Re: Unfortunately Airbus withdrew a book written about its history from Amazon
The Internet never forgets. I wonder if it's "cached" somewhere? That would be an interesting read
1755 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013
"Valued at $5Bn" is as a result of there being revenue.
If everybody just downloads the source, there's no revenue.
The problem of making money out of the hosted solution, is that you'd better be much better at it than AWS, or AWS can simply download the source and host it themselves.
Remember, the $5bn came from somewhere - ususally VCs. And they don't just give you money for nothing. Without the VC money, Terraform would still be a college project.
"Let's not forget: Whilst "limited liability" protects SHAREHOLDERS from financial fallout of bad decisions, it in no way shape or form legally immunises the MANAGEMENT or board from liabilities accruing from unlawful actions"
So you are the person I can finally sell this bridge to!
Hogwash.
Just because copying is easier for you and I, does not invalidate copyright. "From which it follows that ready duplication in digital format implies no monetary worth beyond that of storage and transmission. In turn, is implied lack of scarcity." That is an argument of convenience, not fact. Taken to it's logical conclusion, there is no living to be made by any creative endeavour, beyond the craft of the embodying item (statuary, ceramics, woodwork). Really, if it's digitally encodable, there can be no copyright - and thus, no living to be had?
I'm not saying that all copyright is good. The egregious behaviour of the likes of Elsevier should be subject to regulation - especially as the actual content really is free. But all copyright is not bad either.
When you read, you don't copy and store. AI training makes copies of the data in an electronic retrieval system, a process usually explicitly forbidden in the license under which the content is made available for consumption.
Remember, there is no "right" to copy. There is only an explicit grant to do certain things. The law provides for certain carve-outs, but the wholesale copying and storing of content is not "fair use" for example. Publishing content on the internet does not provide an implicit right to copy and re-use.
The propensity of LLMs to be able to reproduce original training material indicates that, in some encoded form, they have a copy (an unlicensed copy) of the original content. The LLM operators' provision of "guardrails" is merely hiding this fact, not disproving it. In fact, I'd go as far as saying the the anti-source material guardrails are simply concealing the evidence of criminality! They really hope that by blocking the ability to reproduce certain content (say, the books by authors in a class-action) they are hoping to convince the court that the original content is not being stored.
"The focus of their cloud efforts, for example, has been disproportionately on improvements to IT, which generate lower rates of value than improvements to business operations. A shift to higher-value cloud use cases in business operations would create significantly more value."
So improving IT is just an overhead, buying toys for the techies - didn't we outsource you suckers yet?
But improving "business" processes (try saying it like the Eagle in Muppet Christmas Carol) is "important".
Never mind that IT improvements generally mean less downtime, better service, and more security.
As has been seen by the outsourcing fad, and cloudiness, this all works when you don't give a flying .... about the results. AI will be used to automate many functions that we, the proles, make use of. The fact that it does not work will make no difference to the bonuses of the C-suite, so no problem is detected.
Notice that the solution to the poor uptimes of Azure is to shrug. "Cloud down? Computer says no, you can't access your account/perform this critical action". And nobody (nobody important) was harmed.
"There are already Ofcom rules for presentation numbers, complete with fines of up to £2m (from memory). Problem is a lot of the spoofing is via VoIP, via the Internet and from overseas."
It does not matter where the VoIP number comes from. If the law was applied properly, the rules for presenting calling numbers would be applied to all calls over an operator. The operator would not be able to throw their hands up and go "ugh, Internet" and wash their hands of the problem. Can't prove the veracity of a caller ID? Don't process the call. End of. I know money would be left on the table, but that's what the law is for.
Anyone can provide anything. But the gateways onto an operators network are not just open doors - somebody has to pay for that. So, level 1 of the trace.
It would be simple for "proper" telcos to require that all voip interconnect providers specify a list of valid Caller-IDs on their account. After all, they get allocated a block of numbers, so unless they can specify which are valid, they should be blocked.
Remember, many times when the Caller-ID is fradulent, the actual call originator may not really have the rights to it, so it's an upstream filtering problem.
Now, I know that shell companies and wotnot are a thing. So you just mandate that if the declared originator proves to be fraudulent, then the next organisation up the chain becomes liable. All the way up to the telco.
"Hard"? yes. But with real monetary penalties likely, you'd be amazed how fast the "hard" problems get solved!
I didn't say that type-annotating Python code was easy :-)
Most stuff (comprehensions, lambdas, etc) work OK. Recent versions of Mypy are also better than old ones.
The "freedom of expression" noobs need reminding that this is professional programming, and any source of improving code quality/shortening QA cycles is a good thing. Right up to writing slightly less dynamic, safer code.
In general, it is about documenting your assumptions ("this parameter has a .foobar() method", "this value might be None/must not be None" for example). If it is impossible to annotate those assumptions, then it may well be impossible to enforce them either. "Optional-poisoning" is Python's "const-poisoning, and requires similar levels of careful thought.
It sounds like your "miserable year" had more to do with your cow-irkers, rather than Python :-)
Python3 has type annotations. Use those, and Pycharm starts helping you. Better still, Mypy can find your bugs just like a static compiler.
It can get a little tricky to correctly describe what you mean for very dynamic code, but the effect of that is to make you write more "classic"-syled code.
+1 this.
The people who demand state-run monopolies for services weren't around when you had to wait weeks for a new phone line, longer for an ISDN line, and there was no impetus to allow anything but an expensive-to-rent piece of GPO kit to be connected to the hallowed copper pair that entered your property.
My understanding is that Spirit also do work for Airbus and other manufacturers. And they don't have bits falling off. So the "screw it, ship it" attitude is only for Boeing jobs. Which means what they will be hiding is Boeing either explicitly or on-the-quiet instructing Spirit to skip steps for speed.
Chinese cars are not cheap because Chinese industry is super-efficient. Whatever the globalists say. They are cheaper because labour costs are low, due to the poverty of the workforce, and the poor employment rights. Parts are cheaper, as the raw materials and processes can be provided without regard to the environment. And the energy costs are almost zero, being provided by subsidised coal-fired power stations.
So, we are simply outsourcing our worker-oppression and pollution to China, and we should recognise that in our tariffs.