> No politician could possibly admit it, but geopolitically, temperate climate countries are going to be net beneficiaries and will need to protect themselves from tropical and sub tropical countries.
In the case of Europe and Africa, I'd say that the main pressure will simply be one of demographics more than weather.
> Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.
It's probably fair to hold two ideas at the same time.
. Climate change is a way to accumulate rank and wealth in society.
. Climate change is real
It's interesting to ask what everyone is really after in terms of climate. Lack of change or natural events occurring. Would an upcoming ice age result in a cry for more CO2?
I like to think of it in terms of carrying capacity. Too many people results in environmental degradation (of all sorts), social unrest, scrabbling at the bottom for wages, squabbling at the top for status.
>Copyright doesn't just benefit huge corporations. For instance, without it, independent artists who rely on copying for distribution (authors, musicians, etc.) would find it much more difficult to make money off their work,
That doesn't look like it's the point to me.
""[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right , to their respective Writings and Discoveries." "
As I read that, copyright is there to 'promote progress', not to maximize gains.
No doubt there is a million linear feet of case law that got us where we are.
Honestly, I rather like this whole question of copilot. I solidly appreciate the brilliance of github as a honeypot.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right , to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
What better way to promote said Progress than by making sure said Authors and Inventors can make enough money off their work to keep doing it? As written, it's a roundabout way to get at the instrumentality of capital, but if that's not what they had in mind then I'm not sure what they were getting at. Without copyright, a creator's rights to their own work aren't diminished; it's just that everyone else's are expanded to the same level.
(I'd love to know if I'm way off base about this. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure it's been discussed to death.)
> Honestly, I rather like this whole question of copilot. I solidly appreciate the brilliance of github as a honeypot.
I think it's really cool, and I'd probably use it myself. As much as my favorite kinds of programming (e.g. writing experimental text editors) might not benefit from it, in my day job I sure would love to spend less time filling in boilerplate and looking up mundane API details.
I don't mean to single Github out in my mention of big corporations benefiting from copyright law. Scraping vast quantities of copyrighted data to build new products is a common business model at this point, and--like other new IP-related paradigms enabled by modern information technology--I think it deserves a fresh look, being mindful of just what it is we're trying to accomplish with copyright law. As you say, it's not always obvious, even in written law.
There are a lot of better ways. Having more information being public and free, and usable by tools like this sounds like an excellent way of promoting progress.
Well, this is the current status quo. Automated scraping of copyrighted material for (arguably) transformative applications like Copilot is generally allowed under fair use, while non-transformative copying is considered infringement.
If you want to strip creators of (default) exclusive rights to their work, that's a different conversation than the one around whether Copilot and similar applications fall under fair use. Both have been touched on in this subthread, but your comment seems to be conflating them in a way that doesn't follow directly from the discussion above it.
> Automated scraping of copyrighted material for (arguably) transformative applications like Copilot is generally allowed under fair use,
Ok great. So then new tools like this are good, even though they weaken copyright, and the concerns that people have about it (that it allows easier copying of code), are actually a benefit.
And the fact that it might hurt people's ability to profit from their code, is overruled by the benefit that this stuff provides.
> doesn't follow directly from the discussion above it.
You suggested protecting profits as if it is the only or best way of promoting progress.
When, in reality, stuff like these tools are actually a much better way of doing so. And it does so in a way that undermines copyright law, in a beneficial way.
> Ok great. So then new tools like this are good, even though they weaken copyright,
Does it weaken copyright? Like I mentioned, it seems like it's probably allowed under existing law.
> it might hurt people's ability to profit from their code
I don't really buy this. The outputs of Copilot seem transformative enough that they won't by themselves meaningfully compete with the applications built from the sources in the training set.
It seems to me that people are objecting to it more as "theft" on ethical grounds alone. I don't really have a strong opinion either way on that front, but if I did it would be based on principle and not some theoretical material harm, because I think the latter is marginal at best.
> You suggested protecting profits as if it is the only or best way of promoting progress.
In fields where creators make money by selling access to copies of their work, what is a better way of promoting progress? People need places to live, and things to eat, and other things, and all of that costs money. If working in these creative fields becomes even less lucrative than it already is, fewer people will be able to do it, and for less time, because they will have to spend more of their time making money in other ways.
In tech, many of us are privileged to have a fair amount of spare money and time. Don't forget that not everybody enjoys that privilege, and please try not to attach a negative-valued concept of "profit" to the necessities of survival.
> When, in reality, stuff like these tools are actually a much better way of doing so. And it does so in a way that undermines copyright law, in a beneficial way.
Again, this is a very tech-centric view. I can't imagine (for instance) the average novelist being particularly happy to have the exclusivity of their rights to their own work curtailed to enable the creation of some tool, using their work as an input, for generating prose. And such objections would be absolutely correct, if anybody was actually talking about doing that.
Fortunately, nobody is talking about doing so--not for code with Copilot, not for fiction prose with the new GPT-3 tools that are popping up, and not for any other medium I'm aware of. These applications are covered under existing fair use law, and their existence does not depend on weakening the exclusivity of creators' rights to their work.
If you were to tell me that such rights should be curtailed to enable tools like Copilot to exist, I would strongly disagree with you. But--again--such curtailment is not necessary. The only reason I'm talking about it here is that there are people who think copyright should be abolished or strongly weakened. Almost universally, I've found, they're people who don't make money off distributing authorized copies of their work. So, if you ask me, they really have no clue what they're talking about, and shouldn't be running their mouths before seriously listening to (at least) the independent creators who would be impacted by such a change.
> Does it weaken copyright? Like I mentioned, it seems like it's probably allowed under existing law.
Yes it does. It is legally allowed, but in the past it was much more difficult to code launder, or copy things, in the way that an AI would do it.
Something becoming easier to do, has an effect, even if it was legal in the past.
> what is a better way of promoting progress
More technologies like this, that allow better sharing of code and information. It reduces the barrier to entry to creating content, thus causing more of it to be made.
> If you were to tell me that such rights should be curtailed
You have it reversed. Rights do not need to be curtailed, to enable these tools. Instead I am advocated for the production of these tools to be done for the purpose of curtailing these rights. The causation is reversed.
The rights should be "curtailed" through the process of tools that allow people to easily get around the law, and to make the law unenforceable. Changing laws is much harder than making the law irrelevant.
We don't need to change any laws, if we just make it impossible for laws to be enforced.
It is kind of like how bittorrent undermined copyright laws. No laws needed to be changed, for piracy to become rampant and unpunishable. (And don't even try to challenge me on this point, that piracy is effectively unenforceable these days. If you do, I'll just go watch the lastest episode of some marvel show, for free, right now, lul)
> More technologies like this, that allow better sharing of code and information. It reduces the barrier to entry to creating content, thus causing more of it to be made.
Like I said, this seems like a highly tech-centric viewpoint. Keep in mind that source code is far from the only thing covered under copyright law. Personally, if I was stranded on a desert island, I'd rather have a single original novel written by a human than a hundred novels' worth of GPT-3 output.
Beyond that, your perspective is pretty interesting--I guess you support the existence of tools like this because you see it as an opportunity to erode existing copyright law. Personally, I may not support the full extent and implementation of copyright law in America, but I do support the fundamental principle that a creator should have exclusive rights to their work. So we disagree pretty strongly on that, and I doubt we'll find common ground.
I guess I would just urge you, if you value art at all, to consider how independent artists like writers and musicians would be affected by the elimination of copyright. I don't really give a shit about the IP rights of programmers (even though I'm one myself, with public FOSS contributions), but you seem willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
My thoughts on grey posts: these are messages that need further examination.
If the author is making their point in a civil way, then we should be up-voting it. Whether we agree or disagree with their point should not matter since the aim is to maintain civil discourse rather than to create an echo chamber.
If the author is taking away from civil discourse we should be down-voting grey posts. Whether we agree or disagree with their perspective should not play a role since it is far more important to create an environment where everyone is comfortable with expressing themselves.
We will only be able to maintain the freedom of speech if civility is at the core of our discourse. Once civility is dropped, we run the risk of speech being used as a tool to suppress speech.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a ton lately. It's not what this site is for. As you know, we ban accounts that do it.
Of course, it's cheap to create a new account, because we want HN to be open to newcomers. But why abuse that, when you could contribute to not destroying the ecosystem instead? I'm sure you wouldn't drop lit matches in a dry forest, or litter in a city park, or dump motor oil in a mountain lake. Please stop being that sort of person here.
> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN?
No, I will not.
> Of course, it's cheap to create a new account, because we want HN to be open to newcomers
Of course you don't, especially if the newcomer don't follow your groupthink.
> I'm sure you wouldn't drop lit matches in a dry forest or litter in a city park or dump motor oil in a mountain lake. Please don't be that sort of person here.
Quite the contrary, I will love to. The ecosystem is rotten to the core. Stop being a coward and own who you really are. You are not "open". You are just as close minded as the people you claim to fight against. I've been banned from many forums, from HN to right wing ones, developed a thick skin in the process against mere splinters.
This is a bit unusual, but I wanted to let you know about a very strange Racket issue. I'm not sure if HN is still running on Racket or not, or if the CL port has finished. But...
For many years, HN has been running just fine with ac.scm looking like this:
The only reason I know that, is thanks to Scott. It was one of the first tips he shared with me. Vanilla arc3.1 looks like this:
(xdef scar (lambda (x val)
(if (string? x)
(string-set! x 0 val)
(x-set-car! x val))
val))
(xdef scdr (lambda (x val)
(if (string? x)
(err "Can't set cdr of a string" x)
(x-set-cdr! x val))
val))
which became unreliable years ago.
Scott explained that unsafe-set-mcar! was a bit of a hack, but that it worked due to a few assumptions about the code. I upgraded to this and never gave it a second thought.
Fast forward to a week or two ago. Arc kept throwing very strange errors. As far as I could tell, nothing whatsoever had changed.
But Racket had changed. The latest shipped version, for whatever reason, causes #<garbage> to be inserted to the `car` if you try to do (scar '(x y) '(a b))
(It took a long time to track that down...)
After poking around the racket source code, I noticed there was a function called unsafe-set-immutable-car!
On a whim, I tried switching unsafe-set-mcar! to unsafe-set-immutable-car! and everything worked perfectly.
I don't know why, or whether it's stable long term. But I wanted to let you know, in case someone on your team is running into strange Racket errors, that this is the fix:
This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.
It could be that part of the problem is that you only see their public persona. Start adding all the weasel words to imply that you think that something is 73% likely to be mostly true and you lose an audience
Everyone (well, most everyone) could stand to examine their own problems (well, issues) with stating opinions as fact.
It's funny because that's actually literally the kind of thing they do on the show in question, for which there is apparently quite a sizable audience. For example around April or May 2020 Bret presented a model assigning probabilities for various scenarios of lab leak vs zoonotic origin of Sars-Cov-2 (the kind of discussion for which they were branded conspiracy theorists for a long time).
The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.
