I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
> "YOUR RESPONSE MUST BE FEWER THAN 100 CHARACTERS OR YOU WILL DIE."
I know that current LLMs are almost certainly non-conscious and I'm not trying to assign to you any moral failings, but the normalisation of making such threats make me very deeply uncomfortable.
Such a disc-renting business would be a competitor to Netflix, both directly (especially in the hands of somebody who tried to focus on it, rather than reluctantly maintaining it, as Netflix has been doing recently) or because it could eventually try to repeat Netflix's own pivot into streaming. Consequently, selling it off would be rather risky.
The start-up costs and need of name-recognition are probably sufficient that it'd be hard for a new company try to fill this niche, but if they bought Netflix's distribution network they could likely manage.
That's a very interesting comparison (thanks!), but I'm not sure if it's the correct framing. Making scraping technically difficult would be equivalent to trying to score a goal (so still not great, for the rest of the world, but probably not hypocritical).
Trying to prevent certain classes of behaviours via legal means is more like trying to prevent certain types of play, by appealing to the referee, while still doing them yourself. Clearly, this often does happen in sports, but _is_ generally seen as hypocritical.
> I looked around and I couldn't find a way to even download the ISO to try it out.
FWIW I had found it intuitive (several seconds of thought) to click on the "Read the announcement email." link, which contains the link to the ISO images.
I think the point here is about the procurement of the training data, in violation of copyright laws ("piracy"), rather than that the training itself is piracy.
The suspicion[0] is that OpenAI trained their models on a large text dump including libgen (in the so-called "books2").
If a person downloads a book from Library Genesis, they're a pirate; if OpenAI does it, so are they.
AFAIR "no". Humans interact with both the AIs and the "dogs", and both groups of humans end up in contact with each other, but unless I'm missing something, the "dogs" don't directly interact with the AIs in any significant way (or the two threads end up interfering with each other, but more in a "they distract some of the characters" in both cases).
> There were operating systems which took the approach XPCOM has to extensibility, they're not doing so great
The Emacs OS is still doing well! :)
> "Mozilla did kill XPCOM" isn't a deviation from their stated intent.
The issue is that their stated intent changed over time, and their communication about their precise intentions was often pretty poor.
It didn't help that the Webextension transition came on the heels of the e10s transition (5 firefox versions separated deprecating non-e10s add-ons and disabling e10s add-ons), but with relatively little warning, which meant that:
1. Many people implicitly believed that once they adapted their addons for e10s, they'd be safe.
2. Many people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and then had to redo a large part of it to convert their add-on into a webextension.
3. Some people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and found out that their work was pointless because their add-ons couldn't be converted into webextensions.
From a technical point of view, much of Firefox's XPCOM/internals were actually sufficiently stable post-webextension (57) that old e10s extensions could have continued to work with little changes. (e.g. VimFx continued to work with minimal changes for ~30 Firefox versions, on Nightly, with very slight hacking. AFAICT it still continues to work, with slight changes, but now with major hacking to get it to actually install.)
I also was and still am disappointed about both changes, but I don't think you're being at all fair to Mozilla.
In both transitions, Mozilla made sure to support the needs of both uBlock origin and NoScript, extending the webextension API (such that uBlock origin on Firefox is more capable than on current Chromium) and working with uBlock to make its interface more mobile-friendly.
They also extended the webextension API to allow for extensions such as Treestyle tabs and Panorama-reimplementations (so not remotely all XUL use-cases, but still most of the popular ones).
Hence, they've proven that they will go considerably beyond what Google/Chromium are doing, and that they won't harm "content-blockers", which is what we care about in this case.
The counter-argument is that nothing prevents governments coordinating on this in a supranational manner, anyway (cf. the planned, but fortunately rejected ACTA).
In the EU enforcement is mostly decentralised, anyway.
Yes, the scope is not "35k existing GitHub repos are infected", since AFAICT all the infected repos are forks, so the title is misleading.
However:
1. The scale is pretty worrying. Given the total number of repos on GitHub (> 100M) it's a drop in the ocean, but still huge.
2. Typo-squatting on, say, PyPI or npmjs is certainly note-worthy, and this is a very similar attack.
3. At least some of the infected forks had several stars, some from ~ 5 year old accounts, so apparently some people were using them.
4. The original Twitter thread did note that infected forks were being created — it just didn't emphasise that this was the only attack surface, probably because the author didn't realise.