The system is certainly broken and inefficient in many ways. But the system exists to promote and foster invention. Consider: I will not sink a large amount of resources into R&D if, as soon as I figure out something worthwhile, my competition can undercut me because they didn't have to spend all those resources upfront. Sure, the patent system delays my competition's followup invention. But neither of us would have chosen to invent anything in the first place if it's all risk and no reward.
Funny thing, it's been ages since I heard of a software startup touting it's filed patents. Used to be par for the course. But there still seem to be loads of software startups.
>the system exists to promote and foster invention
It doesn't matter why it exists; what matters is what effect it has. "The purpose of a system is what it does."
>But neither of us would have chosen to invent anything in the first place if it's all risk and no reward.
This is not true. Plenty of small companies invent things every day and never patent anything. The idea that companies would just stop innovating without patents is not just implausible, it's plainly untrue.
Your critique of quantum computing news generally is accurate (and GP's critique of the misleading headline is accurate). However, this article is actually not about quantum computing at all, nor does it claim to be, nor is it explicitly or implicitly an advertisement for any quantum computing technology, so your critique as applied here is an unfair one.
Especially because, I suspect, in a lot of people's minds, the concept of Atlantis much more closely resembles what the author enumerates as the possible (non-fictitious) sources of inspiration for Plato. That is, I certainly don't picture Atlantis in the way that Plato describes it exactly. So in my mind, I agree with the author's assement of Plato's story and conclude that, yes, a place such as that one did exist. The author concedes as much, too, and doesn't realize it.
This is a tiresome argument. Stealing is a moral concept first, and a legal concept second. You can steal without breaking any laws, the same way you can be a bad person without breaking any laws.
If you unlawfully or immorally gain access to information, such as my private keys, and then use that information to move money, you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me.
If you deceive me into executing a transaction voluntarily by misrepresenting the destination (which is immoral and often illegal), you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me.
What laws are a North Korean subject to that they have broken? Who decides when a transaction was cheating or stealing without a central authority and enforcer?
Moral laws and natural law, and moral people in a candid world. It's the same principle by which one people accuses another, over which they have no jurisdiction, of crimes against humanity or war crimes or of violating Nature's Laws. See the US Declaration of Independence for a short treatise on this topic.
To add to the other comments: do you really have a right to whatever it is that the bits unlocked by that key represent? Who granted you that? AFAICT, it's the systems running the blockchain that grants you that, and it's not governed by any contract outside the blockchain.
What is your theory for why you own any physical possessions? Do you only own things at the pleasure of your government which bestows you that privilege? I would think that if a coup replaced your government by force with one that did not respect rights of private ownership, you would cry "immoral", would you not? Or would you shrug and say "might makes right"?
Basically, you own what you control and can protect from leaving your control, by force, or punishment. The modern state is almost based around ownership and freedom, and takes the responsibility for a lot of that.
It may be immoral (not necessarily a crime, mind you) if someone deceives you, but so is using Bitcoin. You're burning the Amazon, while serving as a cash convertor for criminals. Just for personal gains.
I'm sorry, on the Blockchain we don't recognize legacy concepts like dead-tree nation state laws or ancient superstitions purporting to define morality. The future is all about registering ownership information in digital ledgers.
If you wanted to retain control of your keys, you should have encoded them in a secure, nonfungible image of monkey on the Ethereum Blockchain. That way, everyone would know those keys belonged to you.
What NK hackers are alleged to have done here is fraud, something that the US head of state has been convicted of, by courts in his own country. NK on the other hand, has not been tried nor convicted.
What possible legitimacy does the US even have to mark others as "thieves"?
Theft is first a moral concept, and only secondly a legal one, so there is no need to invoke the legitimacy of nation states' authority to have a meaningful discussion about theft.
Theft is a moral concept, but the legitimacy of a justice department to comment on it rests on its record of enforcing the legal limits consistently in its own remit. That is openly not the case anymore, voiding the legitimacy it may otherwise have held.
The practical implication is you can't copyright something that your AI generated. As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work.
> The practical implication is you can't copyright something that your AI generated.
No, its not.
This is not a case of the human trying to claim copyright as the author of a work made using AI tools.
> As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work.
That is true (although at least one has been accepted by the copyright office, IIRC), but it is not an outcome of this case (even in the sense that this ruling might support it) because this case does not concern human claims of authorship at all. It concerns undisputed solely-AI creation.
> you can't copyright something that your AI generated
Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is copyright free? So I can later train models on it?
You can't "launder" copyright away like that. The court will see straight through it. See "What color are your bits?" at https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
There are over 200K language modeling datasets on Hugging Face, I bet a large portion of them were generated with LLMs, and all LLMs to date have been trained on copyrighted data. So they are all tainted.
But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright. It does not carry the expression, but borrows abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed.
If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible.
On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will never regurgitate the originals because they never saw them.
So that you can run an AI company, churn out enough material to flood a particular market, and leverage copyright protection to cash in. Like say you call it the Kittenator, and then do automated keyword search for anything involving kittens - kitten in a box, kitten wearing socks, kittens on the rocks, kitten versus fox - and generate 25 different images for any given keyword combination, and push them out to major image-sharing platforms. The stock imagery market is pretty large but if you have the copyright enforcement in your pocket you can go after it in chunks.
The court did not say AI generated images are not eligible for copyright. They said machines cannot be assigned copyrights. That’s because only humans are eligible.
If you are a human who creatively uses a tool to generate something, you’d get copyright protection.
> Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
I think that's exactly the right question to ask. And ask it for space too. Perhaps the entire history of the interior universe unfolds between the black hole's formation and its final evaporation. Perhaps a heat death of the interior universe, where everything spreads out until nothing interesting is left, can fit inside this ever shrinking volume.
You're kind of proving the point. The building is not the real thing, as any sense in which it is holy (which is a word that means set apart for a special purpose) can be readily undone. The church doesn't cease to exist when that happens. It moves. The same way the Tabernacle (the ancient Tabernacle) moved, which happened on a semi-regular basis. The place is less important than who is there.
It seems like this is confusing The Church with a church.
Notre Dame Cathedral is a church, but you could burn it to the ground tomorrow and it wouldn’t have hardly any impact at all on the persistence of The Church.
Such is claimed, but I suspect that this is a misleading truth. Christianity is an extremely successful religion, but if it were less popular and Notre Dame was one of only a few church buildings (even, just one of a few with that level of grandeur), then burning it to the ground would indeed have a profound impact on the persistence of The Church. For those religions with a single temple, the destruction of that building is more than merely traumatic, it is catastrophic. Christianity only avoids this by having so very many buildings, many of them as spectacular as Notre Dame.
If you go to a shop in a small town in America that sells used goods, you will almost certainly find a few editions of the local church cookbook. Depending on its age, it will likely refer to many of the women who submitted recipes in this manner. You could probably even date the cultural transition by comparing the books across a few decades.
If the interviewers thought the hardcoded sum table was cheating, they surely should have said that demanding the inputs come in base 15 was also cheating. (I think base 15 is the best solution though. The instant I saw the rule that permitted the dev to choose the input representation, I knew this would be the way to go.)
But if the interviewers have to be persuaded that 0 is divisible by 3, I guess you can't expect too much from them. Or anything from them.
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