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'Let them eat cake.'


Common pattern where a bright spark asks, 'why you all so complicated?' Proceeds to assume we're dealing with a finite graph / set.

All the complication is needed to handle the fact that the state can be a random vector of real numbers in a possibly varying dimensional space. It's not jerking off on jargon for its own sake.

Sure, there are simple cases - doesn't make the general case 'bullshit'.


It does apply to people? When you read a copy of a book, you can't be sued for making a copy of the book in the synapses of your brain.

Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's what you could be sued for.


This is not about memory or training. The LLM training process is not being run on books streamed directly off the internet or from real-time footage of a book.

What these companies are doing is:

1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.

2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training.

3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened.

The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.

But the training set that the company is storing is full of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.

What they're doing before the training step is exactly like building a library by going with a portable copier into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that bookshop.


But making copies for yourself, without distributing them, is different than making copies for others. Google is downloading copyrighted content from everywhere online, but they don't redistribute their scraped content.

Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.


Making copies of an original you don't own/didn't obtain legally is not fair use. Also, this type of personal copying doesn't apply to corporations making copies to be distributed among their employees (it might apply to a company making a copy for archival, though).


> But making copies for yourself, without distributing them,

If this was legal, nobody would be paying for software.


> When you read a copy of a book

They're not talking about reading a book FFS. You absolutely can be sued for illegally obtaining a copy of the book.


Not from what I've seen. The compiler is slow af which plays badly with how fussy the thing is.

It's easy to have no defects in functionality you never got around to writing because you ran out of time.


So it makes you think before typing and compiling the code?

Doesn’t look like a con to me :)


Here's a great life hack for you. Set a 15s delay whenever you type in an editor. That way you'll think more before writing code.


Ah, the good ole Rube Goldberg machine.


It's not so hard. One of the interview stages I did somewhere well known used this.

Here's the neural net model your colleague sent you. They say it's meant to do ABC, but they found limitation XYZ. What is going on? What changes would you suggest and why?

Was actually a decent combined knowledge + code question.


There are so many interesting ways to use code reviews like subtly introducing defects and bugs and see if people can follow the logic, read the code, find where the reasoning comes up short.

I wrote up 7 general strategies for teams that are interested: https://coderev.app/blog/7-strategies-for-using-code-reviews...


> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms

As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.


It's a bad question. What is actually being tested here is whether the candidate can reel off an 'acceptable' motivation. Whether it is their motivation or not. This is asking questions that incentivize disingenuous answers (boo) and then reacting with pikachu shock when the obvious outcome happens.


I used to work for a historical records org. As of 10 years back, OCR was getting humans to transcribe such work. So whatever the limitations of genai, my prior is against there being a perfectly good old fashioned OCR solution to the 'obscure hisotrical handwriting' problem.


Hi Le Bot, say potato?


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