I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
> I think the legal standard currently in the United States is that all AI output is public domain.
This is definitely not true.
The only thing a court has ruled is that the AI itself cannot hold any copyrights. Not that there are none or that using LLM based tools removes all copyright.
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
It’s interesting one sees so many cases of intelligence services using female agents to target men in this way.
Why doesn’t it happen the other way around as much? Why don’t you see intelligence services using male agents to target powerful women in a similar way as much?
Almost all the CEOs of top companies by marketcap are straight men.
But even if that wasn't the case I think men and women are wired differently when it comes to pursuing after sex so your strategy would have to be different.
The audience who pays for porn is almost exclusively male for example. Male porn stars usually cater to a gay male audience even though straight women outnumber gay men by a huge margin.
If you look at literotica however, it flips and it's more of a female audience.
Innate female hypergamy. It makes no sense to use a high-positioned male spy in order to catch a way less valuable woman. The whole point of spying is to use less to get more.
You just don't hear it as often because there are far fewer females in such positions. But they try to go for all tiers of power and use honeypots of both sexes. It's well documented if you do a basic google search, look up Romeo Project, KGB swallows and ravens concept. Male honeypotters are under-representation in mainstream culture due to the sexist notion that only men can be seduced by sex and women somehow do not.
I mean, one reason for why we don't hear about male agents targeting powerful women is the sad fact that there aren't that many powerful women around, when compared to powerful men.
Patriarchal social structure makes this sort of an attack more common against men than women.
Almost all statements Yann LeCun made back then (LLMs won't be able to do this or that) turned out to be wrong. They were right to fire him.
The idea that someone should be fired just because they were wrong seems to be something that would cause issues if one wanted to think long term.
This approach will make people afraid of being wrong. It will lead them to avoid challenging dogmatic assumptions in large organizations and inevitably lead to group think.
People really shouldn’t be punished for saying wrong things. Long term it’s better for a company if they aren’t punished for that. Helps to let people freely criticize dogmas or propose new ones.
Depends on your role. If youre in charge of research in a hundred billion dollar org you should absolutely be fired if you devote your org to pie in the sky research instead of creating tangible value. If your job is just doing the research obviously you shouldnt be punished if your experiments dont work. Yann was fired because his main job was balancing product development with research and he didnt do that.
None of these second-rate LLMs are creating tangible value. Nobody has made any money developing LLMs yet, and when the capex runway ends, the second-rate models won't see much (if any) use at all, compute is too precious for that.
Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.
The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.
As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.
I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.
yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.
What, Alyx is literally "Half-Life, but in VR". It's fiarly polished but the concept is not creative at all. They barely even pushed the overall series plot forward and there's like one whopping new character.
I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.
This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.
Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.
Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.
(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).
There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.
I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.
For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.
I don’t understand some of the things he’s writing in this article.
Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Like there’s this sentence which is confusing to me:
”I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen. All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place.”
This is very confusing to me. I don’t understand where the author is coming from.
There’s even this part:
”“You’re saying you’re not right for it because you’re Jewish,” Mike said.
“Well, because Benjamin’s so not Jewish.”
There was a pause. Then Mike said, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.””
What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
> Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Perception on this has shifted quite a bit. Today, I don't know that this would be an issue (but maybe I'm wrong). In the early days of Hollywood, Jewish people tended to work behind the scenes and not as leading characters. In the 1960s things were changing.
Media or events from outside your living memory need an annotated guide providing context if you want to reason about them.
We watched The Bad Seed in class and spent some time talking about the drinks cart as a plot point until it was explained to us that people actually drank that much.
As Hoffman points out, he looks ethnic, i.e. Jewish. He's pointing out that, in the 1960s, someone who looks like him would absolutely not be named "Benjamin Braddock" or live the kind of stereotypical WASP-y California life depicted in the film. In that sense, he's an unconventional casting choice for the character.
> What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
Nichols is saying that he's made an intentional decision to re-characterize Braddock's character using more stereotypically Jewish qualities. Hoffman's portrayal is anxious and alienated, and this has special resonance with a Jewish audience (particularly in the 1960s) watching a movie that's facially a drama-comedy about polite, WASPy society.
I don’t understand this though. How can someone “look Jewish”? And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
I took a look at a young Dustin Hoffman on Google Images. He looks like a regular white dude with black hair? Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
The same way someone can look like any ethnic group: there's some genetics, and a much larger heap of stereotypes.
> And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
It takes place in the 1960s. At that point, American Jews were not as fully assimilated into broader white American culture. That has changed quite a bit in the last 60 years.
(This is a trope from the period, and applies to other groups as well. The wedding scene in The Godfather has a similar message behind it.)
> Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
Italians and Jews often look similar because Ashenazim (European Jews) are mostly Southern European i.e. Italian in their admixture[1].
I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color. But plenty of British people like James Bond actors also have black hair. But maybe they look distinct to other white people I don’t know.
Anyway this is all pretty interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write those responses. I may not fully understand what’s going on with this article but I do feel like I know more than I did a few hours ago.
> I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color.
Yeah, I can understand the confusion from your perspective. You don't have the context. The US has a broad history of discrimination.
In 2026, there's a lot less. In the 1960s it was still common for country clubs (fancy golf courses and social clubs, more or less) to prohibit Jewish people from joining; this was an issue at some clubs even into the 1990s.
(Since you brought up Italians), Italians were also discriminated against in the US, but more in the 1800s and early 1900s; by the 1960s, Italians were largely integrated, although as many were/are Catholic, they would be excluded from 'WASP' - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Around the same time that Italians faced a lot of discrimination, Irish did too, as they were also largely Catholic.
If you're familiar with redlining as a discrimination practice, to give you an idea of popular discrimination targets, Wikipedia says:
> Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans
But that's not an exclusive list of discrimantion targets, just those that were large enough to target when home lending started getting more organized.
You also had racial covenants prohibiting selling land to non-whites, where that would exclude African Americans, most Asians, often Jewish people, maybe Hispanics and Italians and Irish. Those were made void in 1968, but it takes time and effort to remove them from deeds, so you might run into them.
That makes perfect sense. It's all a question of what things you attuned to. To you they all look the same but to others not. Jews in the US faced a lot of discrimination. Even into the 1970's you'd find things like housing complexes that would not accept Jewish people. Country clubs that would not accept Jewish people. In the 1950's and 1960's universities would have "quotas" for Jews. Even up to the 1990's (and maybe even today) there were clubs and groups that discriminated against Jews. Ethnic Jews are somewhat genetically distinct and so do have somewhat different "looks". It can be minor stuff to you, certainly not as large differences as between people with an "asian" look and "white" (and what you consider "white" is probably different than what some other people consider "white).
No problem! I think it's actually pretty funny/interesting how these classifications, which are ultimately mostly socialized/arbitrary, shift over time. These days, there's certainly much less cultural salience to Nichols' executive choices in the film.
In Star Trek they don’t have television. I remember there was an episode where it is mentioned as a dead medium from the 20th century.
I’m guessing they don’t have films either.
They do have written books though.
Now the Star Trek TNG film Star Trek First Contact takes place in the 21st century and features rock and roll and characters talking in “modern” parlance.
I’m guessing that in between the 21st century and the 24th century mankind advanced and stopped watching tv and movies and went back to reading books.
Perhaps they advanced and abandoned social media as well. The Star Trek’s version of forums and the internet could be an idealized version of Hacker News where everyone actually follows the rules and Dang the AI moderator can just chill and not do much. It’s very possible.
This means that all AI generated code is public domain at the point of it being generated.
Of course just because something is public domain that doesnt mean you have to release the code publicly. Public domain just affects what others can do with the output. It doesnt mean you have to release the code yourself.
The new Epic Games Store is apparently entirely vibe coded. So that technically would mean that the source code for it would be public domain right? But people still can't copy the store or do whatever they want as you have trademarks protecting it. And Epic is under no obligation to release the code..
I am not a lawyer. It's possible I am completely misunderstanding the situation. Is there something I am getting wrong?
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