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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”

    “Rarely” is not zero. This looks like it’s opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:

    1. Find OSS code you want to copy
    2. Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
    3. Copy code into your commercial product
    4. When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code

    Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.

    In fact, I wonder if there’s a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.


  • put up posters urging customers to “close the door” behind them

    Do customers read postings in the UK? Because they certainly don’t in the US.

    They should install some kind of mechanism to automatically close the door when it’s not being held open. If the higher-ups don’t want to pay for it, he should calculate how many bags of crisps it would take to pay for it, and then say when Steven has been prevented from stealing crisps for X days it will have paid for itself.


  • Language is magic for these people, specifically the right grouping of words is supposed to be an incantation to get them out of social responsibility, and the wrong collection of words is what binds them.

    Since the state regulates “driving” of vehicles, no sovcit drives. They all “move” vehicles or “transport” vehicles.

    It’s ridiculous, because law revolves around actions independent of how anyone in specific describes those actions, but that’s the mindset of these people. Viewing their beliefs as a kind of word Tetris has at least helped me wrap my head around what could possibly give them some of their strange notions of law.


  • The Tribunal accepted that creed should include non-religious belief systems, yet still rejected ethical veganism because it “does not address the existence or non-existence of a Creator and/or a higher order of existence”.

    What the hell kind of “non-religious belief system” addresses the existence or non-existence of a “Creator”? Are they trying to expand “creed” just enough to cover a particular definition of atheism and absolutely nothing else? The whole point of atheism is that is doesn’t have to address a “Creator” because the laws of nature work just fine without that question being addressed. Sure, some flavors of atheism take a stance on the question, but not all of them do. Are those flavors of atheism suddenly not a “creed”? How could they possibly justify that without applying a biased religious lens (which by its very nature violates basically all atheist “creeds”)?

    Edit: I just realized this is exactly like when people who do not understand the first thing about homosexuality ask a male couple which one is the “woman.”






  • But people aren’t using the web the same way they were at inception. These big companies have built closed source, centralized systems on top of the decentralized infrastructure to serve new use-cases that weren’t envisioned in the original standards. People like these new use-cases, so we need new standards, etc., to facilitate a re-decentralization of data and features in these new use-cases if we want the most used parts of the web to maintain their openness.

    I don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame on the common user for the centralization of their data, when only the centralized systems have been providing the capabilities they want until very recently (where the open alternatives have arisen partly because of new standards like ActivityPub).


  • People go through stages as they fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Early in the decent they are still engaging in healthy reasoning patterns that I won’t go so far as to say are “logical” or “rational,” but they are still flexible enough to be diverted from the conspiracies. There’s always a reason they start down that path: maybe someone close to them got badly sick, maybe they just had a child and are seeking out the best ways to protect them. If you can sit down with them and engage with them on this underlying cause for concern in an empathetic way, that’s when you can change their mind and keep them in the zone of legitimate science and medicine. If they react to every discussion as a confrontation, they are beyond the point that bringing scientific evidence to them will change their mind.