> That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.
Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans for the same jobs? Like it or not, at-will employment makes it much easier to justify hiring a new employee because they can just be let go if things don't work out. I'm not even talking about the employee not working out, forcing companies into continuing employment can be disastrous if the market shifts (e.g. what's happening at VW right now).
A requirement to provide x months of notice with y% chance of success is a quantifiable risk with a dollar price tag. It is definitely brought up when companies decide to expand in places where labor law is different, and it scales directly with how much the employee is being paid.
> There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either.
So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US. There are obvious incentives that push unions away from merit-based promo, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you refuse to see them.
> Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.
You're right, that might not always be true. Every time that's happened I've just changed jobs for a raise and sometimes also a promotion.
That's my defense against shitty companies: I can just leave. If people were MORE WILLING TO LEAVE when things got bad, companies would get away with much less and make more efforts to retain employees.
I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane! I haven't bothered to apply to a job since college, I've just set LinkedIn to "open to work" and replied to a few recruiters. FFS, even when I've been voluntarily unemployed, just holding onto my stock was enough to see my net worth INCREASE.
> It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you.
I don't understand why pro-union folks always assume that skeptics think their boss is their dad. Rest assured, I am very cynical about my job and corporate politics.
Look man, I'm fully aware of what unions are and what they do. They're a great deal for some union members! They're also why American ports are the least efficient in the developed world, they're a big part of why RICO exists, and I'm already doing an in-demand well-compensated job. My peers and I are all going to be able to retire at 40, barring a major war or other disaster. If I get laid off, I get 90 days of COBRA and then Medi-Cal, and odds are I won't even need the Medi-Cal.
What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?
> Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect.
Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done."
After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.
What's almost certainly going to happen is that the courts will decide the infringing party in that situation is the one who willfully caused the violation.
Since most users of LLMs are not using them to run around copyright and this copyright stuff is aggressively trained out of models or blocked whenever possible, the models themselves are still transformative works not intended to facilitate infringement.
Ok, what about a human summarizing it or taking notes? What about a human indexing it for later searches? Does it matter if they use notecards or if they do it on a computer?
What if they retouch a photo you've taken as a political message? Does it matter if the do it with Sharpie, Photoshop, or by feeding it into an LLM?
When you publish, you give up some control over your work. Other people are allowed to do things with it and IMO it does not matter if it's in their head, on paper, or in a computer.
No, because these days we are quite explicit that the law binds us all. Citizen or not, legally present or not, criminal or not, every human being within the borders of the US (or any modern country) is entitled to the full protection of the law.
When an American becomes an outlaw, it doesn't mean the same thing as it did back then. There is no legal way for the government to deny someone their rights.
I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level (tbh more money than I even thought I'd make in my life).
Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much.
I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy.
What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.
> oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions
No, they're being advertised as useful tools. Obviously the tool salesmen are gonna inflate their capabilities, but in the past few years I've never heard ANYONE important make the claim that they're always correct. I've seen that used as an attack pretty often though.
> ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models.
Yes but it's not like random otherwise healthy people do this which seems to be what you're implying. There are clearly other risk factors at play here and it's not obvious how much the AI is contributing. Psychosis isn't new and AI hasn't moved the needle much.
> and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.
Or... people just happen to like it when the model speaks in a friendly voice and that desire is impossible to separate out when you're figuring out if an LLM's response is good.
Don't try and put this on American companies when you can just go to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and see pretty plainly that lots of people insist of syncophancy. Obviously this isn't good or healthy, but it's not wrong or nefarious. It's certainly not an America-only phenomenon.
Nobody would expect their coffee to be almost boiling, everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time.
Even Steve Jobs died early because he took vibes-based advice instead of just listening to doctors. You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.
Comcast does data caps everywhere except places where its customers have alternatives. It's insane that they're allowed to charge monthly for providing a speed and then also set the data caps at like ~3h of continuous full use.
No he's got a point, if your friend and OpenAI both preface their statements with "I'm not a doctor but..." then there is no reason for it to be ok when one does this and not the other.
We're several years into having LLMs be publically available. If people still don't understand their limitations it's not the models' fault. This situation in my mind is kind of similar to a random person googling symptoms and then brainlessly reading the first website they find.
I think that argument is pretty persuasive, actually, because I use these things all the time and am well aware they're prone to bullshit. I cannot fathom someone with unstable blood pressure and other unexplained symptoms not going to see an actual doctor JUST BECAUSE ChatGPT told them they were fine, and it makes even less sense that anyone would listen to a soulless machine talking about "God's plan." FFS, when you have serious medical symptoms, JUST GO TO THE ER. They get plenty of people convinced they swallowed their earbuds while sleeping, someone with fluctuating blood pressure is so much more serious.
If the argument you're making is "some people are too stupid to be trusted with an LLM" then you should say that, but otherwise this is crazy.
Because most authors don't make a ton of money from their books, and even a relatively low settlement from Anthropic is a large enough sum that they're OK with taking it.
I'm telling you what the law plainly says. I personally think that the exceptions for fair use made sense before the transformer was invented, and they still make sense now.
The two main problems with copyright also haven't changed: copyright lasts too long and is too expensive to defend.
> on the other hand the complete dismissal of copyright by AI labs
Courts keep ruling over and over that an LLM trained on copyrighted works qualifies as a transformative work and is therefore fair use. They don't have to dismiss copyright law, this has always been allowed.
The only thing they get in trouble for is pirating the works to get their hands on them.
This is a pretty common clause when a company open sources something that was previously locked away. The AOM AV1 codec has a similar rule for its patent pool to discourage trolling.
"You are violating the DRY principle with code like <blahblah>. Look through the codebase in depth, and identify possible places to consolidate common logic."
Yeah, there's no substitute for taste, but this is not that big of a deal. I infinitely prefer repeated code to crappy, leaky abstractions. Let the model generate some slop, then tighten it up either by hand or with more prompting.
> Oh, yeah, you're just wrong. The law explicity states that copyright belongs to HUMAN authors. Not AI. And courts have repeatedly ruled AI generated work cannot be copyrighted. You're the one who seems a little confused.
No, I'm not confused. Go actually read your own link before you get condescending with me:
> Assuming that copyrightable works require a human author, works created by humans with the assistance of generative AI might be entitled to copyright protection depending on the nature of human involvement in the creative process.
The only settled legal finding is that copyright must be assigned to human beings.
The guidance of the Copyright Registration Office is not legally binding, which is where I think you may be confused. You do not need to register copyrights because they exist intrinsically when you create works.
If push comes to shove, you prove this in civil court to sue someone. They can argue a fair use defense. For example, training LLMs on copyrighted text has been repeatedly ruled fair use, as a transformative work.
The law is quite clear that how a work was created does not matter for copyright. All that matters is whether or not a thing qualifies as an original work of authorship. The boundaries of what AI-generated work can be copyrighted will be tested in court in the coming years.
Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans for the same jobs? Like it or not, at-will employment makes it much easier to justify hiring a new employee because they can just be let go if things don't work out. I'm not even talking about the employee not working out, forcing companies into continuing employment can be disastrous if the market shifts (e.g. what's happening at VW right now).
A requirement to provide x months of notice with y% chance of success is a quantifiable risk with a dollar price tag. It is definitely brought up when companies decide to expand in places where labor law is different, and it scales directly with how much the employee is being paid.
> There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either.
So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US. There are obvious incentives that push unions away from merit-based promo, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you refuse to see them.
> Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.
You're right, that might not always be true. Every time that's happened I've just changed jobs for a raise and sometimes also a promotion.
That's my defense against shitty companies: I can just leave. If people were MORE WILLING TO LEAVE when things got bad, companies would get away with much less and make more efforts to retain employees.
I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane! I haven't bothered to apply to a job since college, I've just set LinkedIn to "open to work" and replied to a few recruiters. FFS, even when I've been voluntarily unemployed, just holding onto my stock was enough to see my net worth INCREASE.
> It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you.
I don't understand why pro-union folks always assume that skeptics think their boss is their dad. Rest assured, I am very cynical about my job and corporate politics.
Look man, I'm fully aware of what unions are and what they do. They're a great deal for some union members! They're also why American ports are the least efficient in the developed world, they're a big part of why RICO exists, and I'm already doing an in-demand well-compensated job. My peers and I are all going to be able to retire at 40, barring a major war or other disaster. If I get laid off, I get 90 days of COBRA and then Medi-Cal, and odds are I won't even need the Medi-Cal.
What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?