The alternative is a custom DSL for templating which I find much worse. Even CSS has a DSL for conditional and programmatic logic which I only use because of the immense performance benefits it brings.
There is no purely fun way to build a production app. If there were everyone would do it. The hard part of building an app is the slog through the tedious parts. If you just want to build a toy app for fun, I recommend you just mess around with processing or pygame.
This! The fun of programming won't come out of a software project.
I find fun in programming by writing code solving small challenges. Something people really hate, e.g. LeetCode, is actually the fun place for me: I really enjoy writing some small size program to solve a made-up problem with my scattered time. I don't need to worry about language, library, framework, platform, UI, etc. The only thing matters is coding, and that's the thing makes me happy.
Technically we do have examples of stable diffusion violating copyright, it will generate some exact clone images if you give it the right prompt and that image exists a few hundred times in the training data.
For something like 11 images which were accidentally repeated hundreds of times in the training data this is true. They're more the exception that proves the rule.
Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted
Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing.
I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these private rendition already without violating the content owner copyright.
Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.
Are there cases where an ai and a human can generate the same media but which result in the media having different legality?
> Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.
I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all.
> Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted
My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something.
Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable.
On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large.
Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know!
The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand.
If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets.
This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.
This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained on images that produces a new image even if in same style as the source database is not violating copyright. It sucks for artists but that's not an argument that current law bans it. If current law banned it, every artist who was inspired in their work by other styles or image would be violating copyright. E.g, all comic book artists study and are inspired by other comic book artists. I don't doubt there will be attempts by courts and/or legislatures hostile to AI to make up new law to impose some sort of penalty/license fee on AI generated images. One approach would be make an artists style a trademark (for all I know that is already established law but I doubt it). I doubt the effort will be successful as there will be a gazillion ways around it or it will result in a relatively small number of monopolies of protected styles which would seem even a worse outcome than a flood of AI generated art. Ultimately I think artists will need to be even more careful about branding and probably will insist on prominent displays of their signatures and promoting the idea that a premium should be placed on human generated art probably through some sort of "certified human art" label. It definitely will increase the supply of art and likely decrease the number of artists that can survive financially off their work.
> This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained on images that produces a new image even if in same style as the source database is not violating copyright
Yeah, software "doesn't seem too complicated" to non-programmers too.
No offense, but if you aren't a lawyer then your opinion on legal matters has about as much veracity as a dentist explaining how software is made.
I have a certain amount of scorn for non-engineers telling me how their app idea is a weekend job and I should do it for free. I'm sure lawyers feel the same way about us when we claim there are easy answers around stable diffusion and copyright law.
The AI was trained without permission on copyrighted data. If it was as cut and dry as you claim then why do both parties think its worth going to court?
I don't know much about the law, but I know enough to recognise when its a job for the lawyers to figure out.
Training method and recall are of no consequences because copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but it's always in the context of distribution.
The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions.
That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.
> law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.
What makes you think that?
The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case.
In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge.
> law is technology agnostic
Clearly not in this case.
There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses.
If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.
Insurance is not copyright and the case is not even the same subject matter.
And again that case is technology agnostic, discrimination law requires you to be able to provide proof that results are non discriminatory, law itself doesn't care that it was specifically a neural network, it only cares about the end result, the firm lost because it failed to provide required data about their decision process, not because it was using neural networks, that they used a neural network was irrelevant on its own, and it could have been fine if they baked explainability in it.
It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the point of view of the insurance company, which would prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can get away with it.
Incidentally, copyright law etc on fonts is very interesting. Many places license their fonts via in-page JavaScript. However, I believe that such a protection against the font designer doesn’t necessarily apply if for instance you use the font to create a logo. ( I’m sure I’ve missed some nuance here.)
Stable Diffusion isn't violating copyright for the same reason artists aren't violating copyright when they look at a bunch of images and make something similar.
People that complain about SPAs are the modern knights tilting at windmills. What are the primary ways people today consume content? Youtube, tiktok, whatsapp, facebook messenger, instagram, discord, etc, etc.
Before someone qualifies my post with "ackshually I do this thing", yes I read blogs too.
That being said, NOBODY READS BLOGS. People don't want static html and css. They want real time updates, they want notifications, they want gamification. They want to play the slot machine.
So while you want to shit on javascript (it's fun to bundle in the shit language javascript when going on these tirades because everyone fucking hates javascript). The problem is not javascript. The problem is, we want real fucking apps, with interactivity, and we want them instantly, over an internet connection.
I want to play chess in my browser over an internet connection. And when chess 2.0. comes out I better have that shit in my browser in under 100ms.
Oh, and sure JS is shit. But if we were using Rust for our UIs we'd have the same problem. The most prominent Rust web UI frameworks are literal React and SolidJs clones.
And JS will be replaced, but we don't have a good enough garbage collected language for it yet.
edit: Can you even think of a modern business that could be just served by just html and css. Like what? A restaurant? Is that what we really think the average software engineer is working on? Restaurant websites?
Nobody is trying to convince you to build a chess app that doesn't use JavaScript.
More importantly, Alex is not arguing for you not to build things with JavaScript either!
He's arguing against writing inefficient JavaScript where you ship MBs of code to the browser to serve simple functionality.
Scroll to the footnotes and you'll find a big list of JavaScript frameworks which Alex does recommend, because they optimize for performance and low overhead.
What do Solid, Svelte and Vue bring to the table exactly? None of those frameworks solve the dataflow problem and the performance benefits they bring do not make a dent. Also why would I want to use some DSL for html templating when I could use an actual programming language?
I personally like the article and I respect author deeply, as he's one of the people who did a lot for the web. Many developers have been raised on his articles and materials.
However I agree these alternative frameworks section took me out of the piece, because these do not really solve most of the issues. They _just_ maybe get around by not having a virtual dom. But many of them still do a lot of css-in-js, still need rendering on the server (but lack the tooling), and do not solve the dataflow. I definitely have aversion towards new syntaxes of html as well (in parts because i built similar framework myself 10 years ago and it's really gnarly down the line)
Something I've tried to highlight in other posts, and perhaps skimped on in the verbiage around the lists, was that results for users are the result of culture, not technology. I've worked with teams that absolutely killed it using slow-as-molasses tools (React, Angular...even Ember), and I've seen teams screw things up with "fast" tools.
But the outliers are just that. In the main, what I observe as most determinative of good outcomes is the marriage of stack complexity with management (which can be at the TL level, not necessarily PMs or EMs) that has the capacity to wrestle with the dimensions of complexity a stack presents.
This writeup (linked from the original article) might be helpful in outlining the way culture is co-variate with good outcomes and _tends_ to select for more appropriate tooling:
> Also why would I want to use some DSL/html templating when I could use an actual programming language?
I feel like the core issue is that HTML is radically insufficient, so DSL/Templates come into play to alleviate the burden. What's generally worse is having everyone going their own way doing random stuff within an org, so best practices must emerge and that starts to feel like a DSL in a way.
Perhaps I interpreted the article differently, but I don't think it's about Javascript - it's about complex Javascript frameworks. Ie, ones that cause bloat via large dependency trees, and unnecessary computations. These aren't required for the interactivity you described.
I've written one of those React clones in Rust you mention. It was as you say - as much of a mess in practice as a JS framework.
I get that and that's part of the point of my comment. That these screeds always make sure to mention javascript because by bundling javascript in the screed you get default acceptance from the JS haters.
But the fundamental essence of the article is about complaining about SPAs. Which betrays a striking ignorance of what most frontend web software engineers are working on. They are not working on websites for businesses that only need a single form and an email to get the form responses. That usecase is solved and does not require a software engineer. It can be built on wordpress or squarespace.
SPAs are the answer to the question of how do we build an app that is delivered in real time over an internet connection.
The reason these apps are built with JS is because until relatively recently it was the only option. Why is it still used while there are other options? Because WASM is not mature and JS is still faster and there is no killer reason to switch off it.
> People that complain about SPAs are the modern knights tilting at windmills. What are the primary ways people today consume content? Youtube, tiktok, whatsapp, facebook messenger, instagram, discord, etc, etc.
Facebooks and youtubes and tiktoks are built to push ads most efficiently and SPAs are just that. You're not the customer for them, you're product.
> Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves.
Why do you model life as a single bet where you have a 1 or 2% chance of winning? In reality you are making bets every day, each with a range of odds of succeeding and each success can produce a range of outcomes.
Look at poker, a game that has a massive "luck" component, people still consistently win.
Poker is a well studied, and more importantly, closed system where all of the variables are either known or known unknowns. We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human.
The amount of decisions you make in a game of poker vs the amount you make in a lifetime are not even remotely comparable. And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning. Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life.
His point is that it's extremely possible, and in fact happens every day, that you can be a talented, hard worker who put in the same amount of hard work and time that someone else did, and make all the objectively correct choices, and the difference between the levels of success you both achieve can and will be huge.
> We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human.
This is not true but will be at some point.
> And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning
You haven't met most poker players, they almost all start playing with real money before they even have a clue. What make s poker a truly terrifying game is that you can win a lot while making all the wrong decisions and get hooked for life while being a terrible player.
> Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life.
Yes, there are many unfortunate people that have made life altering decisions while young and the decisions follow them forever. Thankfully not all failures in life hold such dire consequences, in fact some failures seem like the end of the world but in reality the consequences are not as big as you expect (eg getting fired from your first job or failing an exam).
Let’s start with you have to grow up in an environment where you can the rules of the game, generally by watching others. If you know how to “hard work” yourself into growing up right, I’d like to know how.
I've been reading your replies in this thread, and I'd highly recommend you to just take a moment and reflect on what you've been suggesting to other commenters. Your replies have been ignorant at best and pure nonesense at worst. I'd elaborate but I don't have the time and energy to justify myself, so I understand if you take this with a grain of salt, but I wanted to let you know nonetheless.
You're welcome to express your opinion. I'm not interested in defeatism. It doesn't work for me, and I've never seen it work for other people.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people who took responsibility for their lives, and thereby improved them dramatically.
If I may assign you some homework:
1. what do you want to accomplish in life?
2. what are you going to do about it?
I know the current popular narrative in the United States is nobody ever actually accomplishes anything. It's always luck, privilege, you didn't build that, etc. I don't buy it. It's all excuses, defeatism, envy and misery. If you want to improve your life, don't buy it, either.
I was once told I was so "lucky" that I had a propensity to work hard. Geez. I laughed at the guy. (Actually, I'm very lazy. My dad said I was never afraid of hard work, I'd lie down right next to it and fall asleep.)
Here’s something that puts a wrench in your idea: disabled people exist and are often denied immigration explicitly because of their disabled status. Statistically everyone is simply not yet disabled. Some people are just disabled earlier in life than others, permanently affecting their capacity for work, immigration, or other self improvement without external assistance (such as medical intervention, without which they would die). In the disability community there’s a lot of just plain luck: how severe is your condition? How much support can your family supply? Are you in a country with a robust healthcare system? Are you able to afford medication, or are you able to dedicate the time to fight for medication, medical equipment, etc? Does your country have accessibility laws?
And before you call this defeatism: actually pushing harder than is realistic usually makes disability much worse! It’s instead important to realistically understand what’s available to you and frankly speak upon factors beyond your control. Otherwise people end up despairing and killings themselves way more, because they keep setting up expectations and blaming themselves when their circumstances prevent them from doing things they used to do before their disability.
Isn't this kind of a motte and Bailey fallacy, though? You mention disabled people (a population of millions in the world) as your example of luck, but use it to justify the idea that you have to be born in a stable country with resources (arguably disadvantaging almost all of the world's population except for a billion or so).
Those are not even remotely comparable conditions.
> It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation.
It's not a lottery game, it's a poker game (and in reality, it's much easier than poker because the economy is positive sum and poker is zero sum). If you only consider "wealthy" to be people who have made billions or hundreds of millions then it's a lottery. But someone that consistently makes decisions that maximize expected monetary gain can consistently become a "rich" person if our definition of rich is have more than $10million.
(Poker is negative sum if you are playing in a raked game)
This is very achievable to most HN types. Maybe not in our 30’s, but easily by retirement. Just maxing out your 401k for an entire tech career will get you there.
Interesting. 2.2 million seems to be around the top 10% in the US, and around 20x the median (Federal Reserve data from 2016). It also places one in the global top 1%.
At that age there’s the estate tax … plus you’re paying taxes on withdrawals since mist retirement savings are tax deferred. There’s also capital gains taxes that hit you I think.
Would also be interesting to know if people in general even count 401k as “wealth”. I feel like it occupies a different bracket in many people’s minds.
No, if it was actually like monopoly there is 0 chance of succeeding once people have established themselves.
You have a finite number of bets you can make in your life, if you waste them by partying, gambling and being high on drugs then yeah, I can see how it can feel like it's impossible to succeed.
And life is a lot easier than these board games, there isn't one winner in life.
I think it's interesting that partying and drug use make 2 out of 3 slots in your list of useless bets that are sure to make you fail. Aren't there whole classes of extremely wealthy people who are known for drugs use and constant partying? The real central point here is wasting time. If your partying and drug use is using money for no return, your time is not paying off and you're heading down. But parties and drugs can absolutely be tools of social connection and creative exploration, which can be rewarded very highly depending on who your socializing with and what you create.
This seems unlikely to me, do you have any stats to back it up.
Also immigrants usually don't come to literak nothing. While its certainly difficult for them, usually there are cultural or religious groups that help them out or they have family that immigrated before them to help them get on their feet.
My parents came with literally nothing because the government they escaped took everything from them. Both of my grandfathers had their education but they could not practice their craft because their accreditation did not matter in the US, my father could not speak english, neither could my mother. My mother knew so little english that she couldn't even ask to go to the bathroom in her first week of school so she peed her pants.
One single platform for cross platform development is enough motivation and react native has improved a lot in the past year.
The entire concept of developing the same app multiple times for different platforms is just so mind numbingly dumb. 3x the engineering team, 3 different platforms with all their different idiosyncrasies. The impossibility of maintaining feature parity across all three platforms. 3x the testing and debugging.
I can see some apps needing to be native (ex: using AR/ML libraries where you need to squeeze everything out of the phone). However, for most apps I use, they could easily be mobile optimized websites wrapped in an app.
