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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#281

Post by ff317 »

Twey wrote: post #230
modeless wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the r…

The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a…

The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal.

Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#282

Post by vkou »

lupire wrote: post #179
eru wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are generally saner than voters. Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter. Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.

Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst excesses".

They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#283

Post by metalcrow »

mcherm wrote: post #249

The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code. But that's not true! According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!! I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.

This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#284

Post by miki123211 »

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

And this goes both ways.

Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.

This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.

LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#285

Post by pocksuppet »

tekne wrote: post #236
mlyle wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public sp…

I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.

Many times when politicians get to suffer the full effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the better.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#287

Post by miki123211 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #163
sensanaty wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were extremely anti-porn getting caught watching porn in parliament is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive drug smuggling rings.

You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 196…

Corruption is eliminated by properly aligning incentives. Capitalism is also all about properly aligning incentives. Moving to a more capitalism-heavy system usually causes countries to get much richer.

Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#288

Post by pocksuppet »

piperswe wrote: post #267
eru wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)

Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very important definitions of free/open-source software. For example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

The Debian project guidelines are not the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't free software, they are just some of many useful guidelines to consider. Another useful guideline is that the user shall have freedom.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#289

Post by Thrymr »

tekawade wrote: post #199

How is this legal. Unless it’s trained excluding *all* open source code it’s not legal. Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose. Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”. Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.

You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:

> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright

> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.

> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#290

Post by pixelatedindex »

mcherm wrote: post #259
fladrif wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fa…

No one who understands the first thing about this topic could possibly have read that web page and not realized that it was satire. "Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?" "Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers." "For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers." "Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary i…

Maybe I’m missing something but big corps do this, right? I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to say these things. I get why that’s exactly the reason it’s satire but it’s a little too close to the truth for me to chuckle about it.
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