If I post “heathrow83829 is a convicted poopoo head” (replace with your favourite crime) as if it were a factual claim, you’d be well within your rights to sue me for defamation even if people should apply some critical thinking skills and say “wait a minute, how would pdpi know that? Are you sure he isn’t just talking out of his arse?”
Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.
The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.
At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
The other big point is that some people treat LLMs as if they are truth. We all know that they get a lot wrong, a lot of the time. Yesterday I watch both Elon post something somewhere between badly worded and wrong and another user used Grok to "prove him wrong", but this time being completely wrong in a different way. And this was a matter of law which can be looked up. Anything within throwing distance of politics won't be considered "correct" by everyone ever. Just defining "correct" is harder than it sounds and that probably isn't possible in reality.
I think Google added that AI-generated responses maybe incorrect? When you are paying such a low amount of cost, like probably for free, I don't think you can expect a same level of quality as a human written or reviewed of answer. It is like same random user spin up their Lovable and vibe-coded a piece of slop and hold Lovable responsible for not giving them production quality code. It is simple, you get what you paid for. If someone actually figured out AI that is actually always correct, it would be charged in superhuman price as well.
This case isn’t about Google’s users getting low-quality search results. As you say, you get what you pay for. The actual issue is that, in some searches, the AI summaries would claim the plaintiffs were guilty of scams and all-around shady business practices.
Put differently: it’s not newspaper readers complaining the paper is inaccurate, it’s the people mentioned in the articles.
However, I think an ML designed for machine learning would be nice, especially if the type system is extended to multidimensional arrays shapes. Pattern matching on array shapes would be rather nice. Ocaml style interactive mode for exploration and compiling for performance would be nice too.
> It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know?
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.
I view it as: each time you answer the same question you are forced to reincorporate everything you’ve learned since the last time you’ve answered it. Which makes you reassess your chain of thought and maybe come to a different conclusion. And thereby learning something new.
Cool catalogue, but it had nothing to do with inheritance. It’s more “nine ways to do polymorphism-adjacent things using ad-hoc polymorphism (“traits”) instead of subtype polymorphism (‘inheritance’)”
Just like you can do OO in any language - for example, you can do OO like C (or at least that's what GTK folks believe), Rust already has most runtime mechanisms to pretty much implement inheritance in a library or a coding pattern (as opposed to a language feature)
For a long time the most important thing missing was a better story around upcasting, but Rust 1.86 implemented the usual child-to-parent upcasting [0] expected in OO (with the Any trait doing the parent-to-child downcasting [1] in a way that's less error prone than most OO languages actually)
Also note that Firefox and Servo were a early proponents of getting more OO into Rust (I guess that's because they need to deal with the DOM? Not sure). Which doesn't mean literally having classes and inheritance, but rather, language features that can emulate those when needed.
Today I think the missing piece is fields in traits: a way for a vtable to store field offsets rather than just pointers to method; current practice is to add getters and setters to traits when needed (but that's "ugly"). Unfortunately discussion around this stalled [2]
> Today I think the missing piece is fields in traits: a way for a vtable to store field offsets rather than just pointers to method; current practice is to add getters and setters to traits when needed (but that's "ugly")
I've been wanting for a long time to re-implement Perl's Moo/Moose/Dios in Rust via macros. I think that would make for some really nice (but non-rust -looking) ways of doing all sorts of object hierarchy stuff
Yes. The polymorphism isn't bad. It's the inheritance of data that's the problem.
Rust traits can't have associated data. That's the big difference from objects.
It's also hard to have a parent-child relationship where the child can find the parent. That takes much fooling around with wordy combos of Rc, Weak, upgrade, etc.
This makes it hard to convert C++ programs, and C++ programmers, to Rust.
It's quite possible to write 100% safe code under Rust's constraints, but it takes a major rethink from C++.
Indices are supposed to reflect a part of the market. That's why you have all of S&P500, the Dow, NYSE Composite, and Nasdaq Composite (and several others) in the US — They each reflect different attributes of the market as a whole.
As it stands, it's clear that the users of S&P500 are not interested in the performance of the parts of the market made up of overpriced (and potentially highly volatile) IPOs.
The problem with your framing of "users of S&P500 are not interested overpriced IPOs" is that it conflates two fundamentally different things: what an index describes vs what investors prefer. The moment you start filtering out parts of the market based on investor appetite vs market reality, you stop building an index and instead start creating an actively managed product. That's active investing. It's no longer an index.
The S&P 500 is used as the benchmark of the market by practically everyone. Journalists, policymakers, investment managers, politicians, regular investors, everyone I know. If the benchmark that everyone uses as a market proxy is systematically excluding a substantial part of the market, then the gap betweeen "the index" and "the market" has real consequences.
You can't have it both ways: Either the S&P 500 is a market proxy, in which excluding parts of the market is a problem; or it's a curated slice, in which everyone needs to stop it as the default benchmarket for the market.
An index is an index. It works fine as an index if it excludes one or two stocks. People seem to forget as well that this is a question of waiting a single year before it including the stock. It is literally just long enough to make sure the price settles, it's not some catastrophic thing.
It's more than that. None of SpaceX, OpenAI, nor Anthropic will meet the criteria, and they will make up a significant part of the US stock market. Each of these companies is heavily investing their cashflow into growing the company and are unlikely to be profitable many years.
The inclusion criteria prioritizes companies that extract their cashflow into profit, and excludes companies that invest their cashflow into growing the company. For example, when Jeff Bezos ran Amazon he described his company as "famously unprofitable, And that is a conscious strategy and an investment decision." Amazon only joined the index in 2005, nearly 8 years after IPO, even though it was a significant member of the stock market at the time.
"The inclusion criteria prioritizes companies that extract their cashflow into profit", in almost all cases, yes. But if you want to buy into these newer stocks there are various high growth indices you can buy, no one is stopping you. If you want to buy into only one or two of those stocks then you can. It's a free market for stocks and it's a free market for indices. There's no regulation that says the S&P has to include certain stocks.
The issue is a contradiction with what S&P 500 claims to do vs what they actually do.
S&P 500 claims to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". But if they exclude high-growth no-profit large-cap equities such as (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) from their index, then S&P is doing a poor job at what they claim to benchmark.
It's not not an insignificant oversight. The valuations of (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) total to ~5% of the total US stock market.
> S&P 500 claims to be the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities"
Right...
> But if they exclude high-growth no-profit large-cap equities such as (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) from their index, then S&P is doing a poor job at what they claim to benchmark.
So it comes down to a difference of opinion between Standard and Poor's and tristanj. Go make the Tristanj500, include these companies, and make the same claim - "the actual best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities". No one's stopping you.
It doesn't conflate anything. The inclusion rules weren't given to us by God, they were created by humans because they thought, rightfully, that people will be interested in that as a product ("prefer"). As the market changes, the product can be adjusted.
Lastly, there's no such a thing as a real "market proxy", except the whole market. If you scope any subset of it, you're making some inclusion and exclusion rules.
The S&P 500 is primarily a benchmark index, not a list of approved stocks to invest your 401k into. The GP is conflating the two. GP is claiming there's a subset of stocks that people don't want to invest in, and these should not be included in the S&P 500. Sure. But, per the S&P website, the S&P500 was created as a benchmark of U.S. large-cap equities. On their website, S&P advertises it as "the best single gauge of large-cap U.S. equities".
The S&P 500 index was created in 1957. It was created decades before the first index fund (by Vanguard), which copied the index in 1976.
The index is intended to follow the all of the largest large-cap U.S. equities, not pick and choose which ones to invest in. GP is arguing that many passive investors, who blindly follow the S&P500 index, don't want to invest in these upcoming unprofitable mega-caps. That's not how the index investing works, that's picking and choosing approved sectors of the market, which is active investing. If you want active investing, buy an active investing product, don't buy a fund that copies the benchmark index.
> The index is intended to follow the all of the largest large-cap U.S. equities, not pick and choose which ones to invest in.
This particular piece is incorrect. S&P has preexisting rules to pick and choose which large-cap equities to follow. They had a discussion about whether to drop those rules in order to become a more accurate benchmark, and they chose to stick with what they had been doing.
Regardless of what they say they were doing (or what they’re trying to do), the fact that they changed nothing means that what they had been doing is the same as what they are doing now, ie, picking and choosing stocks at the risk of diminishing their benchmark capabilities.
> what an index describes vs what investors prefer
What makes you think S&P 500 did not become the most popular index (instead of full market ones) because of the rigid entry criteria and and rules for weights.
Amongst other things the weighting is not even based on the market cap.
> you don't get bugs related to typing because elixir is somehow magic,
I've never followed Elixir particularly closely, but what I saw in some Erlang discussions was different. Discourse there was that you need to gracefully handle failure anyhow, so type errors can (should?) just get handled by the failure recovery machinery you're supposed to have anyhow. I disagree with that point of view, but it's much more defensible than "$LANGUAGE is magic".
OP might be referring to Jose Valim's 2023 ElixirConf talk where he's explaining why Elixir should go down the path of types.
He gives a lot more nuanced take than 'types are useless', which is more like 'types are less useful than people think in the context of Elixir development'. (Which makes sense because he's in the middle of implementing a type system for Elixir.)
> types are less useful than people think in the context of Elixir development
With no insights at all into Elixir this sounds like a reasoned and defensible, if not outright correct, position.
The proposition I'm working with is "types are more useful than people think in managing a horde of degenerate short-cut taking co-workers whose failures I will be blamed for openly and quietly regardless of actual fault". Gradual typing is an interesting and appealing compromise, I'm gonna have to give Elixir a serious try.
Yes, that is a great talk. He really does an admirable job of exploring all of the reasons why people think that they want a typed language and concludes many (but not all) are not that helpful.
you succumb to the fallacy that because the compiler let it through, the code wont have any error - the erlang mentality says that the compiler/CPU/everything has errors, how do you handle errors in the general sense
Compile-time checks don't obviate the need for runtime error handling, and I love the robustness of Erlang's runtime error handling. However, that doesn't change the fact that we should be catching and handling errors as early as possible, and there's a whole bunch of logic errors that you can easily catch at compile time.
> “Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems.
I find this infuriating. I have my own voice, my own writing style, and I deliberately use some "bad" writing tropes for effect. For any non-trivial amount of writing (read: anything with actual paragraphs), I'm liable to spend as much time editing as I am writing out the first draft, to make sure my writing conveys the message I want it to.
"Tab to improve" is, effectively, "tab to delete my own personality".
Marx’s idea of communism required a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Lenin took that notion and, under the pretence of needing absolute power to prevent a counter-revolution, turned it into the totalitarian regime of the USSR. Since then, communism and totalitarianism have gone hand in hand.
With the aside that most of this bored me stupid 40 years past and still does today ...
Marx's "dictatorship" as used by Marx back in the days of late nights in the British Libraries wasn't the authoritarian "dictatorship" we associate with the term today.
In the 19th century, the term "dictatorship" did not yet have the modern connotation of an authoritarian, autocratic one-man rule. Its meaning was derived from the ancient Roman dictatura, a constitutionally sanctioned office for a magistrate granted extraordinary powers during an emergency. For Marx and Engels, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not a specific form of government but a term for the class content of the state that would follow a proletarian revolution.
Sure, Lenin had a hard on for authoritarian behaviour and started the USSR trend of dangling a communist utopia as a reward for grinding through petty nitpicking committees and even more hard core authoritarians .. but that's more the bait and switch of human greed than any necessary coupling of communes and boot first hierarchies.
Yeah, I wasn't quite clear there. That's what I meant, that Lenin is the one who took the "emergency powers until communism is established" interpretation of "dictatorship of the proletariat", and turned it into "all the powers until forever". But that interpretation is effectively what became synonymous with communism just about everywhere — the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea... Curiously enough none of the Communist states ever really transitioned from that intermediate state to full communism.
> So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering?
I fail to see the difficulty? Editors striking would mean them not doing the volunteer work they normally do.
How much vandalism do you reckon will go undetected if they do go on strike? How much more time will it take to get articles updated to reflect current affairs?
I would like to see some numbers on it. What exactly is their overall leverage here? What about a lengthy strike? Does anybody really know until it happens?
Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.
The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.
At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
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