re: The opposite of “full” is…

@mjd Or "new", if you're looking at the moon.

@mjd @christianp I heard a suggestion that the stops on the 6 train be used to remember degrees Celcius -- 33rd St is ~0 C, 42nd is ~5C, 50th is ~10C, etc.

@johns Make sure you photograph all of the identifying numbers on the packaging as well as your receipt before you notify the FTC.

@crystalvisits @jeridansky Orange is the new banana.

@lumi I frequently say that my wife and I are in a mixed marriage: I use emacs and she uses vi.

@bkuhn @zacchiro @cwebber @ossguy @richardfontana Actually, I just thought of one proprietary software company that would be much happier not to have LLMs around: Salesforce. Nobody's going to buy their overpriced shit when the alternative is to vibecode something that works exactly with your business process and that you can change, yourself, any time you want at the cost of a couple hundred bucks of Claude and a few hours of work.

@bkuhn @zacchiro @cwebber @ossguy @richardfontana I don't even know if I agree with my supporting arguments. But I don't even think that it has to be someone in the proprietary world that brings a lawsuit -- it could be anyone whose code or text is trained on.

@zacchiro @cwebber @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana I would say it's dramatically less safe. First, there's very little incentive to go after some OSS project over an unauthorized inbound=outbound contribution. Second, if someone did, the damage would likely be a small part of a single project. Third, only a small number of parties (the employer, or maybe some other single party whose code was copied) have the ability to sue.

With LLMs, it's different. When the authors sued Anthropic, they all sued. Is a shell script that Claude generated a derivative work of, say, the romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses (to pick a random thing included in Anthropic's training set)? Well, it's hard to show that it's not, in the sense that that novel is one of the zillion things that went into generating the weights that generated the shell script.

Now it happens that the authors sued Anthropic (and settled). But I don't know if their settlement covers users of Claude (and even if it did, there are two other big models). And that's only the book authors -- there's still all of the code authors in the world.

So yes, I think the risk is high. I mean, in some sense -- in another sense, it seems unlikely that Congress would say, "sorry, LLMs as code generators are toast because of some century-old laws". At most, they would set up a statutory licensing scheme for LLM providers which covers LLM outputs. Of course, Europe might go a different way, but I think they would probably do the same. Under this hypothetical scheme, if your code were used to train Claude, you would get a buck or two in the mail every year. Authors got I think $3k per book as a one-time payment, but that was a funny case because of how Anthropic got access to the books.

Still, there's a risk that Congress wouldn't act (due to standard US government dysfunction).

It seems like most people are willing to take this risk, which I think says something interesting about most people's moral intuitions.

re: genai. ethical harms. bit rambly

@lumi @bkuhn @ossguy @mastodonmigration I have always been in favor of a narrow definition of Free Software -- that is, I think it means software that respects the four freedoms. A piece of Free Software could be bad for other reasons. Bitcoin comes to mind as being unnecessarily bad for the environment. Perhaps software useful only to send spam. Or (hypothetically) software made with enslaved labor.

re: genai. ethical harms

@lumi @ossguy @bkuhn @mastodonmigration Right, that's the car analogy: cars aren't sustainable.

(If you're asking whether it genuinely helps, I would encourage you to look at what other experienced programmers you respect are saying -- in particular, I think @mjd is worth listening to, as he is one of the best programmers I personally know).

But also, unfortunately, it seems really unlikely that we will manage to outlaw either cars or LLMs.

re: genai. ethical harms

@lumi @bkuhn @mastodonmigration @ossguy GenAI has a case where it's useful: producing small software when you don't know how to write code. To my mind, this is a software freedom issue: what use is a pile of source code that you don't know how to modify? Sure, you could hire someone (if you're rich).

It also seems to (since November) be sometimes able to help experienced practitioners produce software faster than they otherwise would be able to -- especially in areas where they are unfamiliar with the ecosystem. You may or may not believe that this justifies the harm, but it is a use-case.

Finally, one weird-ass use-case which I admit is niche: I use it to remove ads from podcasts. Imagine doing that like 90s spam filtering, with a pile of regexps. Yuck. LLMs (while not perfect at the job) make it straightforward. My kid is much happier not listening to ads.

re: genai. ethical harms

@bkuhn @mastodonmigration @lumi @ossguy Maybe cars would be a better analogy: expensive, environmentally destructive, makes your body atrophy, but damn they're convenient.

@mjd @skewray

A: X is wrong, and you should feel bad about doing it.

B: I did X because of the incentives.

A: By telling you to feel bad, I am trying to change the incentives.

@intransitivelie Charles De Gaulle? Or Pierre Mendes France?

@lahosken A thing I like about this is the graphic design.

@mjd @robinhouston I think there's still a problem with long spiky caltrop shapes.

@mjd @robinhouston Those are called "polyiamonds", which must have been what was meant; I think it's false because of polyiamonds with holes.

@crystalvisits I once went to a podiatrist for a sprained ankle. Sure, there was an elevator to his office. But to get to the elevator, you had to go down a flight of stairs. It was a very wide flight of stairs -- 4 or 5 meters wide. They could have put in a lift. A podiatrist.

@attoparsec @beka_valentine I think I'll play the one from The Expanse (content notice: much gore).

re: irritated note on history of U.S. aggression

@mjd George H. Bush had to settle for Panama.

@lahosken I had a similar idea

@smellsofbikes @MLE_online That brick one is incredible.

@jefftk Is that the amount with or without a bottle scraper?

@waltman "Before we get started, I would like to acknowledge that I am recording today on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, whose historical relationship with the land continues today."

@lahosken @adrianhon When I clean my cat's litter box, I always tell them to put their dukes up -- because I'm boxing.

@mjd @choroba Also named, indirectly, after the same guy: the Wistar rat.

@rose_alibi Houston Street (pronounced House-ton).

@lahosken I think -ler should be -er.

@smellsofbikes @MLE_online The ones from mangozz.com are usually good, if stupidly expensive. I always get two-day shipping (by waiting until there's a sale that offers it).

@smellsofbikes @MLE_online This is still what it's like with Alphonso and Kesar mangos are like -- they're only in season a couple of months each year. When they come back, the kid and I go through a dozen a week.

@petersanchez @icy @tedu @knapjack@bonk.cozysumo.space OK, finally caught up on this. I was unhappy with The Rose Fields. It ended in the middle of nowhere. Also, the protagonists were nowhere near the actual plot, which seemed to have something to do with money, except that Pullman doesn't care about money and thus doesn't actually have anything to say about it. Oh well.

re: semantle #1483 spoiler

@rhiannonstone Nice!

@jmac @jplebreton I think that's Raymond Queneau (describing Oulipo): "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."

I often think of that line in the context of techical debt in software engineering: "rats who construct the sinking ship from which they plan to escape".

@mjd @dpiponi The sections of map on a globe are also called gores.

@LivInTheLookingGlass If you can cheese the shapeshifting, maybe? Like, a redwood is organic; if you lean a bit, transform into a redwood (instantly extending your length, but at an angle, so you're falling), then, when you're about to hit the ground, transform into a flea so you don't get hurt?

@bkuhn @jzb @kees There's always the classic Justin B Rye taxonomy.