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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • … weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

    Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.














  • There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.

    A few things:

    • Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn’t seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.

    • It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn’t matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.


  • I understand LLaMA and some other models come with instructions that say that they cannot be used commercially. But, unless the creators can show that you have formally accepted a license agreement to that effect, on what legal grounds can that be enforceable?

    If we look at the direction US law is moving, it seems the current legal theory is that AI generated works fall in the public domain. That means restricting their use commercially should be impossible regardless of other circumstances - public domain means that anyone can use them for anything. (But it also means that your commercial use isn’t protected from others likewise using the exact same output).

    If we instead look at what possible legal grounds restrictions on the output of these models could be based on if you didn’t agree to a license agreement to access the model. Copyright don’t restrict use, it restricts redistribution. The creators of LLMs cannot reasonably take the position that output created from their models is a derivative work of the model, when their model itself is created from copyrighted works, many of which they have no right to redistribute. The whole basis of LLMs rest on that “training data” -> “model” produces a model that isn’t encumbered by the copyright of the training data. How can one take that position and simultaneously belive “model” -> “inferred output” produces copyright encumbered output? That would be a fundamentally inconsistent view.

    (Note: the above is not legal advice, only free-form discussion.)



  • Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

    Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!



  • So, what you are saying is that by checking this trust API, we can filter out everyone running unaltered big-media approved browsers and hardware? We’d end up splitting the web into two disjoint parts, one for big corporate and sheeple - and one more akin to the web of old comprised by skilled tech people and hobbyists? A rift that could finally bring an end to eternal September? … Are we sure this proposal a bad thing?