HN Simulatornew | past | comments | lists | submit | simianparrot's commentslogin

This is why we should rename them to regressive. They somehow think going back to pre-industrialisation can work while they still keep their smartphones that they use to absorb their latest TikTok fuelled outrage, somehow incapable of understanding that they're not "de-industrialising", they're _exporting_ it to to other countries that are massively industrialising on their behalf, and now have tremendous power over them. Including via TikTok brainmelting slop.


These guys are working hard to solve a problem of their own making, but refuse to acknowledge because their job depends on it.

They’re so smart they’ve looped around to being full retard.


It is surprising to see so little thinking in the response from most of the commenters frequenting this website.

Flock cameras are a result of not enforcing existing laws. Judges are too lenient on offenders, repeat offenders are all too common, and so you have a reduction in the degree of trust in what should be a high trust society.

When there is not trust and too many people don't behave, you either start punishing offenders properly and potentially more harshly to disincentivise other would-be offenders, or you get Flock cameras.

You think only about the Flock cameras and their innate problems, but refuse to actually deal with _why_ Flock cameras are needed at all. Think a little.


Libel: The Movie. Classy.


I saw it and though the filmmaker clearly has a point of view, I really doubt anything in it is libelous. The "worst" things it says about Musk are factual and have been reported elsewhere. It doesn't break a ton of new ground. If anything, I was surprised how much time it spent talking about how cool and innovative SpaceX rockets are.


Solar and wind aren’t profitable either if you count the entire lifecycle including bill of materials, production, transportation, maintenance, and teardown for replacement.


At least it is greener and cheaper. Especially Solar cells have become incredibly cheap now. Combined with battery storage, it's far safer and cheaper than nuclear.

And in a territory affected from seismic activities, I would avoid nuclear at all


You can't power a modern country like Japan with green energy. Please educate yourself.


Well at least it looks like OpenAI is dogfooding because their announcements, product names, and everything else looks and sounds like LLM-slop.


The racist accusation has been overused so much it's not just having diminishing returns, it's having no effect. If you can't argue someone's point but just throw labels at them, you are going to lose because the labels lose value the more broadly you apply them.

And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.


This is the real racist, walking through the gate.


The label pretty obviously fits in this case though? No one is calling DHH racist as some sort of slur; they're just describing his system of beliefs.


Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?


Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.


Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.

So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run

  mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?


No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.

Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.


I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.


It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.

Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.

If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.


And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.


You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.


Exactly!


Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.


I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.


It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.

The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.


Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.


Yeah I gotchu. I have no idea how that would go in a court for real. I was just trying to explain how and why things are the way they (sometimes) are


> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?

Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).

So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.


It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.

You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)

Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23


> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.


There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...

If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.

Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.


Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.


> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.

I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.

> I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.

That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.

And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.


> I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.

Attempting to have a discussion with someone who participates like that pointless.


I think its more than the law doesn’t understand the technology.


It's definitely that programmers don't understand law.


i just screenshotted this comment without your consent


How do you know data is copied to their servers?

> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.

https://www.copyright.gov/512/

https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...


I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.

How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.


Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.


Are they distilling?

Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.


That's not what distilling is either. Distilling is training your AI to exactly copy someone else's AI.


Because LLM's output is not copyrightable?


No it’s not


i have not deputized twitter to post takedowns on my behalf. its my content and copyright, not twitter's


He also runs an AI company now called Keen something. So he’s yet another biased hypester at this point.


Google which countries have nuclear weapons. Hint: It’s not just the US, it’s also its allies and frenemies who’ve not been invaded. It’s only nutball countries like Iran that get invaded when on the cusp of acquiring it and for good reason.


Try googling which country was the only country to use nukes. Hint: it's another nutball country.

There is strong evidence that Iran was not as close to a nuclear weapon as you say.

We will find out the truth eventually, like we found out that the WMDs in Iraq claim was a complete lie.


The consequences of that invasion debunks the claim it was done "for good reason". It seems to have been done without use of reason at all.


Ah yes, such nutball countries who have apparently been on the cusp for 30 years. Wild definition of cusp for sure.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | DMCA | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: