How did you draw those conclusions? They don't seem to be in line with court rulings (i.e. Anthropic), which hold that training is fair use. Code is being treated the same as any other copyrighted content that is used for training, from blog posts to PR announcements from companies and everything in between. Of course the blog posts are PR announcements have their copyright held by their authors, with no license provided at all, so if OSS code being used in training is a violation, then so would everything being trained on (to a first approximation...public domain works excepted). But no court has every taken that position to my knowledge.
There's just so much confusion around this. In this thread alone:
* Distillation is legal under copyright; the violations would come as ToS violations, which is contract law, not copyright law.
* Training is legal as well, so long as the original material was obtained legally.
* Moving code off of GitHub doesn't change any of this: AI companies are free to download your git repo no matter where it is hosted, just like they can any other content on a publicly accessible website.
* Liability comes into the picture when the models are used to infringe copyright in their output. We'll have to see the outcome of the NYT case here, but that is proceeding at a glacial pace.
I am not a lawyer; I'm an interested amateur that's been following the saga for years. I wish the discussion here on HN were more nuanced.
If anyone has legal updates that render any of the above incorrect, I'd love a pointer to the decisions. One area I'm particularly weak is the legal status in countries that are not the US: I don't follow those laws nearly as carefully, nor the court cases brought.
>> * Moving code off of GitHub doesn't change any of this: AI companies are free to download your git repo no matter where it is hosted, just like they can any other content on a publicly accessible website.
C'mon, I'm not even apart of the movement to move away from GitHub, but that's not really a valid argument. Sure, they CAN download the source code, but its not nearly as automatic. They don't get to download it all, en masse, from copying hard drives/databases they already own. They have to go over the internet. They don't get automatic notifications when new code gets pushed. And finally, if one wanted, they can make it harder for bots.
I certainly believe that these companies do get away with a lot more than the average Joe - see: Facebook downloading Anna's Archive, every pirated eBook - but that doesn't mean you have to hand it to them on a silver platter.
Plus, even if your code is private on GitHub, you can guarantee that they can't train there models on it anyway; unlike if you host it yourself, or somewhere else.
Does anyone else find it ironic when closed-source GitHub claims it's some super hero for open source?
I have written about this numerous times, so I won't repeat myself with the long form writing. Maybe I need to keep a list of comments somewhere, so I can reference them. I digress...
In short:
- GPL code requires attribution and sharing of code. Models strip license, so GPL is effectively violated.
- Source available licenses are "for your eyes" only, so training on source available code is also violates said code's licenses.
- MIT requires attribution, but forgetting it has no consequences, so it's a more gray area.
About moving from GitHub:
- Some public repositories provide visible and invisible anti-scraping protections. So it's not always that easy.
- GPL says I need to share code to the people who downloads the application itself, so I can move to cathedral model.
Moreover:
- US Government has a stance of "If we need to take permission for everything, AI industry will die". Hence, as an outsider, the court rulings have no weight in my eyes. They are taking stance to enable and not hinder the industry. If one reads Fair Use doctrine, it's very possible to rule otherwise. OpenAI's whole non-profit research arm was an instrument to circumvent Fair Use doctrine's "earn money from copyrighted works" clause and support "we only do research pinky promise" requirement of the said doctrine.
When courts said "go ahead, we're not looking", people started to torrent e-books (ahem Meta ahem) to train models or buy/cut/scan/ocr books to train their models (Anthropic).
So the situation is left murky to allow Silicon Valley to thrive. Not to protect people's blood, sweat and tears. These works are provided by peasants anyway, so why bother.
Addenda: Courts said models' outputs can't be copyrighted. So, copyrighted code gets in, non-copyrightable code gets out. It's effectively license-washing.
> Hence, as an outsider, the court rulings have no weight in my eyes.
My only focus in on legality, so this doesn't track for me. If we're not talking about what courts are ruling, then there's nothing to talk about legally, since the copyright office is waiting on courts to rule here.
The GitHub terms of service has always granted GitHub additional rights. If you put up code with a license incompatible with those rights, then you are the responsible party for the violation, again as per GitHub's terms of service.
This was true before AI, and the ToS now explicitly includes AI training to avoid confusion.
In short: it has never been a good idea to put anything with a copy left or strong license up on GitHub if you wanted them to abide by it.
> If you put up code with a license incompatible with those rights, then you are the responsible party for the violation, again as per GitHub's terms of service.
This is not how copyright law works or any other law for that matter. The issue is foremost between the copyright author and GitHub. The ToS may or may not allow GitHub to sue the uploader for damages for a ToS does not magically give them rights that the uploader isn't legally able to give.
IP law is a farce, and the open source licenses are built upon that farce. If a single good thing comes out of LLMs, it will be forcing society to recognize “intellectual property” for the dystopic stupidity that it is. I doubt it though.
Knowledge being rented out to individuals is the status quo. Already there are court rulings dictating that “training” on data is legal, but model weights also are non-copyrightable, which seems like a step in the direction of sanity.
The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
This is how politicians speak. A loss of trust is actually very serious. The Norwegian foreign minister is saying that the US is no longer sharing our values. That is a _big_ change for us.
Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
The last one I did was using Fyne in Go, which is quite cross platform but its software drawn not native. Its targeting phones as well so its cross compatibility is very good but at the cost of giving you the full complexity of desktop applications, it does not have a highly capable table view for example. Since its written in Go this is what you will develop in.
Otherwise I think its QT and GTK on C/C++ as the other option across the desktop operating systems, neither is native on anything but Linux but they also look OK but I think a lot of people would rather avoid C nowadays for application development.
Doesn't matter how many times they ask the UK public about sharing NHS data they always say no. This has been a continuous escalation of increasing selling NHS data over nearly 2 decades now. They don't work for the public interest at all, every signal they have on data sharing has told them stop. Thankfully at the moment NHS staff are refusing to comply but at some point government is going to ram this through anyway.
Not sure that going straight to production with every change is really best practice for something that could have such a disasterous impact with no pair programming nor review. This process is going to create catastrophic errors sometimes its got zero guard rails, humans are going to make mistakes.
There is something to be said for the bitmasks that are so common in C, createUser(user, ADMIN | SENDMAIL); has a lot more clarity than createUser(user, true, false, true);
I don't mind the object approach used here but its quite verbose in comparison even in Javascript. Having to name the variable and set whether its true or false is a lot more than needs to be done. Booleans in general have quite poor readibility and maintenance especially if a third possibility arrives.
The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
The billion spend on renewables in Germany were not "wasted", there were spend on the primary goal of the German Energiewende, to allow Germany exit nuclear electricity power production.
The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.
I would recommend other CCC video:
"Deaths per TWh"
The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.
They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.
Over the figurative dead body of Bavaria. They want cheap energy for their industry, they don't want wind power because it's ugly and bad for tourism, they will maybe accept a little well-hidden solar power, they don't want overland cables because they are ugly, and they don't want underground cables because they heat and dry out the ground. There is also some market distortion because energy is traded as if transfer capacity was unlimited, but when Bavaria buys cheap wind power that can't be moved, they still pay the cheap price but the energy is locally "replicated" at e.g. gas power stations, which is paid by... OK, I forgot, but it's a terrible system.
These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.
Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.
Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.
There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.
Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.
If someone had guts (not the current governments) they would split the Germany into zones and all the Bavarian whining about “ugliness” would fade rather quickly when the prices went up.
Not sure if you're serious, but this was not viable in the 2010s, or even today in Germany at all because of Germany's high latitude: No matter how efficient solar panels become, they will always be more economical to operate closer to the equator. Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
> Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
That's because China itself is mostly coal, not because of anything magical about particular sources. However, coal is now in decline even in China: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Before someone (accurately!) says the decline in coal is tiny and one year doesn't make a trend: This is likely to continue until there is no more coal for the same reason the UK also completely stopped generating electricity from coal: cost.
PV's absurdly cheap. China has a lot of land, doesn't need to care about optimal use of the Gobi desert.
As much as we could discuss the independence of Katherine Reiche from gas industry, how much new gas power plants could be replaced by battery storage? Not much. The new gas power plants will be the backup of the electric production after Germany shuts down coal power plants. This backup, or call it insurance, is for weeks long times when wind and solar don't deliver enough, the famous German Dunkerflaute. There are research projects for long duration energy storage systems, but building using current battery storage technology for week long Dunkerflaute that occurs once a decade event would be extremely expensive.
You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.
Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.
Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.
Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
I checked and it looks like ETS are increasing prices of gas produced electricity 20-30€/MWh.
So not little (although peaks are around 140€/MWh).
But these are taxes that can be used to reduce the reliance on gas (actually, it's mandatory to use them for transition projects).
Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines. And currently Austria isn't building renewables at scale. I think there is a strong NIMBY movement so the best places to build wind and pumped hydro are blocked...
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...
Gas is dispatchable. You can treat it like a huge battery. Nuclear power not only isnt a substitute for gas, it needs gas as a backup and to mediate supply and demand.
Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.
I suspect that you can modulate nuclear power too, but why do it? after you started the reactor it runs practically for free? (the fuel cost is so small; or it costs the same to run full power of half power). disclaimer: I did not read actual details about nuclear power plants designs in the past 20 years, so i'm vibing from first principles and bad memory
How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.
Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.
Australia is also well endowed with coal and no carbon pricing, so for Australia the cheapest form of electricity production is a mix of solar + battery + coal.
Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.
"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"
>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.
A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
There have been two hydroelectric power plant failures in the United States in the last fifty years, and one near miss. This is among hundreds of dams many of which have operated for more than a century.
A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.
If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)
Ubuntu has fallen out of favour with quite a lot of Linux recommender sites and reviewers and its mainly about flatpak and Gnome, but also gaming support by default. Other Linux distributions do things better now for the influx of gamers to Linux and with SteamOS being on Arch a lot of Arch deriatives are becoming increasingly popular. I don't think its Fedora picking up users, its Cachyos and Bazzite.
What are the specific issues with gaming that you're claiming Ubuntu has?
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months, and I have complaints - lots of them. But gaming isn't one. I just installed the apps I needed and they worked.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
> Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration
This shows a weakness than in the Linux desktop ecosystem that something has to be bundled to correctly integrate with the system.
It's no different to Chinese OEMs bundling additional stores with their phones.
It's a quid pro quo from Valve. They are investing profusely in Linux ecosystems, and the distro-devs are following that.
Meanwhile Epic Games still lacks a first-party app on linux, and users need to pass from Lutris, Heroic etc...
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