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Ah yes people were making emulators because emulators weren't a solved problem...

That isn't why people made emulators. It is because it is an easy to solve problem that is tricky to get right and provides as much testable space as you are willing to spend on working on it.


Actually you might need to depending on how similar your implementation is.

Copyright law here is quite nuanced.

See the Google vs Oracle case about Java.


No one knows until a law about it is written.

You could postulate based on judicial rulings but unless those are binding you are effectively hypothesizing.


People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license.

Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing.

So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license.

Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if you directly use my code you need a license" this doesn't have any of the downsides of copyright in other fields which is mostly problematic for content that is generations old but still protected.

GitHub code tends to be relatively young still since the product has only existed for less than twenty years and most things you find are going to be way less than that in age on average.


> if you just followed the simple license

But there's the rub. If you found the code on Github, you would have seen the "simple licence" which required you to either give an attribution, release your code under a specific licence, seek an alternative licence, or perform some other appropriate action.

But if the LLM generates the code for you, you don't know the conditions of the "simple license" in order to follow them. So you are probably violating the conditions of the original license, but because someone can try to say "I didn't copy that code, I just generated some new code using an LLM", they try to ignore the fact that it's based on some other code in a Github somewhere.


I was responding to "if software patents are bad why is AI stealing software also bad"

A great many companies publish proprietary code to GitHub private repos. That is how GitHub makes money.

I don't believe any AI model has admitted to having access to private GitHub repos unless you count instances where a business explicitly gives access related to their own users things.

Admitted, sure...

Are people repeatedly handling merge conflicts on multiple machines?

If there was a better way to handle "I needed to merge in the middle of my PR work" without introducing reverse merged permanently in the history I wouldn't mind merge commits.

But tools will sometimes skip over others work if you `git pull` a change into your local repo due to getting confused which leg of the merge to follow.


One place where it mattered was when I was working on a large PHP web site, where backend devs and frontend devs would be working in the same branch — this way you don't have to go back and forth to get the new API, and this workflow was quite unique and, in my mind, quite efficient. The branchs also could live for some time (e.g. in case of large refactorings), and it's a good idea to merge in the master branch frequently, so recursive merge was really nice. Nowadays, of course, you design the API for your frontend, mobile, etc, upfront, so there's little reason to do that anymore.


Honestly if the tooling were better at keeping upstream on the left I wouldn't mind as much but IIRC `git pull` puts your branch on the left which means walking history requires analysing each merge commit to figure out where history actually is vs where a temporary branch is.

That is my main problem with merge, I think the commit ballooning is annoying too but that is easier to ignore.


You gave examples of feedback loops.

We know very well how to train computers to handle those effectively.

Anything without quick feedback is much more difficult to do this way.


LLMs designing PID loops?


My point is the code for feedback loops is architecturally simple: when reading is wrong correct.

By boosting the accuracy and frequency of the reading you can get pretty good results.

But that has little to do with LLMs, or LLM generated code.


Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be.

The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't.

So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".

Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance optimizations/installation size.

The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.

I will say though while being made by indies means they are optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.

Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be brought up as frequently.


Storage space is at a premium. The PS5 has about 650gb of usable space. At ~100gb/game which is not uncommon you can store 6 games on the console without needing to free up hard drive space.

Filesize matters, especially to people with limited bandwidth and data caps. The increasing cost of SSDs only makes this situation more hardware constrained.


Do you have six games you are actively playing? That is more than most. And 100gb is not an average to my understanding sure there are AAA games that go over that but it isn't like you need to swap between a bunch of those. (Also they tend to be set piece so not something you go back to)

Again I agree optimization is good just pointing out it tends to not impact people. "My default driver can only handle six full game downloads" isn't actually a blocker to most people playing a PS5.


Except robots.txt was the actual real solution to search indexing...


The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.

For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.

Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.

Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.


>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.

Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.

However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.

Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.


Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.

Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...


This proposed tax is an EXTRA tax on billionaires only. The “all taxation is theft” position is pretty indefensible in modern society, but this explicit “No, fuck you in particular!” tax is ALSO indefensible.


Why? We consistently use progressive tax policies worldwide.


Wealth taxes are extremely uncommon worldwide.


Billionaires have been too and the tax code is one the slowest things to adapt.

In tax code sense I am not even sure the effects of buy, borrow, and die have even been settled.

EDIT: can't respond but "pay no taxes but at least your kids do" isn't exactly a fix


That is a hole we could fix tomorrow by eliminating the step up on death. No need to introduce a new global financial surveillance regime for tracking asset ownership for wealth tax purposes just to fix that.


Fuck billionaires. The fact that individual people possess so much wealth is poisonous to society. It is the easiest thing in the world for a billionaire to become a not-billionaire and they will still be stupendously wealthy.


If we don't tax wealth and the wealthy are playing the buy, borrow, and die strategy what is California losing when they leave?


California does already tax the wealthy, this is just more taxes on the wealthy.


Except if you buy, borrow, and die you don't pay taxes.

Elon Musk only paid taxes because he had stock options that were going to expire. Otherwise he just doesn't sell shares thus not triggering a taxable event and not paying taxes.


Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.

If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.


Ignoring OpenAI due to when this article came out of the Fortune 500 one company was less than a decade old.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/06/youngest-com...

Given we now have 2,500 billionaires how can they not manage to come up with new ideas that create companies any faster than that?

The reality is most billion dollar companies are made through mergers to reduce market competition not actually creating new things.


Majority weren’t billionaires when they started their successful companies.

Their successful companies (the employees) and the government, policies, and environment around them are the things that make them successful.

Billionaires mostly hoard assets. Important assets that you need (not want, need) to live.


I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.


A cumulative total return of the S&P 500 since 1995 is about 2,467% (or roughly 25.7× your original investment).


Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.


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