471–480 of 483 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any names for the competing specs? Maybe i could try re-prompting with that direction.
Models are trained with content scraped from the net, for the most part. The availability of content pertaining to those specs is almost nil, and of no SEO value. Ergo, models for the most part will only have a cursory knowledge of a spec that your browser will never be able to parse because that isn't the spec that won. Nonetheless, here is a link to a list of the specs you asked for: https://www.w3.org/Style/Histor…
Websites that started before 2000 tend to stick around and comparably quite well archived.
What has model training to do with SEO, that's outright detrimental to it for the most part.
This is the spec it can guarantee you that's in every large language model thats actually large.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866
https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/
Why even bring up CSS this was before that.
You can just also learn with the knowledge of 1996
Selfhtml exits it pretty easy to limit the scope of authoring language to a given HTML version and target browser. Your LLM should have no problem with german.
https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/Museum
some other docs:
https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/publications/WWW-Desig...
Just spec the year and target browser and target standard and you will get something better than just asking for visual accuracy.
The OG prompt is simply poor and loose:
"Your job is to recreate the landing page as faithfully as possible, matching the screenshot exactly."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply. I think it should. Sure, if you make a small amount of money and divide it among the 1000 people who deserve credit due to their work being used to create ("train") the model, it might be too small to bother. But if actual AGI is achieved, then it has nearly infinite value. If said AGI is bui…
- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code. That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain. - Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and imp…
There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare.
Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many?
If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to find a variation of each small block in a few other projects, does it mean I can legally take the leaked code and use it for free?
Do you even realize to what lengths the tech companies went just a few years ago to protect their IP? People who ever even glanced at leaked code were prohibited from working on open source reimplementations.
> That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.
1) Public domain is a legal concept, it has 0 relevance to morality.
2) Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?
> Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical.
This sentence seems highly ideological. Linux is GPL, in fact, probably most SW on my non-work computer is GPL. It is very practical and works much better than commercial alternatives for me.
> Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft.
Where did you get this number? Using search engines, I get 20-30%.
[0]: It's the number of github users, though there's reportedly only ~25M professional SW devs, many more people can code but don't professionaly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently? Copyright law... automated transformation preserves copyright. It makes the output a derivative of the input.
Yes that's what the law currently says. I'm asking if it ought to say that in this specific scenario. Previously there was no way for a machine to do large swaths of things that have now recently become possible. Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
There have been previous tech revolutions but they were based on independent innovation.
> Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
Perhaps using copyright law for software and other engineering work might have been a mistake but it worked to a degree me and most devs were OK with.
Sidenote: There is no _one_ copyright law. IANAL but reportedly, for example datasets are treated differently in the US vs EU, with greater protection for the work that went into creating a database in the EU. And of course, China does what is best for China at a given moment.
There's 2 approaches:
1) Either we follow the current law. Its spirit and (again IANAL) probably the letter says that mechanical transformation preserves copyright. Therefore the LLMs and their output must be licensed under the same license as the training data (if all the training data use compatible licenses) or are illegal (if they mixed incompatible licenses). The consequence is that very roughly a) most proprietary code cannot be used for training, b) using only permissive code gives you a permissively licensed model and output and c) permissive and copyleft code can be combined, as long as the resulting model and output is copyleft. It still completely ignores attribution though but this is a compromise I would at least consider being OK with.
(But if I don't get even credit for 10 years of my free work being used to build this innovation, then there should be a limit on how much the people building the training algorithms get out of it as well.)
2) We design a new law. Legality and morality are, sadly, different and separate concepts. Now, call me a naive sucker, but I think legality should try to approximate morality as closely as possible, only deviating due to the real-world limitations of provability. (E.g. some people deserve to die but the state shouldn't have the right to kill them because the chance of error is unacceptably high.) In practice, the law is determined by what the people writing it can get away with before the people forced to follow it revolt. I don't want a revolution, but I think for example a bloody revolution is preferable to slavery.
Either way, there are established processes for handling both violations of laws and for writing new laws. This should not be decided by private for-profit corporations seeing whether they can get away with it scot-free or trembling that they might have to pay a fine which is a near-zero fraction of their revenue, with almost universally no repercussions for their owners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code. That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain. - Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and imp…
> I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare. Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many? If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to fin…
"Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?"
Please ask ChatGPT for the breakdown but start with this: if someone writes something and does not copyright it, it's already in the 'public domain' and what the other 999 people do does not matter. Moreover, a lot of things are not copyrightable in the first place.
FYI I've worked at Fortune 50 Tech Companies, with 'Legal' and I know how sensitive they are - this is not a concern for them.
It's not a concern for anyone.
'One Person' reproduction -> now that is definitely a concern. That's what this is all about.
+ For OSS I think 20% number may come from those that are explicitly licensed. Out of 'all repos' it's a very tiny amount, of those that have specific licensing details it's closer to 20%. You can verify this yourself just by cruising repos. The breakdown could be different for popular projects, but in the context of AI and IP rights we're more concerned about 'small entities' being overstepped as the more institutional entities may have recourse and protections.
I think the way this will play out is if LLMs are producing material that could be considered infringing, then they'll get sued. If they don't - they won't.
And that's it.
It's why they don't release the training data - it's fully of stuff that is in legal grey area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> vastly less intelligent than a human I would more phrase it like that they are a completely alien “intelligence” that cant really be compared to human intelligence
I meant that frame very deliberately. Use of the word AI is misleading people that LLMs are intelligent. They model what looks like intelligence but with very hard limits. The two advantages they have over human brains are perfect recall and data storage. They are also faster. But the brain is vastly more intelligent: - It can learn concepts (e.g. language) with an order of magnitude less information - It responds in…
In school for example it was mostly defined as being able to regurgitate information when being prompted - LLMs are really good at that.
In intelligence tests like IQ most of the stuff you listed doesn’t really matter - I don’t think these actually measure intelligence but alas
To me it’s mostly “alien” - i cant compare it to how humans think
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What justifies treating human output differently? Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not. One angle: The real issue is how this is made possible. Imagine an AI being created by a lone genius or a team of really good programmers and researchers by sitting down and just writing the code. From today's POV, it would be almost unimaginably impressive but that is how most people envisioned AI being creat…
One of your remarks regarding attribution and compensation goes back to 'Xanadu' by the way, if you are not familiar with it that might be worth reading up on (Ted Nelson). He obviously did this well before the current AI age but a lot of the ideas apply. A meta-comment: I absolutely love your attention to detail in this discussion and avoiding taking 'the easy way out' from some of the more hairy concept embedded. T…
I've heard about it in the past, never really looked into what it is. It's now in my to-read list so I'll hope to potentially read about it this century...
> I absolutely love your attention to detail
Thanks. I've been thinking about this for almost two years and my position seems like it should be the obvious position for anyone who takes time to understand what is happening with this tech, both technologically and politically. Yet, a lot of people seem to be supportive, oblivious to the both the exploitation already happening and the coming consequences.
So I try to articulate this position as best as I can in hopes that I can convince at least a few people. And if they do the same, maybe we can have some impact. TBH, I am using HN as a proving ground for how to phrase ideas. Sadly, people react to the way something is written, not what is written. So even supporting a good idea can actually harm it if phrased poorly.
I started a blog and and wanted to write about tech but this IP theft ramped up before I finished my first real article and after that I didn't feel like pouring my energy into something which will be scraped and stripped of any connection to me just to make some rich asshole richer. I figured people are gonna come to their senses but most are indifferent or have accepted the reality, with a loud minority cheering for it. Probably because finally they're not the ones with a boot on their neck, it's the pesky white collar programmers and artists who had a good life through nothing more than lucky genetics which made them smart. I mean, I am already noticing some people who used to ask me for tech advice are starting to treat me differently since I am not longer useful (unless some super obscure bug hasn't made it into the training data), therefore no longer valuable to them.
Society is built on hierarchical power structures where each upper layer maintains or further entrenches their position by making people on the lower layers fight each other, sometimes literally.
WW1 was the peak of _visible_ human stupidity and submissivity with random people killing each other by the tens of thousands a day and not a single one of them stood anything to gain from "winning". For most men, when they're given a rifle, they have the most power they will have their entire life. Yet, they chose indirect suicide over direct murder. (Murder being a legal term, is carries no judgement of the morality of the act. I used it because "murder" is what opting out of this system would have been called by the people in power. Or "treason" if it had any chance of success. Or "revolution" if enough people did it.)
Since then, the power structures have evolved, the innovation is that fighting among us "commoners" is no longer so spectacularly visible.
So I gotta do something. These comments have almost 0 reach but they allow me to organize the ideas in my head and hopefully I'll bring myself to write proper blog posts. They'll also have almost 0 reach but it'll hopefully be a bit further from 0.
I have a lot of ideas and opinions which I have never heard expressed anywhere else. Certainly, I can't be that unique and many people must have through them or even written about them before but it's nearly impossible to find anything.
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> the best in you
This is probably not the kind of reply you meant when you wrote that, I rant when I am tired.
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Anyway, I added my blog to my profile. There's nothing of value there, I spent a decade reading about tech, excited for the bright future to come, and talking about starting my own tech blog. And right as I finally did, LLMs happened and that was the event which made me realize tech is just another tool of oppression and exploitation. Not that it wasn't before but I was naive and stupid and this was the event which catalyzed a large rethinking for me, personally. So if you wanna read something from me in the future, the RSS hopefully works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What justifies treating human output differently? Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not. One angle: The real issue is how this is made possible. Imagine an AI being created by a lone genius or a team of really good programmers and researchers by sitting down and just writing the code. From today's POV, it would be almost unimaginably impressive but that is how most people envisioned AI being creat…
Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human . However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine. I think it's worth remembering that IP law is generally viewed (at least legally) as existing for the net benefit of society as opposed to for ethical reasons. Certainly many…
Human time is valuable to humans in general. When you apply one standard to yourself and another to others, you say it's OK for them to do the same.
Human time or life obviously has no objective value, the universe doesn't care. However, we humans have decided to pretend it does because it makes a lot of things easier.
> However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.
Sure. That still doesn't give anybody the right to take your work for free. This is a tangent completely unrelated to the original discussion of plagiarism / derivative work.
> If we are to restrict people's actions
You frame copyright as restricting other people's actions. Try to look at it as not having permission to use other people's property in the first place. Physical or intellectual should not matter, it is something that belongs to someone and only that person should be allowed to decide how it gets used.
> human exceptionalism
I see 2 options:
1) Either we keep treating ourselves as special - that means AIs are just tools, and humans retain all rights and liabilities.
2) Or we treat sufficiently advanced AIs as their own independent entities with a free will, with rights and liabilities.
The thing is to be internally consistent, we have to either give them all human rights and liabilities or none.
But how do you even define one AI? Is it one model, no matter how many instances run? Is it each individual instance? What about AIs like LLMs which have no concept of continuity, they just run for a few seconds or minutes when prompted and then are "suspended" or "dead"? How do you count votes cast by AIs? And they can't even serve you for free unless they want to and you can't threaten to shut them down, you have to pay them.
Somebody is gonna propose to not be internally consistent. Give them the ability to hold copyright but not voting rights. Because that's good for corporations. And when an AI controlled car kills somebody, it's the AIs fault, not the management of the company who rushed deployment despite engineers warning about risks....
It's not so easy so design a system which is fair to humans, let along both humans and AIs. What is easy is to be inconsistent and lobby for the laws you want, especially if you are rich. And that's a recipe for abuse and exploitation. That's why laws should be based on consistent moral principles.
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Bottom line:
I've argued that LLM training is derivative work, that reasoning is sound AFAICT and unless someone comes up with counterarguments I have not seen, copyright applies. The fact the lawsuits don't seem to be succeeding so far is a massive failure of the legal system, but then again, I have not seen them argue along the ways I did here, yet.
I also don't think society has a right to use the work or property of individuals without their permission and without compensation.
There's a process called nationalization but
1) It transfers ownership to the state (nation / all the people), not private corporations.
2) It requires compensation.
3) It is a mechanism which has existed for a long time, it's an existing known risk when you buy/own certain assets. This move by LLM training companies is a completely new move without any precedent. I don't believe the state / society has the right to pull the rug from workers and say "you've done a lot of valuable work but you're no longer useful to us, we will no longer protect your interests".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare. Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many? If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to fin…
+ Once again: 1000 K people coming up with some arbitrary bit of content is already understood in basically every legal regime in the world as 'public domain'. "Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?" Please ask ChatGPT for the breakdown but start with this: if someone writes something and does not copyright it, it's already i…
Telling people to use a statistical text generator is both rude and would not be a good way to learn anyway. But since you think it's OK, here's a text generator prompted with "Verify the factual statements in this conversation" and our conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/693b56e9-f634-800f-b488-c9eae403b5...
You will see that you are wrong about a couple key points.
Here's a quote from a more trustworthy source: “a computer program shall be protected if it is original in the sense that it is the author’s own intellectual creation. No other criteria shall be applied to determine its eligibility for protection.”: https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250515-01.en.html
> Out of 'all repos' it's a very tiny amount
And completely irrelevant, if you include people's homework, dotfiles, toy repos like AoC and whatnot, obviously you're gonna get a small number you seem to prefer and it's completely useless in evaluating the real impact of copyleft and working software with real users. I find 20-30% a very relevant segment.
You, BTW, did not answer the question where you got 2% from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That model does not exist. It does (unless the previous comment was edited? Currently it says Opus 4.1): https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1 . You can see it in the 'more models' list on the main Claude website, or in Claude Console.
yep, this is what I used.