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buran77

6,533 karmajoined hace 7 años

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buran77
·anteayer·discuss
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.

Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.

P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
buran77
·anteayer·discuss
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?

Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.

Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.

GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
buran77
·hace 7 días·discuss
Look, first you were wrong with the confidence of an LLM and claimed an argument that was literally in the definition of copyright fair use had absolutely no relevance whatsoever for copyright. Even now you are surprised that I invoked fair use on reading a book. That was to respond to someone who "brilliantly" brought up reading Harry Potter [0] as evidence that the law allows any extent of "memorization" and reproduction of copyrighted material.

Then you switched to a barrage of questions on the premise of words in my comments that were neither written nor implied. If you muddy the waters just enough maybe everyone gets lost in there.

> The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use

Now maybe we agree "reading Harry Potter and remembering some lines" is indeed fair use, but you decided my argument is still not relevant to create a distinction between "reading a book" and "feeding it all into an LLM" because of an vaguely related exception. For better or worse thumbnails are a copyright violation according to some courts [1]. But looking at the big "Books" decision (this is the one you meant?), did you check out the court's opinion [2]? Why would you believe the two cases are substantially similar? Just because they're both big tech? Just for yourself, from the definition of fair use and referencing that opinion, do you see any significant differences between "Google Books" and "big LLM"?

> You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies

The highest bidder is what I said.

> Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago.

You're getting creative" about what I wrote. "AI companies"? They are just the big corrupting agent of the day, and nobody with deep enough pockets had "revolutionized" the legal areas they're working in to this degree until now. Tech in general has been doing it for a few decades already. Other incredibly powerful industries have been doing that in their respective areas for even longer. "Suddenly"? The US justice system has worked exactly like this for so many decades when it came to the interest of very deep pockets. "All judges"? I said "the system" because all judges don't have the ultimate power to ultimately decide on things.

I'm surprised at your surprise that reading a book is fair use, and that courts have been "captured" and beholden to economic interests above justice for so long we forgot when it started.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774664

[1] http://www.linksandlaw.com/news-update59-thumbnails-germany-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...
buran77
·hace 8 días·discuss
> None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law.

And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:

  (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  (2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
  (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Naturally remembering some parts of a legally purchased book verbatim is fair use. "Memorizing" the entire library obtained via torrents and incorporating that in a commercial product that can output all that content doesn't sound like fair use to me.

The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
buran77
·hace 8 días·discuss
Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever?

If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.
buran77
·hace 8 días·discuss
> Attacking someone for leaving Google

Did I? And who would this person I attacked for leaving Google be? My comment's right up there, feel free to just copy/paste the "you're shit because you left Google" part. It's fine, don't scramble, that's not the point.

Good on them to leave, better late than never I guess. In you frenzy you ignored that the point almost everyone on this side of the fence makes, this thread included, isn't "bad that you left", it's "don't pretend it was morally better when you joined". Because that's how all these people like to wash the stench and paint themselves in a better light. When (generic) you started a decade ago you had to wade through what in 2017 was neck deep shit, looking for that paycheck. Googlers of today also have to go neck deep, just in what 2026 defines as shit [0].

> You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.

My friend, it's just me, you, and the other googler here on a submission marked as dupe and already in the HN cemetery. I wasn't putting on a show for the world. I know you are personally invested in defending your choices at any cost lest your internal moral framework collapses. Your livelihood and self worth depend on that. And I know I'm not educating you because every one of the people who lies to themselves that "they did it better in their time" will still lie to themselves for that paycheck in the future. Every few years they have to explain how it wasn't like that at the beginning, when it totally was for anyone with eyes and not just a money counter. No rando on the internet will ever educate you differently.

And believe me when I tell you I will never feel morally superior to anyone working for Google and friends for two reasons. I've probably done worse in my life before I've done better, and bragging about being morally superior to a generic googler is a victory without glory.

[0] But I'll leave you with what I told googler #2 earlier:

> You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for "moral inflation".
buran77
·hace 8 días·discuss
> It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring

I'm not OP but I'm not ignoring anything. In 2017 Google was doing just as many "questionable" things for that time as today. Googlers at the time were embracing doing the shitty thing of the day. All that happened in the meantime is that Google did even shittier things that made those older ones look tame by comparison.

By the time you were at Google the company had a litany of reported concerns. Look at them [0], look at how many happened before 2017. And that's just one list, only about very public privacy concerns.

You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for inflation.

> I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.

An entirely expected yet still disappointing cop-out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google
buran77
·hace 8 días·discuss
> You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences

Or maybe you were so eager to lob a snarky remark that you failed to put in your full attention and intellectual capacity to understand what I said. See, this is how you assume good faith. So let's run through it again with clarifications that would pierce even a googler's shield, shall we?

>> morally bankrupt

...Is what I said. Morality is a sliding window, it moves with time to follow the tolerance of society. But when in the past you supported something that was outside that window for that time you can't come a decade later and over-impose today's window of morality to make it look like "we were pretty swell back then by today's standards". Morality by comparison isn't morality. Otherwise all you'd ever have to do is wait for someone to do worse and then you're Mother Theresa.

Google will do worse next year, and even worse the year after that. Because every generation of its employees see dollar signs and embrace doing the shitty thing of the day. Today's generation implements Android lockdowns, first party malware, more spying, you name it. Even the googler in the submission thinks this is a sign of moral bankruptcy. But ten years from now when Google will have promoted through a few more shittiness levels this same generation of googlers will come out to say "this is not the company it was x years ago". And if I'm still alive maybe I'll tell them the same thing as today: they went morally bankrupt when they embraced doing the shit of the day, not when that finally became tame by comparison.
buran77
·hace 9 días·discuss
> I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp

It's not very fair for you to answer for the faults of the megacorp but to be honest you kind of put yourself in that position when you defended the indefensible.

For all intents and purposes, looking from a user/customer perspective, Google is just as morally bankrupt today as it was 9 years ago. And that's what really matters. You can rationalize it, you can pretend that you couldn't see the trend, that it didn't smell as bad back then, but at the end of the day what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.

So let's not judge 2017 with the eyes from 2026 when the things done back then look more palatable. If you were to ask 2017 me about Google you'd get the same answer as today. Then again I wasn't paid by Google so I could afford to give that answer.
buran77
·hace 10 días·discuss
> There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch;

This is how Aldi and Lidl fueled their growth. Instead of focusing on thousands of different product offerings, they looked at a narrower selection of products (~20 times smaller than their higher end competition) they can buy in very high volumes at substantial discounts. Their offering is defined by what is available for them at the time to buy under those conditions. Instead of ensuring a specific product is always available on the shelves, they might just stock a different product at specific times.

This is less obvious when 90% of their sales are under their private label but the supply behind it is whatever they can negotiate for a better deal.

Their "middle aisle" is the perfect example of this, it really just stocks a mix of whatever is the cheap product of the week and may no longer be available next week at the same price so they stock something else.
buran77
·hace 10 días·discuss
Discs are less convenient so people have slowly moved to digital sales. This worked even better for console manufacturers, cheaper to drop that disc reader, and the second hand market is effectively dead which increases new game sales.

The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
buran77
·hace 10 días·discuss
> This line of reasoning leads to

It doesn't "lead to". Supporting a wrong conclusion even with a valid argument is as old as time. Fans of eugenics don't need an excuse to go down that path.

Our natural and artificial environments shape us for better or worse. We're bigger and more intelligent as a direct outcome of better nutrition. But we also have far more people with deadly allergies because we're so good at managing them now.
buran77
·hace 11 días·discuss
The circus would be there regardless. The reason this happens is because football leagues have a lot of money and some judges have a lot of pockets to fill and many are also utterly nontechnical.
buran77
·hace 12 días·discuss
> How is Google supposed to know if Ellie Piee is a real person?

That doesn't really matter. Anyway it's silly to question whether Google, a multi-trillion dollar company, can validate someone's ID when they already do it in many other aspects of their business.

But is Google treating some claims different from others? Are Ellie Piee's claim against Gergely Orosz's article, and the latter's appeal treated exactly the same as any other? In other words, if I use an obviously bogus identity to make DMCA claims against Google content on their own platforms, will they immediately take it down and then go through the same standard appeal process? If not, then the system isn't "abused" it's used exactly as it was designed to be used. In an asymmetrical manner to the benefit of some.

So the real question isn't "how can Google validate an identity", it's "why is Google treating some different from others"? It sure isn't an accident.
buran77
·hace 14 días·discuss
It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope".

Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
buran77
·hace 15 días·discuss
> logic technology can extend for the first time below the 1 nm node, advancing the era of angstrom-level scaling, where dimensions approach the size of individual atoms. While transistor nodes now refer to a generation of manufacturing technology versus an exact physical dimension, IBM’s 0.7 nm technology—also referred to as 7 angstroms—demonstrates how continued scaling remains possible.

Continuing the well established trend of making bold claims about physical dimensions that have nothing to do with any of the structures in the chip, and the name scales better than the tech.

What they actually deliver is a "nanostack architecture" built with ~5nm features that according to them is comparable to a hypothetical real sub-1nm chip.

It's an impressive achievement nonetheless but it looks like the industry has a few too many marketers.
buran77
·hace 15 días·discuss
> As usual it's communism for the plebs and something entirely different for the capital wielding class.

Bad example. Ask Bezos how much he paid his wife after the divorce.
buran77
·el mes pasado·discuss
Oh, I just meant it's not just "quack doctors" doing it. it's a fairly common practice.
buran77
·el mes pasado·discuss
> Quack doctors spruiking amazing new treatments (that they hold shares in).

Doctors commonly have kickback arrangements to prescribe specific medication. Sometimes it's the correct course of action they just always go for the particular brand, other times it's the wrong course of action but they prescribe it anyway for the kickback (the OxyContin scandal comes to mind).
buran77
·el mes pasado·discuss
What about the extra costs of handling cash, the practical effort to count it, prepare it for transport (including bags, counters, and so on), transporting to the bank, increased security, possibly more cash registers, counterfeit detectors etc.? Overall is it usually more expensive to take credit cards than cash or just in particular cases?