"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.
And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."
I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.
So that recreational existence at the leisure of our own machinery seems like an optional future humans can hope for too.
Turns out the chart is about farm horses only as counted by the USDA not including any recreational horses. So this is more about agricultural machinery vs. horses, not passenger cars.
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City horses (the ones replaced by cars and trucks) were nearly extinct by 1930 already.
City horses were formerly almost exclusively bred on farms but because of their practical disappearance such breeding is no longer necessary. They have declined in numbers from 3,500,000 in 1910 to a few
hundred thousand in 1930.
My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more rapid.
True, but the horses' population started (slightly) rising again when they went from economic tools to recreational tools for humans. What will happen to humans?
That's what Sandy over the road (born 1932, died last year), used to hitch up every morning at 4am, when he was ten, to sled a tank of water back to the farm from the local spring.
"You're absolutely right!" Thanks for pointing it out. I was expecting that kind of perspective when the author brought up horses, but found the conclusion to be odd. Turns out it was just my reading of it.
Somehow that article totally ignored the insane pricing of cached input tokens set by Anthropic and OpenAI. For agentic coding, typically 90~95% of the inference cost is attributed to cached input tokens, and a scrappy China company can do it almost for free: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news0802
Regardless of whether you think imposing a $100k fee on H1Bs is a good idea or not, there is no way that a 2 day deadline makes sense from an implementation perspective. On a weekend too. This is just going to cause panic and confusion at the border.
Another funny possibly sad coincidence is that the licenses that made open source what it is will probably be absolutely useless going forward, because as recent precedent has shown, companies can train on what they have legally gained access to.
On the other hand, AGPL continues to be the future of F/OSS.
MIT is also still useful; it lets me release code where I don't really care what other people do with it as long as they don't sue me (an actual possibility in some countries)
The US, for one. You can sue nearly anyone for nearly anything, even something you obviously won't win in court, as long as you find a lawyer willing to do it; you don't need any actual legal standing to waste the target's time and money.
Even the most unscrupulous lawyer is going to look at the MIT license, realize the target can defend it for a trivial amount of money (a single form letter from their lawyer) and move on.
You can sue for damages if they have malware in the code, there is no license that protects you from distributing harmful products even if you do it for free.
And illegally too. Anthropic didn't pay for those books they used.
It's too late at this point. The damage is done. These companies trained on illegally obtained data and they will never be held accountable for that. The training is done and they got what they needed. So even if they can't train on it in the future, it doesn't matter. They already have those base models.
Then punitive measures are in order. Add it to the pile of illegal, immoral, and unethical behavior of the feudal tech oligarchs already long overdue for justice. The harm they have done and are doing to humanity should not remain unpunished.
And the legality of this may vary by jurisdiction. There’s a nonzero chance that they pay a few million in the US for stealing books but the EU or Canada decide the training itself was illegal.
Then the EU and canada just won't have any sovereign LLMs. They'll have to decide if they'd rather prop up some artificial monopoly or support (by not actively undermining) innovation.
It’s not going to happen. The EU is desperate to stop being in fourth place in technology and will do absolutely nothing to put a damper on this. It’s their only hope to get out of the rut.
If I can reproduce the entirety of most books off the top of my head and sell that to people as a service, it's a copyright violation. If AI does it, it's fair use.
>If I can reproduce the entirety of most books off the top of my head and sell that to people as a service, it's a copyright violation. If AI does it, it's fair use.
Assuming you're referring to Bartz v. Anthropic, that is explicitly not what the ruling said, in fact it's almost the inverse. The judge said that output from an AI model which is a straight up reproduction of copyrighted material would likely be an explicit violation of copyright. This is on page 12/32 of the judgement[1].
But the vast majority of output from an LLM like Claude is not a word for word reproduction; it's a transformative use of the original work. In fact, the authors bringing the suit didn't even claim that it had reproduced their work. From page 7, "Authors do not allege that any infringing copy of their works was or would ever be provided to users by the Claude service." That's because Anthropic is already explicitly filtering out results that might contain copyrighted material. (I've run into this myself while trying to translate foreign language song lyrics to English. Claude will simply refuse to do this)[2]
They should still have to pay damages for possessing the copyrighted material. That's possession, which courts have found is copyright violation. Remember all the 12 year olds who got their parents sued back in the 2000s? They had unauthorized copies.
I don't know what exactly you're referring to here. The model itself is not a copy, you can't find the copyrighted material in the weights. Even if you could, you're allowed under existing case law to make copies of a work for personal use if the copies have a different character and as long as you don't yourself share the new copies. Take the Sony Betamax case, which found that it was legal and a transformative use of copyrighted material to create a copy of a publicly aired broadcast onto a recording medium like VHS and Betamax for the purposes of time-shifting one's consumption.
Now, Anthropic was found to have pirated copyrighted work when they downloaded and trained Claude on the LibGen library. And they will likely pay substantial damages for this. So on those grounds, they're as screwed as the 12 year olds and their parents. The trial to determine damages hasn't happened yet though.
This was immediately my reaction as well, but I'm not a judge so what do I know. In my own mind I mark it as a "spice must flow" moment -- it will seem inevitable in retrospect but my simple (almost surely incorrect) take is that there just wasn't a way this was going to stop AI's progress. AI as a trend has incredible plot armor at this point in time.
Is the hinge that the tools can recall a huge portion (not perfectly of course) but usually don't? What seems even more straight forward is the substitute good idea, it seems reasonable to assume people will buy less copies of book X when they start generating books heavily inspired by book X.
But, this is probably just a case of a layman wandering into a complex topic, maybe it's the case that AI has just nestled into the absolute perfect spot in current copyright law, just like other things that seem like they should be illegal now but aren't.
Yea, that dipshit judge just opened the flood gates for more problems. The problem is they don't understand how this stuff works and they're in the position of having to make a judgement on it. They're completely unprepared to do so.
Now there's precedent for future cases where theft of code or any other work of art can be considered fair use.
So interestingly, free meant autonomy for Stallman and the original proponents of "copyleft" style licenses too. But autonomy for end-users, not developers. But Stallman et al believed the copyleft style licenses maximized autonomy for end-users, rightly or wrongly, that was the intent.
I read through and I think that the analysis suffers from the fact that in the case when the modifier is the user it's fine.
Free software refers to user freedoms, not developer freedoms.
I don't think the below is right:
> > Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
>
> Let's break it down:
>
> > If you modify the Program
>
> That is if you are a developer making changes to the source code (or binary, but let's ignore that option)
>
> > your modified version
>
> The modified source code you have created
>
> > must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network
>
> Must include the mandatory feature of offering all users interacting with it through a computer network (computer network is left undefined and subject to wide interpretation)
I read the AGPL to mean if you modify the program then the users of the program (remotely, through a computer network) must be able to access the source code.
It has yet to be tested, but that seems like the common sense reading for me (which matters, because judges do apply judgement). It just seems like they are trying too hard to do a legal gotcha. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak to that, but I certainly don't read it the same way.
I don't agree with this interpretation of every-change-is-a-violation either:
> Step 1: Clone the GitHub repo
>
> Step 2: Make a change to the code - oops, license violation! Clause 13! I need to change the source code offer first!
>
> Step 1.5: Change the source code offer to point to your repo
This example seems incorrect -- modifying the code does not automatically make people interact with the program over a network...
"free software" was defined by the GNU/FSF... so I generally default to their definitions. I don't think the license falls afoul of their stated definitions.
That said, they're certainly anti-capitalist zealots, that's kind of their thing. I don't agree with that, but that's besides the point.
It's not really "virtually impossible to comply with". It's very restrictive, yes, but not hard to comply if you want to.
And yes, it is an EULA pretending to be a license. I'd put good odds on it being illegal in my country, and it may even be illegal on the US. But it's well aligned with the goals of GNU.
Hell is, by design, a consequence for poor people. (People could literally pay the church to not go to hell[0]). Rich people have no consequences whatsoever, let alone poor people consequences.
Not "by design", as historically the hell came first. It was only much later that they catholic church started talking about the purgatory and the possibility of reducing your punishment by paying money.
The people running AI companies have figured out that there is no such thing as hell. We have to come up with new reasons for people to behave in a friendly way.
We already have such reasons. Besides, all religious "kindness" was never kindness without strings attached, even though they'd like you to think that was the case.
Open source may be necessary but it is not sufficient. You also needed the compute power and architecture discoveries and the realisation that lots of data > clever feature mapping for this kind of work.
A world without open source may have given birth to 2020s AI but probably at a slower pace.
This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.
You’re going to have to qualify where you are talking about. Where I am, California, that only describes community colleges. Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation. Very little of your tuition at these schools goes towards teaching salaries.
> Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation.
What timeframe are you looking at?
Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.
(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)
Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.
I don't disagree, but they support my point that tuition has not changed meaningfully in the past decade (and then some), which is why I asked what timeframe you were looking at.
Inflation is perhaps not a good point of reference anyways, since in 2009, inflation per CPI was actually slightly negative. Cost of borrowing is not the same as cost of goods and services or cost of labor, for reasons such as the ones you point out (changes to banking regulations, increased risk aversion, etc).
Although, I'm a little surprised that cost of borrowing would have been much higher, seeing as that was the start of the zero interest-rate policy in the US. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was hovering around 6-7% pre-crisis and 4-5% in the years immediately following it.
Perhaps some more generous explanations for the rapid tuition growth between 2000 and 2010:
- UC Merced was established in 2005, so I buy the argument on that point regarding investment in infrastructure.
- In 2009, the state's general funds accounted for $2.6 billion, compared to just under $3 billion in 2006. Student fees in that timeframe rose from $1.55 billion to $2 billion, tracking fairly closely with the corresponding shortfall in state funding. [0, 1] Yes, these numbers are also cherrypicked as a representative budget right before the GFC and shortly after, but they represent neither peak funding nor the overall sharpness of the budget cuts. So, I reject the claim that the tuition hikes in the aftermath of the GFC was due to increased borrowing costs for the UC system. I think a more mundane explanation is that the state had a budgetary shortfall due to less taxes being collected (income, property), and made cuts across the board; the UC system raised student fees to compensate.
https://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2017/10/a-brief-history-of... provides an overview of how tuition at UCs evolved up through 2017, although it gets the state funding amounts off by 3 orders of magnitude (since the linked governor's budget is measured in thousands of dollars).
Does it help to submit duplicative arguments? I see some pretty strong arguments in the comments already. I wish there was a way to just upvote an existing comment.
While debatably unprofessional to blame your vendor, I found this read to be fascinating. I'm sure there are blog posts that detail how data centers work and fail but it's rare to get that cross over from a software engineering context. It puts into perspective what it takes for an average data center of this class to fail: power outage, generator failure, and then battery loss.
I think what it really does is emphasise how common it is for crap to hit the fan when things go wrong - even with the best laid plans.
The DC almost certainly advertises the redundant power supplies, generator backups and battery failover in order to get the customers. But probably doesn't do the legwork or spend the money to make those things truly reliable. It's a bit like having automated backups - but never testing them and discovering they're empty when they're really needed.
What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?
One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.
And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."
I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.
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