> Microsoft using copilot to license-launder the github corpus
Isn’t the game with licenses that you must specify what can and cannot be done with the code? It’s a big issue that no one prior to now had the foresight to forbid ML training on code without attribution. If the licenses going back 30 years had that stipulation then it would be easy to take down Copilot and ChatGPT. But the licenses simply don’t cover the use case of training a neural net, so it’s probably going to slip through the cracks just like SaaS slipped through the cracks of the GPL by not distributing code, hence the need for AGPL. So I’m sure we’ll see these kinds of clauses added to licenses going forward, but they can’t be applied retroactively.
The irony in all this is that from the start, open source licensing has been a game of wits where software creators try to cleverly use copyright as a lever of control. Well, they weren’t clever enough. They missed ML training and didn’t forbid it. As a result they’ve basically lost the whole game.
Ads are unwanted. If you serve ads, you are doing something unwanted to your visitors. So they block the ads, and you get the unwanted effect of not making money. The pain point is not that your ads are being blocked — it’s that you don’t have a way to make money that doesn’t start with doing something unwanted.
This is also what drives people into cults: not fitting into normal social environments, finding some esoteric community where suddenly there is a fit.
Nothing you said is truth. Those are just your own blind beliefs. How do you know the universe is meaningless? Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome. You’re just spouting YOUR truth, which is not truth at all.
I just want to make a comment about optimizing applications even though the article is about optimizing organizations:
The way to arrive at the optimal system is to continually optimize all individual components as the system develops. You have to walk the razor’s edge between “premature optimization is the root of all evil” and not optimizing anything until it’s too late and a bunch of bad design decisions have been baked in.
If you want to write the fastest program, profile its performance from the start and try different ways of doing things at each step of the process. There’s usually a way of doing things that maximizes simplicity and performance at the same time because maximum performance == doing as little work as possible to complete a task. Chances are that ‘littlest amount of work’ will be elegant.
The infinite scrolling of the same images over and over again makes it harder to use. You can’t tell how many results you’ve actually received and what they are.
The main benefit is you get a rolling two years where no one else can use your code to compete with you. It’s a lot like a patent which gives you a window of time where you have an exclusive right to benefit from your creation.
It depends on whether or not those employees were producing more than they cost. It could be that Intel is shuttering unprofitable projects the way Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple. He killed almost everything Apple was doing and got the company to focus on a handful of products, one of which was the iPod.
Intel’s and the US’s main priority is for Intel to survive as a business over the coming decades and become competitive again. They’re going to do whatever they have to.
That’s not how price works. Price is a function of supply and demand. The cost of goods sold is just part of what goes into price. So if you make something really compelling or scarce that people are willing to pay a lot of money for, you can charge more for it than it costs you to produce it. That’s business.
> That being said it always seems like google has had a massively unfair advantage for crawling not only with budget but with brandname, and perceived value.
VCs and other startup culture evangelists are always challenging founders to figure out what their ‘unfair advantage’ is.