Sure professor. Keep digging that grave.

aims to

Aims to. As in, has never once reached. So, you’re suggesting that in a state that has never happened, but theoretically could happen, then it’s OK to have a for-profit business.

What about in the real world?

That’s an “if” big enough to drive a train through.

There has never been a classless society where everyone’s basic needs are met. So, pretending that that’s the starting point for this hypothetical is a sign you’re pretty desperate.

Training an LLM on your code makes it definitionally a derivative work

If so, then every painter who studied Picasso is making Picasso-derived works. That’s not how copyright works.

And which of them thought that communism without capitalism allowed someone to run a for-profit business?

You mean, whatever Marx says.

Copyright infringement is never theft.

And, arguably, what they’re doing with LLMs isn’t even infringing copyright. If I look at a copyrighted picture, learn from it, then paint my own impression of it, my painting shouldn’t be infringing the copyright. Do that with an LLM instead of a brain and it’s a similar argument.

The dual standard is really the issue. Meta downloaded terabytes of books from LibGen and loaded them into its model. If that’s not infringing copyright, then anybody should be able to download a book from LibGen and read it without worrying about copyright infringement because they’re just loading them into their brains. But, I have a feeling that Meta will get away with it as fair use, but individual people will still be nailed for “copyright infringement” for loading media into their brains in exactly the same way.

never intended for it to be used as training data.

You could have chosen a different license than the GPL.

Doesn’t the GPL cover shit like this?

No. Didn’t you read the license you used?

To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.

I don’t think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They’d have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that’s free.

The library is still there. Admission is still free.

No, private property is things like a coat and shoes.

If someone owns an industrial lemon juicer, that’s part of the means of production, and must be collectively owned. Sorry Jenny, you can’t have a lemonade stand.

In fact, Jenny’s parents are allowed to own a small lemon juicer as part of their personal property. But, if Jenny tries to use that juicer for her lemonade stand and charges money for her lemonade, that juicer is now part of the means of production (as are the lemons) and she’s now operating an illegal enterprise.

The USSR and other supposedly “communist” governments all eventually allowed some capitalism in their economies, because 100% pure communism simply didn’t work.

So, you’re in favour of private ownership of the means of production?

I’m considering getting one. I currently have a nearly silent computer working as a HTPC but I can’t play games on it. I can get around that with Steam Link, but that isn’t ideal. So, it would be an upgrade that would let me play games on my living room TV without needing to tie up the gaming computer.

The other thing it looks ideal for is a travel computer. Gaming laptops suck. Often they’re absurdly expensive. When they’re decently powerful, they’re almost always obscenely loud. That fan whine really bothers me. Plus, they almost always have major Linux compatibility issues. The current laptop I’m using with Linux has weird driver quirks. Like, for example, to re-enable WiFi after it goes to sleep I need to wake it up from sleep, turn on airplane mode and then turn it off again. Only then will the WiFi work again. And getting an external monitor to work after sleep… ugh.

Also, I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of what is effectively a Linux gaming console. I’m almost exclusively a PC gamer these days, but one thing I always appreciated about consoles is that you never had to ask “will this game run well on my console?” 99.9% of the time, if a game was released for a console, it was optimized for that console. Even when a game was multi-platform like say FIFA, each console got a build that was as good as possible for that console. For PC games, I think that means most developers will have a Gabecube and ensure all their games run as well as possible on it. The fact that it’s Linux-first is also important to me. It means any drivers or software updates will be tested and optimized on Linux. It won’t be an afterthought like it is most of the time.

So, this machine is nearly silent, runs Linux, and plays most of the games in my Steam library. It’s expensive, but maybe it’s worth it?

So, no mom and pop shops? No lemonade stands? No independent book stores? No family farms? Nobody allowed to sell homemade quilts or paintings?

Why not just stick to the facts? The facts were damning enough.

By speculating on things and getting them wrong, he opened the door to them saying he was wrong about everything.

And what I’m saying is that there isn’t any evidence that the Snowden leaks resulted in people caring about their privacy.

Yes, but…

He was a definite hero in releasing what he discovered. He blew the whistle on things that the government was doing that it had no right to do, and that people had a right to know about. He risked his life and freedom to do it, and is paying for that by having to live in exile in Russia.

The “but” is that at times he has speculated on things that he doesn’t have any direct knowledge of.

For example, what he revealed in the PRISM leaks is that the US was tapping into submarine cables owned by companies like Google and getting the data that was going between various Google datacenters unencrypted.

That showed up in the PRISM leaks as this slide:

Snowden claimed that Google was cooperating with the NSA, when that slide shows what was really happening. The NSA learned how Google’s architecture worked, found a vulnerability, and exploited it without Google’s knowledge. Google reacted to the PRISM revelations by putting in a huge effort to encrypt data everywhere, in transit and at rest.

Until then they had thought that the data was safe. The places inside the Google network where the data was unencrypted were protected by significant physical security. They didn’t think anybody could get in, at least not get in undetected. But, their threat model didn’t include the US government treating them the way they’d treat an enemy country.

Google did “cooperate” with the US government, in that when it received a legal order for someone’s data they complied with that legal order. They even set up systems to make that process seamless. Things like the FISA court were a bit of a joke, so it was really easy for the government to come up with a legal order that Google release the data. But, Google still did require that the government go through the motions of getting a court to sign off on the orders. I think that’s why they were so surprised that the government didn’t think that was enough and had tapped into their backbone traffic.

If you look at what actual full cooperation with the government looks like, look at the revelations of Mark Klein. He was also a heroic whistleblower. What he showed was that AT&T set aside a special room in one of their facilities where AT&T would copy all the Internet traffic hitting their network so that the NSA could sift through it as they wished. There was no need for a diagram of where AT&T added or removed encryption because AT&T was just handing it to them unencrypted.

So, yeah. He is a hero for what he did. But, he was irresponsible for mixing the things he knew for a fact with his own personal speculation on them, because some of his speculations were wrong.

I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.

You think there’s much opposition to laws and decisions that erode privacy? In the US in particular privacy has been eroding at an increasing rate year after year.

That article made me vigorously expel air from my nose.

What’s the #1 way that France still controls its former African colonies?

“1. These countries must officially speak French”

Did you know England controls the United States? How? England makes the US speak English. I’m super serial! This isn’t a laughing matter, so stop laughing at this matter.