Yes, fair.

Computers could make cars a lot more reliable and moddable. It’s proprietary/locked-down software and hardware that’s the problem.

Video consoles are either desktop computers with proprietary parts, or tablets with proprietary parts. There is nothing especially difficult to repair in them compared to the rest of their categories.

Chinese loans come with a lot (more) string attached than anything from the West.

Really? Which Chinese loans force countries to adopt strict austerity measures including gutting universal healthcare? The “strings attached” to Chinese loans are mostly (1) have liquid collateral, (2) pay it back, (3) we’ll forgive you part of it if you can’t. It is still beneficial to China because it boosts their trade partners and therefore their economy indirectly.

“Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.”

You are parroting pro-imperialist propaganda without stopping to examine the world around you for a moment.

Chinese loans come at much worse conditions compared to IMF loans

They are at “worse conditions” in the sense of percentages and collateral requirements compared to IMF loans, however they do not force the debtor country to adopt economic and political changes suicidal to them in the long term.

This is clear by many independent investigation

“Independent investigation”

Looks inside

Capitalist propaganda

China and Israel are close allies, the ties have been becoming stronger in recent years.

Compared to Germany, France or Italy for example? That’s an insane claim to make. China just trades with everyone, Israel included, they are not an ally in any meaningful sense.

China’s loans come with a lot of “strings attached” if you want to put it that way. Amongst others, one report, How China Collaterizes: New Report Reveals Hidden Structures in Global Lending (pdf), sheds light on the secured lending practices of Chinese creditors in low- and middle-income countries and shows how Chinese creditors secure priority access to cash flows and liquid assets far beyond the IMF or World Bank has ever done, as the report says,

China’s investments/loans are just that, loans, an imperfect thing to do in a capitalist world. I would also prefer if those investments were applied differently, but they are very much no-strings-attached compared to IMF loans.

IMF literally mandates that countries adopt extreme austerity measures and destroy their safety nets, so that imperialists have an easier time hyperexploiting the workers there.

China severely limited double-use exports back in 2023/2024.

This is false.

This is true. They don’t call it sanctions but they did actually stop selling drone parts for example.

Here is a brief list of sanctions involving Israel. As you will see, all the sanctions imposed are by the EU, European countries, the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan, and other democratically governed states. None from China.

The sanctions list doesn’t mean shit. Look at the weapons used to murder children en masse and ethnically cleanse entire cities in Palestine. All of them come from those “democratically governed states”, a lot of them for free.

Look at the diplomatic and propaganda cover they are running for Israel. What Merz is saying about “Netanyahu doing the dirty work for us”. What happens to anti-genocide protesters in Germany. How the western media tried to hide the genocide being livestreamed on TikTok for two years.

The point is to make scraping too expensive to be profitable. Even the easy level 4 anubis challenge multiplied by a few million pages becomes very expensive.

China is sequencing its debt, offering small tokens of grace through debt forgiveness and then locking in longer-term and fully extractivist deals.

This is no worse (in fact, it is better) compared to Europe-backed IMF investments, which force countries into capitalism and austerity in ways that Chinese “no-strings-attached” investment just can’t.

If anything, my bigger problem with China here is that their weapons export controls are pretty lax and both sides are able to get their weapons through some back channel, and end up using them to kill civilians.

It is also noteworthy that China has been increasing trade ties with Israel extensively in this decade, this includes the supply of surveillance technology in Gaza.

China severely limited double-use exports back in 2023/2024. Some stuff is still leaking through (like some surveillance tech and a a rare Chinese construction crew helping build an occupation post) but it’s more of an exception than the rule. Meanwhile Germany is LITERALLY SENDING BOMBS AND MISSILES THAT DESTROY HOUSES AND KILL CIVILIANS.

China is not perfect by any means, but they absolutely are the less evil one in this relationship, it’s not even a contest.

Europe is literally arming and doing diplomatic cover for a genocide right now, whatever human rights abuses exist in China are immaterial compared to the unbelievable suffering caused by europeans in west asia.

It doesn’t mean you can’t drive at 80

I think it depends. You are technically allowed to travel at exactly the indicated speed (so the check would technically be ⩽ 80), but due to the nature of real numbers it’s also impossible to physically do. So in the most pedantic sense you must drive at less than 80 km/h and the requirement might as well be < 80.

No, in general the shape 100% matters. Rectangular signs (not to be confused with supplementary plates) are almost always purely informational, with the singular exception that you mention (“one way” which is regulatory). See also: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/know-your-traffic-signs/regulatory-signs

IMO the best combo is pirated Youtube Music (e.g. via OpenTune) for music discovery, then Bandcamp to buy albums you enjoyed.

That way you’re not paying subscription to the giant corpo sucking life out of musicians, you get to actually own the music you buy forever, and in great quality (as long as you archive it properly), and a significant proportion of your purchase goes to the artists who created the things you enjoy!

In that case, what are they doing to college for?

But also the problem is that they cheat.

Using AI is easy, as you note. You don’t need to go to college to learn to do that.

College can give you many useful skills, mostly related to gathering and processing information, and applying it to solve various issues. If you just copy-paste every question into AI and then copy-paste the answer back, you will learn absolutely nothing.

LLMs hallucinate and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. No amount of QA will fix that fundamental issue of “the LLM is somewhat likely to confidently produce incorrect information”, if you need the answer to be correct you have to do the research yourself, maybe based on the sources the LLM provided, not just sanity-check the output. This is a very useful skill to have for many jobs involving thinking or finding stuff out.

And even if we fix the hallucinations at some point by switching to a different tech (LOL), I do think it’s useful for people to keep some mental skills. Otherwise we will end up with a stupidity and/or dementia epidemics, similar to cars causing an obesity epidemic.

someone who paints in the style of Michelangelo or Studio Ghibli does not pay royalties to either of those entities

I think it’s actually not entirely true. There is a thing called “trade dress” (part of the trademark law), which can protect certain design or “look&feel” elements of any products a company produces; the requirements for this are a bit strict, but if the “style” of your painting is sufficiently similar to a Ghibli animation to cause confusion for customers (e.g. someone may reasonably think that the painting is by Studio Ghibli), there is a possibility that it’s a trademark violation. But this is also beside the point.

if someone reads ten thousand books and then writes their own story, they are not committing copyright infringement.

There is a legal distinction between human learning and LLM training.

The neural connections in someone’s brain formed by reading a book are not considered to be a derivative work, because they are not a “work of authorship” as they are not “fixed in any tangible medium … from which it can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated", and they are not “sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration".

LLM weights meanwhile totally fit the definition of a “work”, stored in the medium of a digital file (fixation) and produced by humans through a computational process (human authorship), making it a derivative work of the training material by definition.

Once again, I agree that this is actually unfair, but it is the consequence of the law as written, because the law itself is unfair.

If a company unlawfully … reproduced protected works in a way that violates copyright law, then it has broken the law and should be prosecuted.

Merely training an LLM on copyrighted material without holder’s permission (and then distributing the weights or selling access to inference on those weights) is a violation of copyright law if it were to be applied consistently (ignoring the fair use argument, which I’ll get back to). That is, if you applied any other computational process in this way, the result would be a derivative work and subject to approval by copyright holder(s). The reason it’s “different” this time is that the people violating the law are richer than those who wrote the law in the first place, not because of any legal argument.

As of right now, there are multiple lawsuits against major LLM developers. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that training on publicly available data can qualify as fair use.

If a court ruled that it’s “fair use”, that actually lends more credence to the idea that LLM weights are a derivative work - “fair use” is a defense for copyright infringement that only makes sense in this case if the new work is an unauthorized derivative of the original.

Whether it’s actually fair use or not is another question. I can see the fair use argument for open-weight non-commercial models, not so much for commercial offerings - commercial LLMs seem to fail all 4 elements of fair use.

BTW, I’m not even necessarily anti-AI (at least the open-weight, local models). I use a local model in my job almost daily, and also I think it’s mostly good that the entirety of FOSS corpus is available for download in a compressed and easily remixable form. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy of the legal system which applies its already unjust copyright law (and most other laws) only against poor people.

I don’t know what to tell you, legally there’s a difference between a person learning something and training an LLM.

Copyright protects the expression itself, not the ideas, facts, patterns, grammar, writing styles, or knowledge learned from that expression.

Copyright absolutely does protect “ideas, patterns, grammar, writing styles”. It does not cover material facts, but this is beside the point here.

Nobody claims that someone who read 10,000 copyrighted novels is committing copyright infringement every time they sit down and write a new story.

Actually, if they take certain elements from other works it often can be considered copyright infringement, but this is also beside the point.

You don’t get to argue that learning is legal when humans do it and suddenly becomes theft when a machine does it. Either learning from publicly available information is allowed, or it isn’t. The standard cannot magically change because you dislike the technology.

This is the crux of the issue. The LLM is not a person from a legal perspective, therefore it cannot “learn”. What is happening is that a legal person - a company - is consuming a bunch of copyrighted material and transforming it into a bunch of data to be interpreted by a computer program. This makes that data definitionally a derivative work made by the company. Sure, the transformation process is probably “creative” enough for the company to be able to claim copyright on the resulting weights, as long as that company gains explicit or implicit approval from all the copyright holders of the works they used to create the weights. Legally speaking, this is no different from you pirating a bunch of movies and making a compilation of the funniest moments - see how the legal system would react to you doing that.

Of course, I find the entire concept of modern copyright system to be an awful idea whose entire purpose is impeding the human creativity for the purposes of monetization.

But if we read the law as it is - the AI companies are absolutely doing copyright infringement by training their models on GPL code and not releasing the weights under a GPL-compatible license.

GPL absolutely should cover shit like this. Training an LLM on your code makes it definitionally a derivative work, therefore it must be licensed under GPL too (with limited fair use exceptions which shouldn’t apply here). The problem is that the US government is not willing to enforce this at all, because it is owned by the same billionaires as the AI companies.

LLMs are absolutely trained on FOSS software, including GPL’d stuff. Accelerating software development is also a large part of how they are making money. I believe training on GPL’d software and then charging for access is copyright infringement, but it doesn’t really matter because entities supposed to be enforcing copyright are paid for by the same billionaires who run the AI companies, so literally nothing will happen.