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Why?


> "your child wearing a mask makes me uncomfortable"

What about that could possibly make someone uncomfortable. How does it have any effect on the other parent?


So that cloudflare can now MITM their HTTPS encryption. /s


Lol, then don't use Windows. Why anyone trusts their personal data to closed source software, and especially closed source software by an empirically hostile corporation like Microsoft is beyond me.


A Cloudflare fronted website can't handle HN frontpage levels of traffic?

Then why does anybody use cloudflare?


Probably bad cache headers configuration. Even with Cloudflare in front it could be forwarding every request to the backend if the cache headers are misconfigured...


>"Windows but with even less reliability and more security problems plus tech debt"

To me that just sound like it will make ReactOS much more Windows-like. So it's probably a win for the project. \s


>For example, the main "customer" of the module system is the JDK itself

As mentioned in TFA, "The general advice seems to be that modules are (should be) an internal detail of the JRE and best ignored in application code"

So yeah, why expose it to those who are not the "main customer"?


> So yeah, why expose it to those who are not the "main customer"?

How did modules affect you as a user? I'd guess that you had to add `--add-opens`/`--add-exports` during one of the JDK migrations at some point. And the reason you had to do it was that various libraries on your classpath used JDK internal APIs. So modules provided encapsulation and gave you an escape hatch for when you still have to use those libraries. How else would you do it while still achieving the desired goal?


It’s just too complex. They should have went with the internal modifier.


Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

His whole job is just doing code review, and I'd argue he's better at coding now than he ever was before.


I'd be careful with extrapolating based on the creator of Linux and Git. His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.


> His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.

Okay sure.

I'll use myself as another example then. When I was a dev I used to write a lot of code. Now I'm a tech team lead, and I write less code, but review significantly more code than I used to previously.

I feel more confident, comfortable, and competent in my coding abilities now than ever before even though I'm coding less.

I feel like this is because I am exposed to a lot more code, and not in a passive way (reading legacy code) but an active way (making sure a patch set will correctly implement feature X, without breaking anything existing)

I feel like this principal applies to any programmer. Same thing with e.g. writers. Good writers read _a lot_ and it makes them better writers.

This is my opinion and not based on any kind of research. So if you disagree, that's fine with me. But so far I haven't seen anything to convince me of the opposite.


Yeah exactly… hardly comparable to the median or mean dev


Sure, but I’m not comparing myself with a typical programmer am I?


It's not only that Linus is atypical, it's also that he is reviewing other people's code, and those people are also highly competent, or they would not be kernel committers. And they all share large amounts of high-quality and hard-earned implicit context.

Reviewing well executed changesets by skilled developers on complicated and deliberate projects is not comparable to "fleet of agents" vibe engineering. One of these tasks will sharpen you regardless how lazily you approach it. The other requires extreme discipline to avoid atrophy.


Linus Torvalds is hardly typical.


> or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though.

Like the US? OpenAI et al. don't give a shit.


There's a difference between feeding massive amounts of copyrighted material to a training process that blends them thoroughly and irreversibly, and doing all that in-house, vs. offering people a service that indexes (and possibly partially rehosts) that material, enabling and encouraging users to engage directly in pirating concrete copyrighted works.


Ironically the low tech infringing proposal would lead to more reliable results grounded in the raw contents of the data, using less computing/power and without the confidently incorrect sycophanty we see from the LLMs.


Nah. It would just lead to more of classical search. Which is okay, as it always has been.

LLMs are not retrieval engines, and thinking them as such is missing most of their value. LLMs are understanding engines. Much like for humans, evaluating and incorporating knowledge is necessary to build understanding - however, perfect recall is not.

Another, arguably equivalent way of framing it: the job of an LLM isn't to provide you with the facts; it's main job is to understand what you mean. The "WIM" in "DWIM". Making it do that does require stupid amounts of data and tons of compute in training. Currently, there's no better way, and the only alternative system with similar capabilities are... humans.

IOW, it's not even an apples to oranges comparison, it's apples to gourmet chef.


There's this famous phrase in Russian that was born out of a short interview with a woman, a strong Putin supporter, that's often been used as a sarcastic remark for pointing out someone's double standards and/or hypocrisy.

It can be roughly translated to "you don't understand, it's a completely different situation". That's what's constantly on my mind when I'm reading discussions like this one.

Everybody and their dog torrenting petabytes of data and getting away with it (Meta is the only one that got caught and they've still gotten away with doing it)?

The very same data poor American students were forced to commit suicide over? The same data that average American housewives were sued over for millions of dollars of "damages"? The same data that often gets random German plumbers or steelworkers to pay thousands of euros of "fines" to the copyright mafia so they won't get sued and have their lives ruined?

Yet when giant corporations are doing the exact same thing on a massive scale, it's fine? It's not even the same thing, an American student torrenting books isn't making any money off it, while Meta very much is.

Of course it's not the same, a simple-minded and poorly educated person like me isn't capable of understanding the difference. You keep believing in your moral superiority, the rest of the world has finally woken up.


Is there also a famous Russian phrase that translates to "details are irrelevant, it kinda looks similar to me therefore it's the same"? If not, there definitely should be.

The details are the entire point. Arguing that a corporation can get away doing something, while an individual can't, isn't useful, because there are great many of such somethings, and in most cases it turns out perfectly reasonable, once you dig into details.


>The same data that average American housewives were sued over for millions of dollars of "damages"? The same data that often gets random German plumbers or steelworkers to pay thousands of euros of "fines" to the copyright mafia so they won't get sued and have their lives ruined?

Honestly curious. Could you share any examples of these cases?


> The very same data poor American students were forced to commit suicide over

Leaving the rest of your argument aside, precisely nobody forced aaronsw to commit suicide.


There's also a matter of 'aaronsw being a student, not many "poor American students" as GP implies. As far as I know, this was the only case of this type[0][1].

Honestly was too tired to point that out in my earlier reply, but that's exactly the kind of argument you get when people are not willing (or purposefully refusing) to consider details. Intentionally or not, you get bogus and highly manipulative statements.

A single case of a student activist fighting for freedom of communication and access to public goods for citizens, ending up breaking under pressure from public/non-profit institutions MIT, JSTOR, FBI over copyright, is not the same as what GP implied - many students, regular folks just like you and me, being forced to take their own lives due to legal consequences of pirating books in bulk. Nothing like the latter ever happened anyway.

We can do better than this.

(And even if we can't, I trust the courts can.)

--

[0] - Curiously, while doing some search now to be sure I didn't miss any similar case, I learned that JSTOR incident wasn't the first for 'aaronsw - apparently, he did the same thing a few years earlier with public court documents[1]; FBI investigated this too, and concluded he was legally in the clear. It's probably well-known to everyone here, but I somehow missed it, so #TodayILearned.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong was the only one I could find that was even remotely related - an engineer and inventor who, in big part due to prolonged fighting over patents consuming all his time and money, suffered from a mental breakdown and committed suicide at 63.


There are those who are in charge and those who aren't.


That's Uber's Gambit. Nothing is illegal for large enough corporations with strong network effects and deep pockets.


That's not Uber's Gambit.

Uber was blatantly ignoring the local laws in order to break into the market and quickly defeat local competition. They used their infinite VC money supply to interfere with and delay investigations and enforcement, betting that if they do it fast enough, they'll have the general population on their side.

LLM vendors found and exploited[0] a legal uncertainty - correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK it still isn't settled whether or not their actions were actually illegal. Unlike Uber, LLM vendors aren't breaking into markets by ignoring the laws to outcompete incumbents, and burning stupid amounts of money just to get away with it. On the contrary, LLM vendors are simply providing an actually useful product, and charging a reasonable price for it, while reinvesting it into improving the product. Effects it has on other markets aside[1], their business model is just providing actual value in exchange for money. That's much more direct and honest than most of the tech industry.

The product itself is also different. Uber is selling a mirage, a "miracle" improvement that quickly turns not so, and is destined to eventually destroy the markets it disrupted. LLM vendors are developing and serving systems that provide actual value to users, directly and obviously so.

--

[0] - Probably walked into this without initially realizing it. No one complained 5-10 years ago, where the datasets were smaller and the resulting models had no real-world utility. It's only when the models became useful, that some people started looking for ways to make them go away.

[1] - That's an unfortunate effect of it being a general AI tool, and would be the same regardless of how it was created.


> that blends them thoroughly and irreversibly

It's okay, you can say 'laundering'


I can, but I don't, because that's at best an unintended side effect.


> > or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though.

> Like the US? OpenAI et al. don't give a shit.

OpenAI is not a country and therefore cannot make laws that don't respect international (or domestic) copyright. Also the US is a lot bigger than OpenAI and the big tech corps, and the law is very much on the side of copyright holders in the US.


> the law is very much on the side of copyright holders in the US.

Remind me again what the status of the case is with Meta/Facebook using pirated material to train their proprietary LLMs, and even seeding the data back to the community while downloading it?


In progress. Nobody is expecting the original protections afforded by copyright to apply here, but the fact that the material is pirated is less relevant than whether or not an LLM is a transformative use of the material.

We will almost certainly see copyright law weakened by the case, but I do not believe that FB will get off with no penalties.


The money is definitely in the side of big tech vs book publishers. There may be a nominal settlement to end the matter, perhaps after a decade of litigation


I've never heard of it before, and it makes perfect sense what it is from that intro.

On a celestial sphere (planet, star, etc) the declination angle (being 0 is at the equator, being 90 degrees is the north pole of the sphere, being -90 degrees, is at the south pole).

You also need another angle known as the "hour angle" to locate a point on the sphere. It doesn't explain what that is, but as can be seen on Wikipedia, you can easily click on that word to go to the entire page that explains what it is.

What don't you understand?


Well, you misunderstood / mis-guessed what celestial sphere means. Interestingly enough, your mis-understanding also sort-of works.


Well that was a whole other topic. And luckily it links to a page that explains the whole topic of what a "celestial sphere" is. Going to the page, I see I was indeed wrong about what it was, but now I see it is an abstract sphere, with a radius that can be whatever size you want, and that is centered on the Earth, or on the observer.

Once again, not so difficult to figure out even if you have no experience in the specific technical field of a Wikipedia article. So I have no idea what /u/casenmgreen's problem is.


I think I see casenmgreen's is trying to get at. But they just picked an example that (to you and me) just isn't all that complicated nor bad.


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