Not enough. They tried to make them separated their Office software business from the OS business, but failed sadly. Not to mentioned all the problems with them making unsupportable office files formats.
> creating market for data, attaching speculative value to it and et cetera, and stinks of web3 bullshit
Creating tradeable property rights is older than web3. (Web3's innovation was turbocharging securitization by skipping the step of finding something worth securitizing.) The question is whether, and to what extent, we want personal data to be a market good. It currently is.
Profit should be aligned with public good. That's where the system is currently failing majorly. Most people in all economic systems will strive for self-gain. The great thing about capitalism is that it realizes that this will always be the case and tries to co-opt this basic human desire into something good.
If it was all just Capitalism, we'd still be working six-day weeks without health insurance alongside our kids. There has to be a trade-off between satisfying some people's hunger for profit and, well - civilization itself.
Honestly we have a fair bit more regulation than we had in the past, and other capitalist nations don't have the problems we do. It's a lot more than just economic policy.
Mostly I think the problem is our death cult of individualism and exceptionalism. Half the country thinks everyone should either pull themselves up by their bootstraps or die.
I think it's the giganticness of the country and how that leads to a low degree of education for the average person (among other things, like safety nets). In a developing New World nation, you need individualism because that's how you settle a frontier, even if the individuals eventually become towns and states. The problem is that it's difficult to eventually coalesce that into a system that supports people the way Western European or Asian nations have. It takes loads of resources and hence loads of political will. If the Swiss single-handedly colonized North America, they wouldn't be able to replicate their system across the continent either. It takes a long time. Things are improving, though, I think! It's just a slow-moving process.
Maybe not yet. All just a change of their terms away. Oh you don't like it? We will give you 2 weeks to migrate. Perhaps you want this other more expensive subscription?
Just like with other code they should not be using as they do, they would probably run another "ask questions later" approach.
I’m sure you think this is a clever reply but the reality is that GitHub wouldn’t even begin to think if that were even technically possible. If it got out that it trained on confidential customer data, it would be game over. The risk is so stupidly large nobody in their right mind would take it. So yeah, if they say they don’t, they don’t.
I don't understand why people just automatically doubt things that companies say when they can be sued (or would otherwise destroy their business) if they are lying about it. Seems unnecessarily pessimistic.
People doubt Microsoft because they've historically run a very aggressive business and done things of questionable morality many times.
They've been to court and they've lost and it definitely hasn't destroyed their business one bit.
For example, Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn routed customer email through their servers so that they could scrape it. They did that without customer knowledge via a dark patten.
They later apologised for doing it but still used it to propel the company's growth. In the end it didn't hurt anything but their reputation for respecting people's privacy.
Microsoft's own anti-trust history is littered with exceptional behaviour too. They are the size they are now by dint of super aggressive business practices.
Normally because history shows us that redress via the court systems is rarely punitive to a company the size of Microsoft, further Microsoft has a long history of lying to its customers with seemingly no impact on its business.
I mean, we discovered that the whole car industry was lying flagrantly on their emission tests which had the potential of destroying the whole business and there were A LOT of people who knew about it and could talk anytime
But will that actually be against ToS or copyright? Many people tend to say that copilot learning from OSS doesn’t infringe any copyright and is no different from a person just learning from someone else’s work. So how is it different if copilot is learning from private repositories? Or eg from leaked source code?
It is not, at least in the US. Distribution is illegal; possession may or may not be prosecuted; and if you read the code and provably reuse it or make use of trade secrets you could lose a lawsuit. But if you "somehow" have access and don't do anything associated with the code, the basic act of reading it carries no penalties.
I'm frequently told on HN that Big Tech would willingly, flagrantly violate GDPR like its nothing. Even if the upside of collecting that info was minimal and the downside was 4% of global revenue.
I guess if they can do that, then what's a small lie about private repos between friends.
I’m fairly confident this is untrue. At Microsoft at least, it’s a big deal when there is a privacy issue, even a small localized one on a single product - and creates a small firestorm.
We’ll get engineers working long hours focused on it, consulting closely with our legal and trust teams. One of the first questions we ask legal when we suspect a privacy issue is “Is this a notifiable event?”
It’s not really about getting slapped by regulators - it’s the fact that much of Microsoft’s business is built by earning the trust of large companies and small ones. Many of them are in the EU of course, but we have strict compliance we apply broadly. It’s just not worth damaging our reputation (and hurting our business) for some shortcut somewhere, as trust takes a long time to build and is easily broken.
Because they do shady shit, like, by default Copilot would "sample" code for training while using it. Maybe this is no longer the default, maybe it still is, but it was the default.
This type of thing erodes trust? Why should my proprietary code be used for training by default?
OpenAI is not the same company as GitHub, and it has always been pretty clear that chats on ChatGPT are recorded and used for training (unless you now opt out).
Not sure why you're bringing OpenAI into it. My comment and the article is about "Copilot"
I'm talking about when using "Github Copilot" and you ask for a code suggestion, it would send the "context" back to GitHub / Microsoft and use that code as training.
Your comment is interesting to me though because there does seem to be a surprisingly large amount of defending OpenAI going on. Almost seems automatic now.
If a parent takes the intervening effort to limit time online, they can take the intervening effort to ensure their child takes part in social activities. The connection is not lost on them.
Social media is addicting in large part because kids are addicted to each other. It's often used as a substitute for hanging out. That barrier doesn't need to be there all the time. Adults get complacent with tech and will bias towards the convenience of staying at home versus going out-into-the-world to do things - if we want to lead by example, changing our own lifestyle helps, but simply accommodating a kid's extra-curriculars will get you out of the house too.
And really, if you prevent a kid from watching 3 hours of television, are they going to do "nothing" instead? No, they'll figure something out to keep entertained. By the same token, they'll want to satisfy their social needs.
One problem is that opting for online chat can be a defense mechanism against going out and being vulnerable in front of other people.
Pro do what you want. Personally I end up working from a coffee shop once a week, I'd be alright with flexible hybrid. I do get some social needs met from family, but I clearly benefit from getting out of the house. With kids, it's easier this way than having your own weekly extra-curriculars (though I try to set time for some). Friends in this city are few and weekends get repetitive.
That's true only if the majority of kids spend the majority of their time online. It's a circular argument. And while one might argue that that is indeed the case today, the question is SHOULD it be the case, tomorrow?
I think it's just an objective fact: given the way social media sites intentionally try to grab and hold onto our attention at any cost, the cons far outweigh the pros and we all (not just children) would be better off consuming less social media. Once the media companies restructure their business model and make their platforms more ethical and sustainable for society, then I have no problem with widespread adoption again.
I think the downsides outweight the upsides. If they're doing sports and clubs, the social isolation will be minimal, other children will have phone bans too, and they won't be at risk from a load of horrendous stuff online.
I’ve experienced a lot of exasperation recently as the sports and clubs that my kids are involved with only communicate the practice schedule and meeting times over WhatsApp.
That doesn't happen in a vacuum. Parents are responsible for enabling their childrens' social lives, it's part of their duties as parents.
Friends live far away? Organize with other parents to drive kids back and forth, or go home together from school. You live in SFZ suburbia? Well, that requires a more drastic change but it's doable.
To be fair, when a programmer learns from publicly available but not public-domain code, and then applies the ideas, patterns, idioms and common implementations in their daily job as a software developer, the result is very much a "commercial product" (the dev company, the programmer themselves if a freelancer) learning from someone else's work and ignoring all the licenses.
The only leap here is the fact that the programmer has outsourced the learning to a tool that does it for them, which they then use to do their job, just as before.
No, the difference is that OpenAI has a huge competitive advantage due to direct partnership with Github, which is owned by Microsoft. In fact, it's even worse. With OpenAI making money from GPT, Github has even less incentive to make data easily available to others because that would allow for competition to come in. I wouldn't be surprised if Github starts locking down their APIs in the near future to prevent competitors from getting data for their models.
Nobody is arguing against uploading code. It's about Github/Microsoft specifically.
I agree there's a difference in the ease of access, a competitive advantage, sure. And I get that people writing public-source (however licensed) software don't want to make it easier for them (as in, Microsoft) to make money off of "learning" (of the machine type) from it. That's fair.
However, at a first glance, it still feels to me like an unavoidable reality that if you publish source code it'll eventually be ingested by Copilot or whatever comes next.
I mean, for the rest of the content all the new fancy LLMs have been trained with, there wasn't a Github equivalent. They just used massive scraped dumps of text from wherever they could find them, which most definitely included trillions of lines of very much copyrighted text.
In short: not only I don't really see an issue with Copilot-like AIs learning from publicly available code (as I described in the GP comment) but I also think if you publish code anywhere at all it's inevitable that it'll end up in Copilot, regardless of where you host it. If you want to make it more expensive for Microsoft to scrape it, sure, go ahead, but I don't think it matters in the long run.
However, at a first glance, it still feels to me like an unavoidable reality that if you publish source code it'll eventually be ingested by Copilot or whatever comes next.
I’d be quite careful with of this view.
By your logic, it should be ok to take the Linux kernel, copy it, build it, then sell it and give nothing back to the community that built it. Then just blame it on the authors for uploading it to the internet ?
It seems like this is true, and depressingly short term thinking on the part of governments. Social housing can be an asset for the state, and if not profitable at least less costly in the long term than current piecemeal approaches.
There are a plenty of people who want to build more housing, and they would make a lot of money doing that if it wasn't illegal. The problem is not capitalism, it's statism.
It's an infinite loop. Build more housing to suck in more jobs and people. Then you need even more housing since people from now-depleted surroundings come in. Rinse and repeat.
It's not capitalism or statism. It's lack of safeguards to prevent concentrating too many people and economy into too tiny pieces of land.
I’m not talking only about this specific tunnel. Norway spends quite a number of their petro dollars to make tunnels in the middle of nowhere to another middle id nowhere.
