Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
That's what makes a banana republic, and for all intents and purposes the U.S. are exhibit A.
The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the…
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!
The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them? I'm talking about prior books, I'm sure new books have language forbidding their use to train LLMs at the point of sale. But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils. Obviously, the LLM can do so at scale, but is there a le…
A LLM is not a person. That is the legal difference...until we have Citizens United v2
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. This is why the business class is so aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. Sure, agreed. > And the experience is equally mediocre. Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel. I think people really forget how…
> the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US
It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”.
If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
We're sick of the double standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment, then change the law.
Double standards is how the law is practiced since time immemorial. Copyright is Disney-Sony law made up few decades ago for no reason other than money. Pick your battles.
The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I…
The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor".
The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the…
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
If you do something wrong then you, as a person, are held responsible and accountable.
If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).
It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed. The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time. I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well funct…
Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.