I don't think anyone really disputes what should be done when an LLM violates copyright in a way that would be a violation if a human did it.
Questions about LLMs are primarily about whether it's legal for them to do something that would be legal for a human to do and secondarily about the technical feasibility of policing them at all.
California's average residential electricity rate is almost twice the US average (32 cents vs 18 cents) despite being in a state with abundant energy resources.
Even if advocates got everything they wanted here (6% margin vs 10% margin), that would lower rates by... 1.2 cents. PG&E desperately needs to be reformed into a competent organization, something that nobody in (Newsom) or adjacent to (these advocates) power in California seems to want to do.
The CA Governor is the one who selects the people on the committee that regulate PG&E.
And the same committee approves PG&E’s budget and rate each year, all the way down to the fine details such as repairing an electrical fence at a substation.
This problem is entirely under the control of Newsom and the CA legislature yet they seem completely uninterested in fixing it.
I think back to every ... overly enthused student council member or student council president or HOA president I've seen in my education, a microcosm of politics. These are people with a fire inside of them to seize these positions. Speaking with them, as they were my representative to the academic leadership, they would often hear my request and provide a explanation as to why that was not feasible. A naive assessment of their explanation - often at face value reasonable in the most simplistic of ways, a slightly deeper reflection would reveal it was a convenient excuse for the truth - they had a completely different motivation, usually self-interest in nature, but hidden behind the lie to hide the ugly truth.
The same is much true of California. So many strict laws and regulation. For the environment? For safety? Why I can't build a house? No, no - they don't want anyone building houses to keep the prices pumped up high. Same for many things. Keep PG&E rich, and PG&E will keep the people in power rich either directly or through the major supporters of said politicians
A politician in the US requires immense resources to run any campaign. That means rich people control who gets to be a politician.
Fixing this would require both public funding of campaigns, and immense limits to campaigns. Certain people, ignorant or malicious, will pitch an insane fit about trying to do that.
It doesn't matter how much certain politicians "suck" because the way the system is built, your choices are a guy who is awful but will implement some of what you want, or a guy who is fucking bonkers and will destroy our country, and this is true regardless of your political affiliation.
Even Bernie sucks the political party money teat. Because being the most popular senator isn't a reliable enough way to get elected!
Our politicians spend more time on the job calling rich people and begging for cash than they do actually voting on or discussing legislation.
This will only continue to get worse because the rich people are fully in control, and it benefits them to keep pushing the cost of a campaign higher, as the richer of the rich benefit from boxing out the "just" very rich.
Any change requires serious moves to unseat the current supreme court.
Currently, populism is much more effective for extremely regressive and outright hateful politicians than extremely progressive ones though, so expect things to get much much worse.
FDR was only elected and provided the actual power to make changes after 30% of the country was jobless, and an entire generation had been raised in horrific fiscal policy, and lived in a world where a hard worker for 50 years died in the ditch because we had no retirement program or way of feeding people who no longer work.
If we do literally everything right and the very angry and stupid people suddenly put aside their hatred of "others" for long enough to actually vote for a good idea, we might see improvements in 30 years.
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic[12][page needed] and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office.
PG&E are big campaign contributors to Newsom; he is expressly interested in not fixing it.
It's amazing that we had a governor recalled 20 years ago in no small part due to utility-related scandals, but these days, being a public servant in their pocket is just business as usual.
I’m whatever the opposite is of a devoted fan of Newsom, but I think describing the cause of this aggregate mess as PG&E buying politicians is well off the mark.
The problem is that PG&E is just one player in a system built up over decades. The system is built on the wrong set of premises, continues to evolve based on those premises, and can only be fixed by rejecting those premises.
This is becoming increasingly obvious, and a politician like Newsom is too smart to tie himself to the mast of a sinking ship.
I guess we will have a total whitewashing effort for Newsom coming up in 2028. Same nonsense as Kamala. Its funny how we can now predict the controversies.
It is, but you're really talking about the same thing: Gavin Newsom is corrupt and comfortably ensconced within the investor-owned utilities' pocket.
Recall that it was so important for Newsom to attend that dinner at the height of COVID because it was Jason Kinney's 50th birthday party, a PG&E lobbyist and close advisor to Newsom.
Ha! I totally forgot about that! The only saving grace is that in 2028 new media will have increased even further than in 2024 and it already played a significant role in that election. It will be interesting to see the tactics used to bury things like the French Laundry moment because the opponents have been learning all the tricks that the Democrats like to use and plan for them.
Fossil produced electricity is unsustainably cheap. According to https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/California only half of electricity is low-carbon there. It's imperative to ramp down fossils use and production to mitigate the climate disaster so we can't afford to believe there's "abundant energy resources" in a situation like this.
I can only assume that they've been bribed not to reform PG&E. The real question becomes who is running for office that isn't willing to take bribes so that people who are willing can be voted out of office. If the answer is nobody, than nothing will ever change.
Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.
We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.
My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?
I think most people don't see the basic trade of "you charge me less but get my data & my attention" to be a bad deal, particularly when the upside is a large TV which was a _huge_ status symbol (for better or worse) not even 15 years ago.
I'll speak for myself. I think it's pretty universal that when someone says "I want X", people believe them. Where I find myself slightly rarer is that when someone's purchasing decisions says "I want X", I believe them.
People seem earnestly willing to trade their attention and data for ~a couple hundred dollars (this was my best estimate of how much cheaper ads make TVs - about $50 per year of ownership with 5ish years of ownership typical). I am much more worried that people who are not earnestly willing (me and the 5 other weirdos mentioned in my OP) don't really have a good outlet. It would be a genuine loss if the government no longer let people trade their attention and data for a cheaper TV, according to the people (I really had to resist capitalizing there) themselves. I don't have to like it to believe them.
This legislation has high costs and while it seems fair to impose them on the Apples and Googles of the world, this gets weirder with smaller services that might have trouble complying. My podcast player, Overcast (overcast.fm), is one guy. Should he be subject to this? It seems like that business might not be able to exist if he was.
You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.
The business size doesn't matter. Bake it into the business' books and charge what it takes to manage it. If you can't, your business isn't viable. If you can, it doesn't matter if you're 1 person, 100 people, or 1 million people.
> You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.
That's what countries regulating this tend to do (often user count instead of revenue thresholds, but similar).
It also makes sense, because if the podcast guy bans you, you can pick a different podcast player or just not listen to podcasts. If both Google and Apple ban you, you're also effectively debanked because you can't use their app stores to install the banking authenticator app that is required to use online banking, possibly excluded from using public transit, etc.
CircleCI does only charge for self-hosted runners generated egress and/or artifact storage:
"Any Network Egress to CircleCI will be charged. At this current time, this includes CircleCI Caches, Workspaces, and Artifacts and will be charged at the normal rate according to your Usage Controls.
The only network traffic that will result in billing is accrued through restoring caches and workspaces, and downloading artifacts to self-hosted runners. Retention of artifacts, workspace, and cache objects will result in billing for storage usage.
Since your builds will not be running on CircleCI's Infrastructure, you will not be charged compute credits"
I think that's fair. In my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because it “came for free with the VCS and/or our MS contract” and it was “good enough for the job”. Now might be a good time to look around at the alternatives again. There is a reason that f.e. CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still going strong. Plenty of businesses don’t want to put all their eggs in one (MS) basket, for all kinds of reasons. I guess today one of these reasons became obvious.
CircleCI charges for concurrent job runs (which include self-hosted runs), no? They (you, I guess) obfuscate that by saying you get "Unlimited" if you take the "Talk to sales" route but that's not the same as not charging.
There simply is no free lunch, somewhere someone needs to spend effort and time on managing the orchestration layer for the runners, and there is also network traffic and storage in play that costs money. If you need a future-proof CI/CD platform, it takes some investment. I agree that the Github "pay per minute" approach doesn't feel right, most people would probably find a "pay per orchestration job" or something more acceptable.
Agreed there's no free lunch, GH is moving from more generous than the industry to as-generous (or less-generous depending on your opinion of per-minute versus per-job).
By default free plans can run 5x concurrently on self-hosted, 20x minimum for all paying customers, and yes there's a "talk to sales" for >20x on the pricing page
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
> look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
People optimize to what is scarce. Previously, developer time was much more scare than memory. Seems like that might change so folks might start to optimize to memory. It's not a moral judgement, it's a technical decision about where to allocate resources.
And it's had scapegoats for just as long! Everything is going according to plan really. It's not the tax scheme, or the zoning, or the construction costs, or the concentration of labor opportunities in London. Don't be daft!
Britain seems interested in actively undoing technological progress for some reason. A deindustrial revolution you might call it!
Questions about LLMs are primarily about whether it's legal for them to do something that would be legal for a human to do and secondarily about the technical feasibility of policing them at all.