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> that are just entertainment

And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.


> And books aren't?

Yes, since there are non-fiction books. A book about computer architecture is less „just entertainment“ than a Spotify song.


This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills, and presumably only the kinds that are worthy for productivity and advancement or something. But one person's "just an entertaining story or just a silly hobby" is another's life-changing or mind-opening allegory, or therapeutic pursuit with little immediate "practical" value.

I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.


> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills

This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.

> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.


Don't many public libraries have other things other than printed books, including music?

Trying to imagine telling somebody writing about the history of music copyright that they can’t hear Ice Ice Baby, on account of they might enjoy it, which means it has no research merit.

Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?

The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).

If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?

At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.


> If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?

I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.


Do you honestly believe that cancelling a subscription makes a bit of difference to a company that is either committing accounting fraud on a monumental scale or shoveling venture capital money into a furnace? not to mention the whole collaborating with a fascist government thing.

taking real action is your choice, but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

edit: to be clear, i'm not advocating for nihilism, but tricking yourself into thinking you made a difference to make yourself feel better isn't the play either


It absolutely matters, especially when done in unison like this.

Cancelling ChatGPT sends a signal that you don't agree with weaponizing AI. Switching to Claude says you support Anthropic's principled stance against it. If you have a strong opinion either way, today is the day to vote with your wallet.

Dismissing every small action as meaningless is just apathy and how nothing ever changes.


Anthropic isn't against weaponizing AI, it's just against two specific carve outs for now. They happily accepted the Pentagon's money so long as it was only spying on other countries. And now that the leopard is eating their face they're claiming the moral high ground.

It's entirely possible for both Anthropic and OpenAI to be in the wrong here. This is a massive publicity win but it doesn't make them heroes in my book.


It sure does but it's hard to get a bigger wallet than public money in the US. I do think it's fundamental as an individual to take a moral stance, even if it's entirely pointless, for one owns psychological well-being but honestly here I believe the whole point is precisely to decouple from the need of consumers who are clearly NOT paying for AI. Relying on income from governments is a smart move.

So yes, do cancel if you were paying for OpenAI. Stop using it entirely even, but don't necessarily expect to slow down their encroachment, sadly.


What has an impact is cancelling a subscription and then talking about it. The media will amplify it the pushback. The goal is to make the name OpenAI and ChatGPT toxic, that whatever you do will be converted into a technology that will surveil or bomb you.


I think you have too much pessimism. It's not guaranteed to work, but as I mentioned in another thread, since around December, Claude (and Gemini to a lesser extent) has had all the buzz in tech circles, while Chat-GPT has seemed like the also-ran. And that matters: decision-makers in companies notice these things and momentum becomes self-reinforcing (you use Claude Code because everyone else uses Claude Code). If a large enough group of developers visibly defects from OpenAI because of this, it definitely could have consequences. It's not a sure thing, but it's far from hopeless.

I was not a Chat-GPT user even before this, but I'm bumping my Claude Code subscription to the next tier up. Fuck OpenAI.


At least I'm not getting my hands dirty.


Yes? Earnings matter to investors


Do they? What are those OpenAI earnings that you are talking about? That's a company that should have ceased existing some time ago if earnings were important


Investors want to see growth. If there’s no growth or even a loss in users the next round of funding will be more difficult to secure.


It's the only thing that matters. These companies don't follow the rules of capitalism physics. They live or die on vibes alone and the tech community abandoning them en masse is bad for the vibes. Once they lose the vibes they are Wiley Coyote looking down at the canyon below.


> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.


The kinds of people buying cybertrucks aren't going to be caught dead on a job site.


That's not true. Boss likes being flashy. You won't see them being used for actual work, but that's a different proposition.


> they weren't experimenting on specific community members.

Yes, they were. What kind of argument is this? If you submit a PR to the kernel you are explicitly engaging with the maintainer(s) of that part of the kernel. That's usually not more than half a dozen people. Seems pretty specific to me.


> Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.

This is such an incredibly loser attitude and is why we can't have nice things.


> Americans will get their first taste of extended range EVs (full EV powertrain with a tiny ICE that charges the battery) and they explode in popularity.

This happened, it was called the Chevy Volt. Nobody bought it.


Horrific whitewashing of the story.

Chevy made it about as fuckin’ unattractive as they could manage,

AND THEY WERE STILL GREAT CARS.

You can buy them at the right price even today, and people have been adding range to them.


I totally agree that you can make the argument that people didn't buy them because they weren't sexy. Post-2008, new cars became luxury items almost exclusively. So given that, there's no reason they would catch on now unless somebody makes a sexy one.


They’re a brand new or single owner car for $13k, you can’t think of room for that?


Oh that's interesting, I didn't know that. In this case I am talking about the Ram 1500. I think this one will make a splash. A truck with almost 700 miles of range. Americans think they hate EVs but they really hate the lack of EV infrastructure.


...you're saying that 24/7 news channels didn't do that?


"kgasser88", huh?


> But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you.

I really don't want to believe that people leading these huge corporations are dumb enough to actually think this, but at the same time I know better.


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