This is a very clear agpl violation. FSF should be all over this and sue the living crap out of the AI companies. You could even get it class action by gathering a few agpl code authors.
People in this thread are acting like the AI companies are just flouting the law and there's nothing that can be done. This is an extremely well documented precedent, and GPL violations routinely show up in court. It's a very easy case to lay out especially because no one is really complaining about money except in the settlement... It's all about distributing the source code. And of course a very nice chunk of change for infringement but that's beside the point.
A successfully litigated case would result in the open sourcing of every AI that touched agpl code in any way because it was in memory with the AI algorithm.
As clear as "can I take a copyrighted photo, use a photoshop filter on it, and then it's not copyrighted anymore?" is pretty clearly a solved question in any copyright system.
I think that this is actually a complex topic in copyright law that requires case by case analysis. It clearly is possible to cut out things from magazines, glue them together to form a collage and create a copyrighted work of art. In my naive opinion sufficient photoshop filtering can thus create a new copyrighted work.
LOL. This is way more common than people think. Remember AMD CEO Hector Ruiz? Same exact thing happened to him, except the woman was selling secrets to wall street instead of China. This is a thing.
This is somewhat an option. I have this TV too and when you set it up, you can choose to have it be a dumb tv, and even avoid Google TV if you want. In the US.
This is why we don't have fireflys anymore. They were everywhere growing up. They lay eggs on the bottoms of fallen leaves. HOA's demand you rake your leaves. This kills the firefly.
I wish it was just raking at this point. The only person I've seen raking in many years is my 90+ year-old neighbor. Everyone else has the backpack leafblower SWAT teams.
We always raked our lawn when I was a child (and I did a lot of the raking), as did my grandparents who lived in their house for 40 years before I was born, yet there were always plenty of fireflies. I don't think you can blame raking for killing them off.
Also undisturbed grass is great for ground nesting birds! We saw them return when we left a field fallow in Ireland. Less helpful in suburbia admittedly
That's easy to say but anyone with a lawn is typically bound by local ordinances. I don't even live in a particularly nice area and I got a warning citation for some cool looking thistle I decided to let grow this year.
Hint: you can get around most issues just by making it looking intentional. Grow a prairie in your front yard, but carefully keep a well mowed path down the middle and around the edges. This makes the whole look like a well maintained garden and will stop a lot of complaints. It won't stop everything, but it goes a long way.
Of course check what is native. Where I live prairie is native. However if you live in woods you shouldn't be planting tall grass.
Could it? Where else in the world has this sort of control? Most countries have more lawn freedom I think, you might get people disapprove but there are no controls.
I apologise, I was thinking of laws about long grass being a nuisance but having looked in to it more it’s better than I thought, wildflower meadow seems ok.
>> DO NOT RAKE YOUR LAWNS. This is why we don't have fireflys anymore
Or, don't have lawns. Suburban grass lawns are a very unnatural structure and I find it odd that any insect would be so dependent on them. Raking leaves immediately around houses is an important fire safety measure. Perhaps the better option is to minimize lawns in favor of natural forest/tree cover where leaves are more likely to rot before they dry out enough to become a fire hazard.
Where I live tall grass is the natural structure. We have a lot of trees in our suburbs - but they don't belong at all (except on river bottoms), grass is correct (not mowed grass, but grass)
Everyone else: figure out what is correct for where you live. There is no one correct answer for everybody.
One of the subreddits I used to read religiously (sorry, offensive name incoming...) was /r/bartards. It was diary-like entries from people who were addicted Benzodiazapines. I've never used them, but wow is it easy to see the lessons there. Here's a few things you should know about these drugs, all of which were very easy to learn if you read 2 or 3 stories on this subreddit:
1: Benzo's, as they call them, reduce inhibitions greatly, and also reduce short-term memory. If you take a 1 MG Xanax with no tolerance, and you have a bottle of 10 more pills, somewhere within the next 12 hours, you will take all 10 of those extra pills. The "High" has a very "I don't feel it" quality, because all that's really happening is your inhibitions are vanishing. So, geez, I don't feel it, I'll take more! Keep in mind, a 1 mg Xanax is usually supposed to be cut into 4 doses.
2: Driving on Benzo's almost always results in a "Americas Most Dangerous Police Chases" type behavior. The driver will likely have taken, now, 11 mgs of Xanax, and will awaken in a jail cell 2 to 3 days after the car incident, completely unaware of what has transpired. Guaranteed they fought the cops 100% of the way to that cell, too, so they don't know where the bruises came from.
3: A real Benzo fiend "blacks out" all the time. A common theme in this subreddit would be "I took 1 MG, had a 100 pills left. Woke up 1 week later with pictures on my phone of myself and 3 other people having an orgy. No pills left. I don't remember any of this." It's astonishing how much people can down in such a binge. Seems it's hard to OD. HOWEVER.....
4: If you are addicted to benzos and you quit cold turkey, you can die. Seizures, blackouts, flu-like symptoms. Its BAD. This is not Heroin. You have to slowly taper off of them, like you were decompressing from a deep ocean dive, over weeks, if not months. Or else you DIE!
5: You can go online right now and get a prescription for this stuff from some disgraced doctor through a startup like those Viagra, ADHD, or GLP1 pharma mills.
6: DON'T EVER TAKE A BENZO, EVER. Maybe 1 before eye surgery where they can't anesthetize you and you leave without any more pills.... Something like that. Otherwise, avoid.
My personal experience with Xanax was that a psychiatrist prescribed 0.25mg pills for daily use, but out of caution I decided to only take it during episodes of high anxiety. I was going through a very emotionally volatile time in my life and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
I would take 1-2 pills occasionally to this end and it worked to stabilize my mood. Initially once or twice a week.
When I told the psychiatrist about this he shrugged his shoulders and the next prescription was "take 1 as needed."
I simultaneously did cognitive behavioral therapy. Life also got better.
Over time the frequency with which I took the pills went down. Eventually I went about 2 months without taking any and decided there was no need to refill the prescription or see the guy again.
I still keep some hydroxyzine on hand. It's an antihistamine with mild anxiolytic effects that tends to induce drowsiness. Occasionally if I'm really stressed out and anxiety is hitting hard I'll pop one of those at bedtime to ensure I get a good sleep, that's usually all it takes for me to set things right and do my best the next day. They're not as strong as benzos nor do they have the infamous downsides.
All this to say, I don't doubt the Reddit stories are real but I think there's a bit of Internet effect going on there, I wouldn't agree with #6 and I think tightly controlled use of benzos can be helpful.
One of the characteristic diagnostics for ADHD conditions is that "uppers", substances that would normally make someone more jittery and excitable, have a calming effect on ADHD sufferers when taken in theraputic doses.
Benzo blackouts are the most clear cut blackouts ever. No feeling of time lost, no amount of cues can bring back any memories, you just wake up and the pills are gone. It doesn't always mean you did something crazy though, you can very well have just had a normal week. And you can learn stuff, you just won't remember learning it. Like if you watch a show you can know what happened on the show a week later but just have no memory of watching it.
The timing of dose reductions increase as one does down. And the amounts one can drop each time decrease a lot. Separately that lack of inhibition is the secret sauce for high power executives to deliver deceptive or outright false speeches and do horrible things like lie under oath or do mass firings.
Feels like a bit of a Reddit LARP. These extreme stories are a good reminder to not abuse the drugs, but the nuanced take here is that your average person is not going to chug the whole bottle in one sitting the moment they get their first prescription. Like many drugs, they can be useful when used responsibly and under the supervision of a _good_ doctor (which can be a bit of challenge in some cases, I know). A blanket statement to completely dismiss a class of drugs is not useful.
These are rather extreme cases. Very few of those who use benzos, tens of millions in US alone per TFA, will go on binges ever. Most problems are from the dependence caused by long-term prescription-level dosing.
6: DON'T EVER TAKE A BENZO, EVER. Maybe 1 before eye surgery where they can't anesthetize you and you leave without any more pills.... Something like that. Otherwise, avoid.
I bit of a harsh take. I started having out of nowhere physical panic attacks (GAD) in my early thirties and they worked wonders. 0.25mg did it. Taken when needed, not daily or as a party drug. I don't use them anymore, for a long time, but they were a crutch that I needed at the time. Breathing into a brown bag wasn't it.
Yeah, I use them, like, one or two days in a row every six months. They're a godsend for getting out of a bad state or for getting through something difficult. Sometimes you just need to function and do the thing.
That’s a model of addiction as a “habit” with a loss of self-control. But the other definition of addiction is really more like “continued use of the substance is required to eliminate a syndrome which only occurs when use of the substance is reduced or discontinued.” I think the latter model is more useful because there are tons of medications out there where responsibly using them leads to addiction. Even SSRIs could be addictive under that definition.
What you describe is called physical dependence, which differs from addiction because it does not involve getting high, does not involve increasing doses to chase the feeling.
But it does mean you can't just stop cold turkey without risk of harm. This is true of benzos, and also many antidepressants (which are very different from benzos) and other psychiatric meds. Often a long period of tapering is required, with "hyperbolic" dosing reduction (each reduction is a small percentage of the previous dosage). This is called a "hyperbolic taper."
As an example, for some benzos, you drop the dosage by 5-10% reduction (from the previous dose, not the original) every 2 to 4 weeks. So D = D0*(1-X)^n where D0 is original dose, X is fraction reduced per period, N is the period number. This should be done under medical supervision.
Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....
Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.
Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that.
Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.
There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.
Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.
If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.
That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.
The real way to increase throughput is to first slow down and smooth out the inevitable bumps by adding adequate slack and building up an inventory of shovel-ready projects as a buffer - and then to start running multiple teams in parallel.
The fact that OP's friend experienced Oracle doing the exact opposite of this lends credence to the idea that they're under pressure and are perhaps panicking.
Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!
yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.
From my limited second-hand understanding of orcl, a team that operates in a smooth and well greased manner is quite the anomaly. I could see why the company would have an immune response to it.
People in this thread are acting like the AI companies are just flouting the law and there's nothing that can be done. This is an extremely well documented precedent, and GPL violations routinely show up in court. It's a very easy case to lay out especially because no one is really complaining about money except in the settlement... It's all about distributing the source code. And of course a very nice chunk of change for infringement but that's beside the point.
A successfully litigated case would result in the open sourcing of every AI that touched agpl code in any way because it was in memory with the AI algorithm.
reply