People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.
It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.
This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.
> (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a
particular user from an operating system provider or a covered
application store when the application is downloaded and
launched.
Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.
So let say I have a program:
print("Hello, World!")
and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program
Microsoft has already made the installation of Windows a fucking nightmare with MS account requirements. Imagine when they are forcing every new device to not only have 50+ TOPS for Copilot, but also a tiny little internal mass spectrometer autosampler which will prick your finger as you login and analyze blood to carbon date the age of the user.
Install offline, no ms cloud bullshit account required. I just did this with Win 11 enterprise 25h2. Used an activator cmd script at the end that bypassed activation.
constitutional amendment to criminalise corporate lobbying with severe penalties - including capital punishment and confiscation of entire corporation.
it's entirely possible such nonsense is all show, and wouldn't be passed, however.
i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
As an Illinoisan, this kind of stuff makes me want to leave and get somewhere sane. Anybody have recommendations? What places don't have this kind of insanity?
There's some hope in New Hampshire. Our legislature just struck down our equivalent bill[1] while it was in committee. And within the last decade, privacy was enshrined in our state constitution[2], providing us with more legal teeth, on top of our free speech protections, to defeat digital age verification within the state.
Unfortunately, a rhetorical knee-jerk response that it needs universal, specific counter legislation for a "permanent fix" is panacea, magical thinking.
The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.
>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.
Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
Since GNU(or other)/Linux OSes allow the sysadmin to compose the OS out of parts and change them, the final OS is created by the sysadmin. That's what makes distributing binary software so annoying for maintainers, every installation can be it's own snowflake OS.
No one who matters uses HN or cares about HN. The handful of us on HN who are in or near a position to affect change are basically here due to habit or $#itposting until we get banned.
So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless.
And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
> and increasingly, the demographics on HN don't align with those who work in those organizations.
People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
> People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture...
And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking.
A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC.
No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform. We want to talk to fellow experts of varied expertise, and I truly appreciate the discussions I have here. Feel free to have discussions of similar value on platforms with smaller, focused communities; I do the same for the tech I know. I do agree bots/astroturfing are prevalent here. But I've had https://news.ycombinator.com as my homepage for ages for a reason, as opposed to literally any other forum. I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now.
Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors? Yes, at the get-go; but that doesn't mean people have sold out their morals. We're all frustrated. We live in a society. At least in the US, you'll just call a representative who's getting paid by lobbyists letting your message fall on deaf ears. But I have seen so many great comments here by people with beautiful minds and good intentions; and sometimes I can even debate with them and get my ass handed to me, because they're much more brilliant than I.
edit: was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros?
> And what I'm saying is that the people who actually matter are posting here. Because it's a trusted social platform
I am one of the those people who matter and work with other people who do as well yet I'm the only one in my peer group of VCs, CISOs, CPOs, CTOs, CEOs, Founders, SWEs, PMs, etc who still uses HN today.
Hell, Nvidia GTC has been going on for 3 days now and not a single post about it has come up. That shows how out of the loop HN has become.
> Did "hacker news" lose its stallman flavor in favor of venture capital investors
To me, it's become even more Stallman-esque and less relevant to founders, operators, or investors. And this is a growing sentiment amongst newer YCombinator founders as well.
Conversations that are actually relevant to founders and VCs don't happen on HN anymore. And an increasing number of HNers use VC and PE interchangeably - this is such a basic mistake that betrays how out of the loop and lack of context HNers have now.
> was curious on Luma. Is it basically meetup/radius/partiful/apple invites but for crypto bros
It's the new meetup. If you are seeing crypto bros on there then you are not located in a major tech hub.
Opening up Luma this morning I see invites to a fireside chat with Fei-Fei Li (ImageNet), a spring showcase by a VC fund that has invested in dozens of YC startups, a couple raves, a Quantum Computing breakfast at Stanford sponsored by the Danish and Norwegian Consulates, and an event by the Japanese Consulate on the intersection of manga, AI, and creativity. These events and others are where people who matter and can impact change are hanging out and chatting with each other.
> I hope this doesn't become what reddit is now.
At least as an American in tech, HN already has become as low signal-to-noise as Reddit.
Based on the time you posted along with your pattern of speech, I'm guessing you live in Central or maybe Western Europe. You have a very "DACH" coded speech pattern.
the people that built the infrastructure that runs twitter left before he showed up. most of it was written by a half dozen people that left around 2016.
Because I was fed up with parallels subscription model and they make me pay for the upgrade the non-subscription version with every new macOS release, I dropped parallels for UTM. I barely need windows, only every other month or so and often just for some small tasks. UTM is nice, but performance running windows is waaay below parallels. It is free, however, so I won't complain.
The performance story doesn't really make sense as both UTM and Parallels use Apple Hypervisor Kit which pretty much is the hypervisor running Windows. It should be identical.
Classic VM solutions like Virtualbox, VMware, Parallels etc. always come with guest tools and driver packages for the guest that have a massive impact on performance. Just because both solutions use the same hypervisor doesn’t mean they perform equally.
Intent looks interesting but the fact that they have their own credits system turns me off of it. I pay $200/mo for Claude Code and that's enough for me; I wish I could use Intent with that.
Now define useful, specifically in the context of a comment on hackernews.
An LLM summarizing the contents of a blog post might be useful to you, but is a comment here the right place for something you could geneate on your own?
I would guess for most people here, real insight or opinions from others is the "useful" aspect of reading hackernews comments.
Using LLMs to generate or refine comments only moves things further away from that goal (in my opinion).
It seems like the law was poorly written. If it is civil, automated speeding tickets and red light tickets should be just added to the registration cost. If it is criminal, you definitely need to identify the person in order to prove they are guilty.
Happens all the time. You and your spouse do the same or similar route (e.g. bring child to school) and a month later you get a ticket. Who was driving that day?
What does derivative mean here? Because IMO it means that the existing work was used as input. So if you used a LLM and it was trained on the existing work, that's a derivative work. If you rot13 encode something as input, so you can't personally read it, and then a device decides to rot13 on it again and output it, that's a derivative work.
In order for it to be creatively derivative you would need to copy the structure, logic, organization, and sequence of operations not just reimplement the functionality. It is pretty clear in this case that wasn't done.
As a cynical person I assume all the frontier LLMs were trained on datasets that include every open source project, but as a thought experiment, if an LLM was trained on a dataset that included every open source project _execept_ chardet, do you think said LLM would still be able to easily implement something very similar?
Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose.
I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".
> Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose.
> I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code
You seem like you're on the cusp of stating the obvious correct conclusion: it isn't.
LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default. You can understand this more simply by calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA. You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as you may be implying. The outputs of AI are not derivative just because they saw training data including the original library.
Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude'
This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
I find the "compression" argument not very strong, both because copyright still applies to (very) lossy codecs (e.g. your 16kbps Opus file of Thriller infringes, even if the original 192khz/32bit wav file was 12,000kbps), and because copyright still applies to transformed derivative works (a tiny midi file of Thriller might still be enough for the Jackson's label to get you)
> This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
Yes this is the best way to ask the question. If I take a public facing API and reimplement everything, whether it's by human or machine, it should be sufficient. After all, that's what Google did, and it's not like their engineers never read a single line of the Java source code. Even in "clean room" implementations, a human might still have remembered or recalled a previous implementation of some function they had encountered before.
> LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default.
About this specific point, it is unclear how much of a defect memorization actually is - there are also reasons to see it as necessary for effective learning. This link explains it well:
"The clean-room reimplementation test" isn't a legal standard, it's a particular strategy used by would-be defendants to clearly meet the standard of "is the new work free of copyrightable expression from the original work".
Copyright protects even very abstract aspects of human creative expression, not just the specific form in which it is originally expressed. If you translate a book into another language, or turn it into a silent movie, none of the actual text may survive, but the story itself remains covered by the original copyright.
So when you clone the behavior of a program like chardet without referencing the original source code except by executing it to make sure your clone produces exactly the same output, you may still be infringing its copyright if that output reflects creative choices made in the design of chardet that aren't fully determined by the functional purpose of the program.
If you pirate a movie and reencode it, does that apply as well? You can still watch the movie and it is “obviously” the same movie, even though the bytes are completely different. Here you can use the program and it is, to the user, also the same.
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