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Until you start using frameworks like Spring and then everything is so painfully magic that no one knows how the program actually runs.

Since modshim isn't money patching and appears to only be wrapping the external API of a package, if the change is deep enough inside the package, wouldn't you end up reimplementing most of the package from the outside?

Modshim does more than just wrap the external API of a package - it allows you to tweak something internal to the module while leaving its interface alone, without having to re-implement most of the package in order to re-bind new versions of objects.

There are a couple of example of this readme: (1) modifing the TextWrapper object but then use it through the textwrap library's wrap() function, and (2) modifing the requests Session object, but then just using the standard requests.get(). Without modshim (using standard monkey-patching) you would have to re-implement the wrap and get methods in order to bind the new TextWrapper / Session classes.


How did we go from ho-hum status quo to burn it all down in the US? Especially when the ho-hum status quo was pretty great for the people in power?

You elected trump. Twice...

Because billionaires spent enormous amounts of money supporting him. Trump would not be president without Fox News.

And not without sloppy marksmanship, russia, the systematic destruction of education and a hundred other reasons. But in the end people actually had to go out and vote for him and that's the part that I have a problem with.

You're acting like every US president sans Martin van Buren hasn't been related / a descendant of King John Lackland of England.

Are you sure you're not also a descendant?

Always getting downvoted for typing the inconvenient truth people don't want to read and or acknowledge. This website is just as bad as reddit in terms of enabling censoring of opinions that don't support the popular narrative (like America being a democratic nation where the people elect the president).

Large scale failure of the status quo for the common man. Between free trade agreements, de-industrialization, recurring perpetual wars, and failed social policies that punish working class people. People no longer believed in the status quo.

The status quo wasn't great for the ordinary people and the only offramp they had was clown world. Brexit should have been a hard lesson proving the people will vote against their own interest if they believe they are also voting for something harmful to the regime they despise.

People weren't voting against their own interest. They are voting against a system which they do not believe worked for them. Saying people vote against their own interest is saying that they aught to just shut up and listen. If you propose policy X and say it will be good for people, and they vote against X, then that is a moment of self-reflection on why people think X is not good for them. That attitude is exactly why people despise the regime above them.

A lot of people vote for vibes, not policies. The mistake is in not giving them the vibe they are asking for.

We elected a narcissistic millionaire who bankrupted every company he was ever in charge of. His primary concern while in office was becoming a billionaire, rewarding the Russians that bailed him out of several of those bankruptcies, and trying to punish anyone he felt wronged him.

When the goal is to burn it down and you put people in charge who actively want to burn it down, they can. See: project 2025.


Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.

I think the general strategy for a long time in the tech world was to have as many of the programmers as you could under your umbrella. You don't necessarily know what you are racing towards, but the general feel was you knew that programmers were going to get there.

It also deprives your competition of their product, and/or bids up their cost.

So that they can push those stupid AI questions at the bottom of Facebook posts

Zuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff


Meta is just paying engineers not to work at any other faang company.

Helping the catastrophes along is Fallout.

I sometimes run Xubuntu on my phone via termux and proot. The hardware we carry around in our pockets is ridiculously capable.

There's a big difference between running native ARM software on ARM and emulating x86 to run Windows. If this Mac was x86, it could have probably run Windows much faster thanks to virtualization

On Apple silicon, Parallels can’t run x64 windows, it is using the ARM version of Windows. The x64 emulation is provided by Windows. Of course this is inefficient, but not everything is automatically 2x slower: any OS code you invoke is not running as x64 emulation, and IO and memory access is not penalized by the emulation (but certainly somewhat from virtualization). I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps.

Yeah I wasn't aware that Microsoft allowed that nowadays. Still, it's not ideal anyway, because in my experience Windows apps that are compatible with ARM are 90% either FOSS or portable on other platforms anyway. You use Windows to use x86 apps; if you don't need x86 apps you are generally better not using Windows at all, and if you need them they'll probably run poorly on ARM due to multiple layers of emulation. Wine is still an option, though. They support Rosetta on Mac and FEX/Box64 on Linux, so they may lead to better performance than Parallels

> I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps

In general as long as you have a fast enough machine emulation isn't that bad. Apple was doing that already for 68k with PPC and most people didn't noticed due to how massively faster their first PPC computers were. Still, the issue is that here we're not really talking about a high-end CPU aren't we


The idea of selling things like our strategic helium supply for $460M to "pay off the debt" would be like me selling bricks from the foundation of my house for a penny to "pay off my mortgage".

$460M was for what was left after the large majority had already been sold.

In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices. They use tax dollars to buy a commodity -- raising the price on everyone so they can hoard it -- and then more tax dollars to pay for a storage facility, and if they're lucky the price goes up by enough to pay for the storage and the time value of money by they time they sell it again. That frequently doesn't happen.

In the common case it's the government subsidizing corporations -- including foreign ones -- by using tax dollars (at government contractor rates) to operate a storage facility at a loss so the industry doesn't have to do it themselves. Then, when they go to unload it, they generally unload enough to lower the market price on purpose, practically guaranteeing that the taxpayer is getting a below-market return. This unloading also has a statistical correlation with the election cycle (see also "strategic petroleum reserve") which is extra stupid. And the expectation that it will happen deters others who aren't paying government contractor rates from storing the commodity, so from a "strategic" perspective you don't get anywhere near as much of a buffer as you're paying for.

If the tech industry wants a reserve of helium then they should buy some land, install some tanks and fill them with helium in years when there isn't a shortfall.


That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.

I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.

And it's an absolutely critical resource for MRIs, advanced science and research, and industry. And we are selling it at a price that's attractive as an amusement for children.


> That strategic helium reserve was from WWI, IIRC.

That may have been when it opened but the current war machine has little use for dirigibles.

> I've heard it claimed that it was a massive oversight to sell that much helium at such a low price. Helium is a non-renewable resource. When it escapes, it just floats off into space.

Helium is produced within the earth by radioactive decay. It then gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas, which is why it gets extracted along with the natural gas. But most natural gas doesn't undergo helium extraction. If we wanted more, we could do helium extraction on more of the natural gas. Not doing it releases significantly more into the atmosphere than was present in the reserve. But doing it is expensive so we only do it more if there is demand for more helium.

The first mistake was the government hoarding that much of it to begin with. It doesn't make a lot of sense to pay a high cost for extraction in an earlier year and then pay a high cost for storage for an indefinite period of time if you're already discarding (i.e. not separating) most of it and could just extract more once you actually want it.

The second mistake was unloading such a massive amount over a relatively short period of time, because then you crash the short-term price and cause people to waste the thing you spent a lot of money to extract.


> In the best case, "strategic reserves" are the government speculating on commodity prices.

A horrendously misinformed take. Strategic reserves have broadly one of two primary purposes. First, providing the government with the ability to stabilize market prices in the short term when volatility strikes. Second, providing a supply of an essential resource to an essential industry in the event that external supplies are unexpectedly cut off temporarily.

Supply shocks are bad. The economy grinding to a halt at the whim of a geopolitical adversary or natural disaster is also bad. Ensuring a stable market is one of the most fundamental purposes of having a government at all.


> First, providing the government with the ability to stabilize market prices in the short term when volatility strikes.

Which is the thing they don't really even do, because their existence is not a secret, but then knowing of their existence discourages anyone else from setting up a reserve because they expect the government to unload right when they'd be trying to recover the costs of operating it. Then the market has less slack in it and the government has to tap into the reserve more frequently and in larger amounts, causing the reserve to be much more easily exhausted than you would intuitively expect because the whole world is now expecting you to bail them out when the time comes.

Worse, it encourages companies to rely on its existence instead of making contingencies, and then if it does get exhausted or you get something that looks more like unexpectedly high demand than unexpectedly low supply, you now have an inadequate reserve and a market full of people operating under the impression they would never have to deal with that.

> Second, providing a supply of an essential resource to an essential industry in the event that external supplies are unexpectedly cut off temporarily.

This isn't a different thing from the first thing. There being less supply is what causes the price to go up. But encouraging the market to take all the slack out causes there to be less supply.

The basic problem is this: If the government keeps a moderate reserve, it's going to cause other people to not do that, and then it's going to run out and Cause Problems. If the government keeps an enormous reserve, they're going to cause the price to be higher even when nothing is wrong and burn through a disproportionate amount of tax money doing it.

> Supply shocks are bad.

The correct answer to this is to diversify supply and be ready with substitutes, not government hoarding.


People aren't as stupid as you appear to think. Yes, there are second (and third, forth, ...) order effects. Typically these sorts of systems will settle into an equilibrium. A reasonably competent government agency will account for that where necessary.

It's strange. You object to the government here yet expect private industry to fill the same gap. Why do you believe private industry would navigate these issues better than a government agency would? Given the difference in incentives it doesn't make any sense.

It's a good thing for the regulator to be able to step in at will rather than blindly hope that things go well. Industry is notoriously bad at making short term sacrifices for long term risk management. Would you rather the government force them to maintain their own reserves via regulation?

> This isn't a different thing from the first thing. There being less supply is what causes the price to go up.

No, the two are not at all the same. Rapid price fluctuations are one issue. Essential resources are an entirely separate problem. Volatility and starving to death both involve price movement but are otherwise very different things.

> encouraging the market to take all the slack out causes there to be less supply.

So if the reserve is run by the government it's removing slack and reducing supply, but when run by private industry ... ?

No amount of regular slack is ever going to be able to compensate for a tail risk that blocks the import of an essential good. Take oil for example. No company is ever going to voluntarily warehouse enough to keep the entire US economy going for any significant amount of time. It's a crazy small tail risk and very expensive to counterbalance.

Food is similar. No grocery store or wholesaler or whoever else is going to voluntarily stockpile enough to keep people from starving in the event of widespread crop failure or similarly devastating adverse environmental event.

> If the government keeps an enormous reserve, they're going to cause the price to be higher even when nothing is wrong and burn through a disproportionate amount of tax money doing it.

Why would that be? Filling and emptying shifts demand but doesn't create additional. Anyway you seem to be arguing that private industry should do this for themselves. So whatever the effects are they will be present either way.

Why do you expect disproportionate expenditures? The cost is that of warehousing. The benefit is the entire economy running more smoothly which presumably increases taxes by quite a lot if money is all you're concerned with. It also just generally improves everyone's quality of life which I would hope is the entire purpose for the government to exist when you get down to it.


> You object to the government here yet expect private industry to fill the same gap. Why do you believe private industry would navigate these issues better than a government agency would? Given the difference in incentives it doesn't make any sense.

Profit-seeking actors have the direct incentive to balance risks and rewards. It's popular to hate on speculators, but "build a storage facility so you can buy a commodity when it's cheap and sell whenever the price is high" as a means to make money is actually pretty legitimate. And then they have the right incentives to manage costs and keep realistic inventory levels because they're spending their own money instead of someone else's. Whereas the government's incentive is to give lucrative contracts to cronies or hoard a ridiculous amount of the commodity because they're spending someone else's money and get blamed if there's not enough but not if there's too much.

There is also an advantage in diversity. Government tends to monoculture. How much does the price have to go up before the government starts unloading inventory? How much does the answer depend on politics? Things are better when instead of one essentially monopolist with a massive tank, you have a thousand independent entities with small ones, because then you get a smoother curve with less relationship to the election cycle. And you get different people trying to solve the problem in different ways. Speculators build tanks, entrepreneurs develop recycling systems, buyers make contingencies to use a substitute, but none of that happens if everyone is expecting the government to guarantee the price.

> Industry is notoriously bad at making short term sacrifices for long term risk management.

Middle managers in large bureaucracies are notoriously bad at this, because enormous conglomerates insulated from competition and subject to the principal-agent problem are not subject to a good set of incentives in many ways. It's why we're supposed to have antitrust laws.

Markets as a whole are pretty good at it, because "price goes up when supply is low" is a predictable opportunity to make money.

> Would you rather the government force them to maintain their own reserves via regulation?

The whole point is to stop having the people who don't pay the cost of doing it be the ones who choose how much there should be and what kind.

> Rapid price fluctuations are one issue. Essential resources are an entirely separate problem. Volatility and starving to death both involve price movement but are otherwise very different things.

They're the same problem because the problem in both cases is supply less than demand and then you're left with the same question of how best to contend with that.

Notice also that the government doesn't keep a multi-year supply of food and that doesn't seem to be any kind of a problem.

> So if the reserve is run by the government it's removing slack and reducing supply, but when run by private industry ... ?

When it's run by private industry it costs less, and more to the point costs the people who want the buffer instead of strangers without the bandwidth or domain knowledge to know if what's being done is cost effective or even necessary.

> No amount of regular slack is ever going to be able to compensate for a tail risk that blocks the import of an essential good. Take oil for example. No company is ever going to voluntarily warehouse enough to keep the entire US economy going for any significant amount of time. It's a crazy small tail risk and very expensive to counterbalance.

The US is a net exporter of oil and oil is widely traded global commodity with significant price elasticity of demand, so you don't get actual shortages unless you try something foolish like price controls. Instead people pay $4/gallon instead of $3 which causes the people who drive the most to switch to electric cars or hybrids, other suppliers to increase production, etc.

> Why would that be? Filling and emptying shifts demand but doesn't create additional.

Filling creates additional demand but if you're using a large enough reserve to be at low risk of ever running out then by design the emptying never fully happens.

> Anyway you seem to be arguing that private industry should do this for themselves. So whatever the effects are they will be present either way.

Private industry would size the reserve according to the risk instead of having the incentive to be excessively risk averse because they're spending someone else's money.

> Why do you expect disproportionate expenditures? The cost is that of warehousing.

Suppose you have a reserve which holds X amount and there is an average annual withdrawal and refilling of 0.5X, once every ten years you would use the full X amount, and once every 50 years you would use 5X if you had it.

The 5X reserve requires five times as many tanks and requires you to eat the time value of money on five times as much of the commodity, but only gets used once every 50 years instead of being mostly used every year. It's not worth having; it's better to eat the higher prices that year than to pay even more to prevent them. There are some risks it costs less to buy insurance against than to mitigate. But risk-averse people spending someone else's money will be more inclined to do it anyway, or to build a 10X reserve "just to be sure".

The government also uses government contractors which do not have a good record for cost efficiency.


What if it's not actually your house, but some unspecified "somebody else's", and you only stand to profit from it? Starts to make sense why some unscrupulous people would go that way, shitty as it is.

It's quite possible to be very successful marketing and selling things that aren't real. The market consists of humans, not perfectly rational machines.


Even so, businesses largely compete based on whether their products are worth buying. That means bad research is bad for business.


I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.


> In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.

Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases.

Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with "big enough warchest[s]."

I mean, one thing I think the RIAA would love is to stop paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing they'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.


It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.

It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.

You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.

Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.


> It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.

It's super obvious, unless your perspective basically stems from someone who was mad they couldn't BitTorrent a ton of movies.

I mean, FFS, copyright is the literal foundation for open source licenses like the GPL.

My sense is a lot of the radically anti-IP fervor ultimately stems from people who were outraged they could be sued for seeding an MP3 (though it's accreted other complaints to justify that initial impulse, and it's likely some where indoctrinated from secondary argumentation somewhat obscured from the core impulse).

That's not to say that there are not actors who abuse IP or there aren't meaningful reforms that could be done, but the "burn it all down" impulse is not thought through.


GPL was created as a workaround for copyright - it wouldn’t have been needed if there wasn’t copyright. There are complex arguments both for and against copyright and there’s no reason to simply assume it must always be just as now even as circumstances change.


It is ad hominem that people who see it different are just pretty criminals.

Yes it is a genius move that copy left used copyright to achieve their goal. But the name is literally reflecting the judo going on in that case. Copyleft licenses also does have a lot benefits to big companies as well too so it's not strictly a David vs Goliath victory.

I don't think it's a commonly held belief that copyright benefits small YouTube creators more than it hurts them as a concrete example, they seem to live in constant fear of being destroyed in an asymmetrical system where copyright can take away they livelihood at any moment while not doing anything to meaningfully protect it.


Blowing up IP would sink the RIAA. They would no longer have legal grounds to go after file sharing, and I’m confident that given the same legal footing that file sharing would win any day of the week.


As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.


AI models have already looked at the source of GPL software and contain it in their dataset. Adding the minecraft source to the mix wouldn't seem much different. Of course art assets and trade marks would have to be replaced. But an AI "clean room" implementation has yet to be legally tested.


That's why he is saying it's not equivalent. For it to be the same, the LLM would have to train on/transform Minecraft's source code into its weights, then you prompt the LLM to make a game using the specifications of Minecraft solely through prompts. Of course it's copyright infringement if you just give a tool Minecraft's source code and tell it to copy it, just like it would be copyright infringement if you used a copier to copy Minecraft's source code into a new document and say you recreated Minecraft.


What if Copilot was already trained with Minecraft code in the dataset? Should be possible to test by telling the model to continue a snippet from the leaked code, the same way a news website proved their articles were used for training.


I feel as though the fact that you are asking a valid question shows how transformative it is; clearly, while the LLM gets a general ability to code from its training corpus, the data gets so transformed that it's difficult to tell what exactly it was trained on except a large body of code.


This would still be true of the case where you ask an LLM to rewrite a program while referencing the source. Unless someone was in the room watching or the logs are inspected, how would they know if the LLM was referencing the original source material, or just using general programing knowledge to build something similar.


Then the training itself is the legal question. This doesn't seem all that complicated to me.


Is there a legal distinction between training, post-training, fine tuning and filling up a context window?

In all of these cases an AI model is taking a copyrighted source, reading it, jumbling the bytes and storing it in its memory as vectors.

Later a query reads these vectors and outputs them in a form which may or may not be similar to the original.


Judges have previously ruled that training counts as sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

I don't know of any rulings on the context window, but it's certainly possible judges would rule that would not qualify as transformative.


The context window is quite literally not a transformation of tokens or a "jumbling of bytes," it's the exact tokens themselves. The context actually needs to get passed in on every request but it's abstracted from most LLM users by the chat interface.


It's not equivalent, but it's close enough that you can't easily dismiss it.


For copyright purposes I think there is an important legal distinction between training data (fed in once, ahead of time, and can in theory no longer be recovered as-is) and context window data (stored exactly for the duration of the model call).

I'm not sure there should be, but I think there is.


You are confusing training data with context (prompts).


A room "as clean" as the one under dispute (chardet) is very easy to replicate.

AI 1: - (reads the source), creates a spec + acceptance criteria

AI 2: - implements from spec

AI 1 is in the position of the maintainer who facilitated the license swap.


> Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.

As far as I know, you can as long as you own a copy of the original. In other words, you can't redistribute the assets, but you can distribute the code that works with them. This is literally how every free/libre game remake works. The copyright of your new, from-scratch code, is in no way linked to that of the assets.


"Behavior, graphics, etc." would likely constitute separate IP from the code. I am not sure there's a model that allows you to make AI reproduce Minecraft without telling it what "Minecraft" is - which would likely contaminate it with IP-protected information.


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