Yup, that’s the precedent bit I mentioned. They’re both valid ways of deciding ambiguity (a judge decides in this situation and other judges aren’t obligated to decide the same way, or lawyers debate the ambiguity, a jury decides, and courts strive for consistency), but they’re fundamentally different and slightly bewildering to people from the other model.

Purely an answer to the question "I mean, how different could they really be?”: fundamentally different in an almost unrecognizable way.

I don’t know how the German appeals system works, but there is a lot of room for difference.

A particular reading spree once caused me to learn that the UK, a modern civilized country, didn’t have what we would call a supreme court until 2009.
Their laws aren’t codified. We have a big book o’ laws, and we pass bills that modify the book. If it’s not in the book it’s not a law. They pass bills that are the laws. This sounds really similar until you consider that “the law” is a collection of every act of parliament going back nearly a thousand years, many of which cancel out others. Oh, and that extends to the concept of a “constitution”.

Some quick searching shows that Germany uses a fundamentally different legal model that views our big book o’ laws as unstructured because courts have a binding say in interpretation of the law. It seems that this regional court can be appealed, and also that their courts don’t use precedent like ours do, so an appeal is more like a second opinion than an escalation.
Judges are less referee and more investigator, so you can claim that the judge made a mistake with their decision, which is appeal.

Yes, I will just take your word for it over the word of the original people involved.

You keep talking about DARPA, when they’re not the same organization that backed ARPANET. Arpanet came before laws were passed saying DARPA could only fund projects directly related to defense.

DARPA was originally ARPA. They were under the department of defense but their project scope wasn’t limited to defense projects. The reorganization that rebranded the agency as DARPA and made it defense focused ostensibly saw the non-defense oriented moonshot project responsibility transfer to the NSF, although the funding shift wasn’t proportional.
The order of creation isn’t exactly relevant to how responsibilities have shifted.

It’s kinda like how, for the longest time, presidential security was handled by the Treasury department. It wasn’t because presidential security was considered a financial matter, but because that’s where it fit.

https://www.darpa.mil/news/features/arpanet

Secure communications and information-sharing between geographically dispersed research facilities were among the ARPANET’s original goals.

From your link to the arpanet wiki:

Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers.

Sutherland and Taylor continued their interest in creating the network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to utilize computers provided by ARPA, and, in part, to quickly distribute new software and other computer science results.

There’s a big difference between ARPA funded labs and general university usage.

I’m not sure why it would matter that you worked for them in the early 90s. That doesn’t exactly give you a privileged insight into the creation of ARPANET.

The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war.

Responding to this part alone: that’s not actually true.
The intent of arpanet, the direct predecessor to the Internet, was to make it easier for universities to use high powered computer resources located at national laboratories, as well as making it easier to distribute software updates. The person who initially pushed for it’s creation wanted “an electronic commons open to all, 'the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals '”. They secured funding for the initial computer science labratories, os research that underpin everything, and the foundation for the “INTERgalactic NETwork”.

Arpa was, at the time, the advanced research project agency. They were under the DoD, but they filled a role closer to the NSF today.

In designing the system they referenced work done by people who were studying robust communication networks. At the time that meant the phone system and nuclear weapons. The research, however, was applicable to any unstable network, and so had particular interest to them because computers had terrible reliability and they wanted to not have to call people if they discovered they had turned off a computer halfway between New York and LA.

The closest thing it has to a cold war military objective is to help us win the research race and spite the Soviets. It can withstand a nuclear attack, but that’s just because that’s the easiest way to make it survive a farmer with a backhoe accidentally hitting a wire.

The thing is they’re currently trying to sell as a business oriented tool. They’re not going to make money off of individuals.
Google is positioned to come closest because they’re already an advertising company.

If you think their focus isn’t businesses then you’re not paying attention to their strategy. The pressure to drive profitability is increasing as their business customers are reporting that investment in AI capabilities isn’t converting into measurable financial returns. That’s the type of news that makes investors wary.

If you operate at a loss, you need to be providing a value to your customers that you can leverage. You need more than high interest, you also need demonstrable utility.

There have also been plenty of times that a new technology just … Didn’t pan out. This specifically happens with AI technology, and we even have a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter The tech won’t go away, it’ll just be market infeasible for a while until it’s no longer called AI and is just a feature in some other product.

Take your comment and apply it to someone marketing “spell check as a service”.

This is capitalism working exactly as intended. People with capital are using it to guide businesses to make them more money.

The mistake is thinking that capitalism is motivated by a healthy economy, when the theory is that if everyone is aggressively selfish then the economy will naturally become healthy and efficient.

The people making money are counting on making their money as investors keep pumping more in. The investors are all aiming to be the last one to sell before the crash. Russian roulette venture capitalism. (In some cases they think the economy will tolerate 1-2 companies and they’re aiming to buy a controlling interest in a company worth 2% current value after the correction, and in others they just have so much money that a few billion is a minor bet - BlackRock comes to mind, with more than $10 trillion to invest)

If you look at 2008, we had a similar-ish situation with a major portion of the economy being invested in mortgage based investments.

Knowing how.

All routers are just Linux computers managing slightly better than average network cards. (Home routers, obviously. Beefy carrier hardware is different).

A basic setup is essentially installing Linux and then running a handful of commands for packet forwarding. The figuring out how to do it without wifi crashing will take longer because that software is wonky.

It’s that, plus other factors. The regulations are more lenient, it’s easier to get a more efficient engine in with more mass to work with, it’s easier to pass safety ranking checks, and it’s easier to put comfort features in that consumers want.
Putting a large crumple zone on a compact isn’t as easy as putting one on a giant truck.
(Note this isn’t saying big cars are more or proportionally more efficient , but that the efficiency advances they’ve made over the years are easier to implement in a large engine)

Why?

I use Linux. This means everyday I use software developed by Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, the US military and the NSA.

It doesn’t really matter who developed or contributed so much as who benefits.

I’m not sure that’s right. It’s not like they’re giving money to brave. The library itself isn’t tainted, and using it doesn’t benefit brave or the CEO.

Further, simply supporting a thing doesn’t make that thing a moral proxy for the supporter. That path leads to an infinite regress of bad moral choices with nothing being moral.

Whoah, I never said I wasn’t interested in the exchange, only that I wasn’t interested in the topic.
As someone who’s extremely insistent that it’s grossly improper to make any form of inferences beyond what is literally stated, I’m shocked you would make such a leap!

I think you’re persistently confusing me with someone else. I perfectly understand your point, and have never had any doubt about what you intended to say. I never even disagreed with you on the topic.
I clarified someone else’s point to you, and you started explaining to me how they made unreasonable assumptions, which is what I disappeared with.

Intellectual property laws apply to open and closed source software and developers equally. When you make a statement about legal culpability for an action by one group, it makes sense to assume that statement applies to the other because in the eyes of the law and most people people in context there’s no distinction between them.

No one is unclear that you were only referring to one group anymore. That’s abundantly clear.

My point is that you’re being overly defensive about someone else making a normal assumption about the logic behind your argument. And you’re directing that defensiveness at someone who never even made that assumption.

I’m really not interested in the topic. I’m talking because I explained what someone else meant and you started responding as though that was an opinion or argument I was making.

That’s not “applying the argument consistently”, it’s removing context, overgeneralizing the argument, and applying a strawman based on a twisted version of it.

It’s really not.
It’s not unreasonable for someone to think “developers who use copy written code from AI aren’t liable for infringement” applies to closed source devs as well as open, and to disagree because they don’t like one of those.
It’s perfectly valid for you to also disagree and say the statement shouldn’t apply both ways, but that doesn’t make the other statement somehow a non-sequitor.

Alright. I didn’t see any gotchas or argument, and didn’t make the comment.

That being said, reading the context I assume you’re referring to, it hardly reads like anything more than talking about the implication of the idea you shared.
Disagreeing because applying the argument consistently results in an undesirable outcome isn’t objectionable.

I don’t really see it as a divergence from the topic, since it’s the other side of a developer not being responsible for the code the LLM produces, like you were saying.
In any case, it’s not like conversations can’t drift to adjacent topics.

Besides, closed-source code developers could’ve been stealing open-source code all along. They don’t really need AI to do that.

Yes, but that’s the point of laundering something. Before if you put foss code in your commercial product a human could be deposed in the lawsuit and make it public and then there’s consequences. Now you can openly do so and point at the LLM.

People don’t launder money so they can spend it, they launder money so they can spend it openly.

Regardless, it wasn’t even my comment, I just understood what they were saying and I’ve already replied way out of proportion to how invested I am in the topic.

I believe what they’re referring to is the training of models on open source code, which is then used to generate closed source code.
The break in connection you mention makes it not legally infringement, but now code derived from open source is closed source.

Because of the untested nature of the situation, it’s unclear how it would unfold, likely hinging on how the request was formed.

We have similar precedent with reverse engineering, but the non sentient tool doing it makes it complicated.

Just for more clarity: they workshoped for ideas on how to improve clarity and accessibility from some editors at an event. They did some small experiments, and they then developed a plan to trial some of them and presented the plan to a wider audience for feedback. After they got feedback they decided not to.

It’s not quite the editors pushing back on Wikipedia. Or rather, it’s not the “rebellion” people want to make it out to be.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Readers/2024_Reader_and_Donor_Experiences/Content_Discovery/Wikimania_2024,_"Written_by_AI"_How_do_editors_and_machines_collaborate_to_create_content

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Content_Discovery_Experiments/Simple_Article_Summaries

It rubs me the wrong way when the process going how it should go gets cast as controversial and dramatic. Asking the community if you should do something and listening to them is how it’s supposed to go. It’s not resistance, it’s all of them being on the same team and talking.

Eh, that’s not quite original research. There are plenty of other examples of images and sound files created for Wikipedia. A representative example isn’t research, it’s just indicating what something is.

The Wikipedia article on AI slop and generative AI has a few instances of content that’s representative to illustrate a sourced statement, as opposed to being evidence or something.

It’s similar to the various charts and animations.

Yes, but…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

That’s because viewing the page uses server resources, as done API access. If you want the data you can download the database directly.

There’s hardware required to shunt the display out the USB port and since it’s not a super in demand feature they usually don’t implement it. As such the software for looking nice while doing it isn’t as developed.

But yes, it’s been in developer settings for years, and was usable if your hardware supported it.