Well put. I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.
Maybe this is me just being angry at the new world that's being created, but the beauty of the open source ecosystem was humans giving away things they found useful in the hope that other humans could find them useful too. Having a machine take all of that and regurgitate it somewhere else without that connection (for profit, no less) feels like a betrayal of that open source ethos.
Now in the back of my mind I worry that everything I open source will be scooped up by corporations to make them more rich and more powerful, so I end up not publishing anything (not that it was of any value). I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.
"If no one is charged with $crime for n years, it goes away unless explicitly renewed" would fix some of the weirder laws still on the books, but by definition wouldn't really change much.
No, it wouldn't fix anything, but it would result it annoying periodic pro forma charges being filed.
When you take a measure and tie a control function to it, you make it a target. When you do that, Goodhart’s law applies, and when the specific connection is as simple as “maintaining a criminal law requires charging someone under it with at least X frequency”, the failure mode is obvious.
You're getting downvoted, but this is really the only answer here. Companies won't stop acting this way as long as their shitty behavior is rewarded, and people keep rewarding their shitty behavior.
No amount of legislation is going to prevent them from doing this. This settlement even proves that they can keep doing it with impunity!
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
One thing that I think goes under discussed when it comes to the big AI companies is the _insane_ transfer of knowledge from sources like Britannica (among others) to the AI companies, which now use that knowledge to make money.
If deemed legal, what incentive is there to create and share these datasets if some company can come and scoop it up and make money from it? All without attribution, copyright, or sharing any of the revenue.
Regardless of illegality, it's a complete violation of trust and effectively poisons the well of the open internet.
I couldn't agree more. I think what has happened is that everything has become so fragmented due to the sheer volume of content being created that discovery is still a challenge. If you are someone who thinks that music, movies, novels, etc are in decline, then frankly you're just not looking hard enough.
For music, I'd recommend looking at Bandcamp Daily[0]. It's not all my cup of tea, but there are some amazing new artists out there spanning nearly every genre imaginable.
This is like saying "why don't you just teach your cat to use the toilet instead of using a litter box?". I mean, yeah, that sounds awesome. Given infinite time and energy, I'm sure it's possible. Best of luck to you, though.
And I don't say that to be rude or disparaging, it's just that parenting is a little like war: your plans never survive contact with the enemy. I had similar thoughts and ideas before I had kids, and they all went out the window when you deal with the real thing. Sleepless nights, a screaming infant, being scared out of your mind when they're sick... but then you will find a calmness unattainable anywhere else as you hold your sleeping child. All of your accomplishments will pale in comparison to the joys of parenthood, and you will unironically look back at those years as some of the best years of your life. You will see.
The irony of your comment is that it is actually possible to train cats to use the toilet, and it's not even that difficult.
But other than that, I fully agree with your sentiment that it's like war. My sibling comment to yours quoted Sun Tsu: "even the best laid plans will not survive contact with the enemy". My favourite example is when our 3 month old decides to have her weekly Big Shit after we get her all cleaned and dressed up for going out somewhere, right as we walk out the front door.
There's no need for (local) AI acceleration if you are leveraging a remote LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, etc). The vast, vast majority of users are most likely just making API calls to a remote service. No need for specialized or beefy hardware.
I think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.
What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.
With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.
The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.
It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.
Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.
Impeached, possibly. Conviction is effectively impossible.
That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches.
I'd argue that no system will work when so many voters are willing to overlook obvious crimes in order to remain in power. But even in less pathological circumstances, the legislative branch had too many internal checks to also participate in external ones.
Maybe this is me just being angry at the new world that's being created, but the beauty of the open source ecosystem was humans giving away things they found useful in the hope that other humans could find them useful too. Having a machine take all of that and regurgitate it somewhere else without that connection (for profit, no less) feels like a betrayal of that open source ethos.
Now in the back of my mind I worry that everything I open source will be scooped up by corporations to make them more rich and more powerful, so I end up not publishing anything (not that it was of any value). I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.