balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on pied 17 hours ago:
Honestly nothing wrong with that, not my cup of tea but content like that definitely has an audience…
- Comment on And Miss The Opportunity To Tap That Ass? 2 days ago:
That’s obviously wrong. I don’t need to read Mein Kampf to know that nazism is a bad idea. Sure, it helps, but it’s not necessary.
Similarly, I don’t need to read the entire corpus of christian theology to understand that the bible is mostly fiction and that christofascists are wrong.
- Comment on And Miss The Opportunity To Tap That Ass? 2 days ago:
Well, IIRC The Hobbit was initially just a collection of bedtime fairy tales he made up for his children, of course it had inconsistencies.
Actually, thinking about it, that seems like a plausible source of the Old Testament as well…
- Comment on I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny. 3 days ago:
Also, sadly it’s not a real passport. You can tell (at a minimum) because the first machine-readable passports were issued in 1980, and Egypt didn’t start issuing MRPs until 2008.
- Comment on Tried to login to the arch wiki but was given a 3 minute crypto challenge. 3 days ago:
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.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 2 weeks ago:
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. 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).
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.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know what to tell you, legally there’s a difference between a person learning something and training an LLM.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 5 weeks ago:
As intended by the founding fathers, of course
- Comment on Where is your God now? 3 months ago:
I once tried steeping (black) tea in a friend’s drip coffee maker. That shit was the strongest, most flavorful tea I’ve ever tried. 9/10 would recommend
- Comment on 🐙 Octopus is Octopus 🐙 3 months ago:
On a very fundamental level, the scaffolding that makes words make sense is the neuron structures in your brain which fire when they recognize certain sounds/scribbles. Things like etymology and grammar are not necessary for a language to be used for communication (in fact, languages existed for much longer than the notions of etymology or grammar). Both of them help make the language more standardized and thus more understandable, but they are not required - you can totally make yourself understood without knowing about either of those things.
- Comment on Future 3 months ago:
Well, we now technically have a fusion reactor in the sky, and we can receive the energy it beams down right at our homes
- Comment on First Satellites 3 months ago:
I’m pretty sure the model of train is a proper name and it’s named after the satellite. I don’t think I would describe any train as a literal “sputnik” of the rails.
Also Russian is full of composite words like that. “Explorer” in russian would be “исследователь” (issledovatel’) - ис (completely) + след (trace/footstep) + оват (make, imbue) + ель (he who). Literally it would be “he who makes (places) completely (covered in) footsteps”
- Comment on First Satellites 3 months ago:
If the “pa” part of “companion” comes from path
It doesn’t though, it comes from French compagnon/compaignon and then Latin com (with) + panis (bread). It probably originally meant “someone with whom you share bread (eat together)”.
And actually, looking at wiktionary, Old English had a word “ġefēra” (with the same meaning) which is constructed very similarly to “спутник”: ge (‘with’, still the same prefix in german e.g. Gebrüder) + fera (‘to go’/‘to fare’, e.g. in seafaring)
- Comment on Where is my filet knife? 3 months ago:
It’s still super fucked up that you’re basically gifting some other person a sizeable chunk of your income just because they were able to put up a down payment and secure a mortgage. Landlords are middlemen leaches that should not exist even by capitalist standards, see Adam Smith.
- Comment on Finally someone we can get behind! 3 months ago:
The actual answer is “stop supporting US/israeli war effort”. The strait is already open for everyone who’s not helping the empire bomb Iranian schoolgirls
- Comment on Classic fucking Linda 3 months ago:
Alternatively, if you’re overweight, just be happy that she’s helping you reduce calorie intake
- Comment on 4 months ago:
And then maaybe stop defaming her? Like, this post should be ban worthy by any reasonable instance and community rules?
This is a shitpost community, I’m pretty sure it is implied that everything posted here is satirical and/or ironic and/or made up for fun. You wouldn’t sue The Onion for defamation either (or maybe you would, IDK)
- Comment on Western Imperialism 4 months ago:
Poland and Lithuania became “the west” very recently; hence “most” in my claim.
- Comment on Western Imperialism 4 months ago:
Most “western” countries have been acting like this in the past century and are still to this moment reaping the benefits from colonial and imperialist plunder of the global south. It’s not just the USA, even though it is the most damaging.
- Comment on I was told it would be a cultural experience 4 months ago:
Yes, but not because they have fun gimmicks on gas stations
- Comment on simpler times 4 months ago:
I think there were some (plenty?) of NFTs that were backed by IPFS.
I think the fundamental problem with them is that the concept of “owning information” is ultimately absurd.
- Comment on Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away." 5 months ago:
Fuck I though this was a satirical shitpost but it’s real. This seems like the last stop before that patent about yelling the company name to get back to your content…
- Comment on Incel propaganda in my music app 5 months ago:
Man vs reeducation camp guards
- Comment on Incel propaganda in my music app 5 months ago:
If you’re ok with a little piracy, this exists: f-droid.org/en/packages/com.dd3boh.outertune
And then you can also buy your favorite albums/songs on bandcamp to actually support the artists!
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 5 months ago:
As another vegan: sorry, no, it’s not accurate. And the texture/meltiness is just completely off. It is similar enough for me to enjoy it and not want real cheese anymore. However, for many people (especially americans) cheese is some holy substance, so we do need to continue improving vegan cheeses for more people to jump.
- Comment on This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN. 5 months ago:
It is not used correctly. The word UFO starts with a consonant in all major English dialects, as such the correct article is “a”, as in “a UFO”. See www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-a-or-an
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 5 months ago:
There was very very little to complain about with her.
- Promising full military support to a settler colony currently committing a genocide using US weapons
- Campaigning with fucking Cheneys and pandering to fascists
- Not promising any actual support for trans people, stopping at "I will follow the law"
- Not being actually voted on by anyone, instead just appointed by DNC
- Most importantly: she’s a neolib, and the working class has been suffering materially due to neolib policies for the past 50 years, people want change
There is a shitton to complain about her. I would’ve voted for her if I was in the US, but it’s crazy to just shove a status-quo establishment neoliberal and expect people who are surviving paycheck-to-paycheck due to that very ideology to be excited about it.