I think that there were and are a lot of different DEI programs with lots of different targets and goals and that the people who were not "uplifted", either by any single specific program, or all of them in aggregate, do not make up a coherent identifiable group.
There's this weird race where I have in my head some level of LLM performance which is "good enough" and the open models keep improving to that level, but by the time that they do my "good enough" has acclimatized to what I'm used to doing with the latest frontier models and what the open models are isn't good enough anymore.
The "good enough" points so far have been
- "as good as ChatGPT"
- "as good as GPT4"
- "as good as Sonnet 3.5"
- "as good as Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2"
Anyway, we'll see where the chinese models are in a year, and we'll see where my expectations are. Hopefully they overlap at some point.
I just realised I've never actually thought about how urban trees get water. I never see them get watered and I assume that would be an incredibly inefficient way to do it.
It was a victory that the teenage pregnancy rates plummeted during the 90's in my small town high school, but when I was there there was still a real drive to discourage kids from having kids, and I internalized the idea that "having children will ruin your life" and carried that with me through my twenties.
> on July 26, CIA was officially born. Just a few months later, on October 1, CIA assumed all responsibility for the JANIS basic intelligence program. Shortly thereafter, JANIS was renamed the National Intelligence Survey (NIS), but continued along the same tradition, providing policymakers and military leaders with up-to-date data, maps, and other reference materials.
> In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic studies as CIA’s publication of basic intelligence. It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook.
No, the World Factbook has been totally taken down. If you try to go to a page, e.g. the entry for Canada[1] it redirects to the statement[2] which the article does cite. That's all that's left online of it, there's nothing else to link to
Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition
I'm heavily anti-copyright. I don't think it should exist. However, as long as it exists, I want it to be applied consistently across the board: AI shouldn't get to use Open Source code while ignoring its license, until Open Source developers get to use proprietary code while ignoring its license. Ditto art, movies, books, etc.
Usually when I see this opinion (yours), it leans on an uncharitable coloring of everybody who sees problems with copyright as "anti-copyright", when really those people largely are happy with the concept of protecting an individual's work. I.e. it is the age-old "those people" argument, where "those people" are a made-up conglomerate of opinions that are real, but come from slightly different contexts and from different people, throwing away those variables to create the illusion of a hypocrite.
I think this is a good explanation, and even if this isn't what the OP says, I see arguments like this frequently.
In the case of copyright, think of it as anti-current-implementation of copyright rather than anti-copyright. For example, you could oppose the current copyright term, but that doesn't mean you are anti-copyright. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I think besides the points already brought up by other responses, it's important to distinguish attribution from copyright. AI training ignores both while people who are against copyright might not want to get rid of attribution requirements.
I take it because copyright was used to hurt independent and smaller harmless creators, they’re dislike of AI is entirely consistent with that given smaller creatives are being harmed in a sense with their work mimicked and work deprived of them.
Personally I think creatives have an edge as I personally don’t think AI is great at exercising discretion in creativity or design. Which you can see in coding agents their discretion in design is often arbitrary and poor. So I think at least for now that’s still where humans tend to out perform AI
Don't worry, they will flip and become staunch supporters of AI too once it starts to benefit them. Then they will immediately forget the copyright issue.
> Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition
As the article has pointed out, it's not the principle that has changed, but the scale. Lots of things that are tolerable at small scale (e.g. lying, stealing) become disruptive to society at larger scale.
Copyright has been used in the past as a way for corporations to rent-seek and limit innovation. Now it may be the only legal means to stop them from doing that.
It's not illegal for me to drive from New York to San Francisco on Interstate 80. But if I were able to endlessly duplicate myself and my car, about a million of me could hog the entire country-wide highway. Not sure if even that would be "illegal", but it would sure be annoying, and I suspect there would need to be laws updated / rewritten to account for my ability to duplicate myself without limit. I doubt society would just agree, "yep, one of you on I-80 is okay, and so a million of you on I-80 is also okay."
There is a difference between distributing pirated copies of popular media by already rich artists who you know get paid anyway, and the systematic art theft of AI machines who “create” new art based on artists works who may or may not have been paid for it, and definitely didn’t get credited.
Both are copyright infringements, but only the latter is art theft.
Were they really 100% anti-copyright though? By and large, copyright is the reason most of us have a job and get paid. There are things that shouldn't necessarily be copyright-able like APIs, and copyright probably exists for too long in certain cases, but a world without copyright doesn't really work with our current economic model.
Everyone is anti-copyright until they understand what copyright means.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services?
I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.
The entire point of Macintosh is that you don't need to know anything about it (and Apple used to actively try to hide things you didn't need to know about). Or at least that is the user it has always been targeted at since the original Mac OS was released.
Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with.
Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.
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