Someone who is buying a MacBook with the minimum specs probably isn’t the same person that’s going to run out and buy another one to get one specific feature in Xcode. Not trying to defend Apple here, but if you were a developer who would care about this, you probably would have paid for the upgrade when you bought it in the first place (or couldn’t afford it then or now).

I mean, if enforced with violence, sure. Usually that’s the job of the police, which are terrorist organizations. Some companies may also hire private mercenaries instead of using the state police, which serve the same function.

Yes of course the UN definition is going to be carefully crafted to make the violence committed by its member states “legal” and the actions committed by anyone else “illegal”.

Who makes the official rules of war? Who decides who follows those rules and who doesn’t? Obviously the practical answer is the UN, ICC, ICJ, etc, but note that the UN is itself made up of countries that all field militaries. They write the rules such that they’re in, and others who are less powerful are out. And as we’ve seen recently, they don’t even apply the rules uniformly. Russia and the US have committed war crimes in their invasions of Ukraine and Iraq respectively, but the general consensus is that their militaries are still not terrorist organizations. Or arguably the most clear example, the IDF. Few organizations could claim to commit more war crimes with such predictability and regularity than the IDF. Yet most of the world considers them legitimate, but considers groups like ISIS to not be, even though conduct wise they’re similarly abhorrent.

The rules of war are basically “if you win it’s ok” and everything else is just politics.

It’s a game of whack a mole. In the past I’ve been able to get it to work in India, but now YT India blocks foreign payment cards. Was able to set up a monthly subscription in Ukraine recently using my foreign credit card. The taxes support the war effort I guess.

With FreeVPNs, probably, but otherwise it’s not too big of a deal. Once in a while some specific sites will be broken, like archive.is recently would force you into an infinite captcha (which was really annoying because I couldn’t read many archive links posted here). Some big sites that are targets for various attacks will use a captcha in the login process, but once you do it it goes away.

Nowadays windows will update UEFI and firmware for many devices through windows update. Most users have no idea what a UEFI is or how to manually check and update device firmware, so this is a big win for security. Linux users can do the same with fwupd which comes installed on many popular distros and is integrated into the software manager apps from Gnome and KDE, making the experience largely the same.

Terrorism is any act that uses violence or fear of violence for a political goal. This is what militaries do, if you threaten them they use violence to suppress or kill you. Some of them are more successful than others, but fundamentally whether it’s a group of rebels or the military of a nation state, they use violence to force everyone within their controlled territory to submit to their authority.

Hey look, actual evidence of the use of human shields. Not just rhetorical bullshit.

All militaries are by definition terrorist organizations, this seems reasonable.

What’s the issue with Dell? Everyone I know at work with Dell laptops likes them. I’ve used XPS 15 and 13 in the past and they’ve been generally fine. Battery life sucked but I haven’t ever seen an x86 laptop with what I would consider good battery life.

I think it is this way because Apple thought it would be misleading if the option was “deny tracking”, because there isn’t a specific technical mechanism to ensure that. It’s unfortunate but I’d rather it was honest than lied.

It’s unfortunate that they’re using an old processor, but this is super cool and shows that the framework platform allows companies to tinker with unusual laptop motherboards without having to design the rest of the device.

It hasn’t been decided in court yet, but it’s likely that AI training won’t be a considered copyright violation, especially if there is a measure in place to prevent exact 1:1 reproductions of the training material.

But even then, how is the questionable choices of some LLM trainers reason to ban all AI? There are some models that are trained exclusively on material that is explicitly licensed for this purpose. There’s nothing legally or morally dubious about training an LLM if the training material is all properly licensed, right?

I get the impression with a lot of Israeli politicians, they didn’t hate the Nazis so much as they hated being the out-group of the Nazis. Since, as soon as they were able to establish a foothold of power they’ve largely followed the same playbook, but with themselves as the “Master Race” and everybody else as the vermin to exterminate.

Most computer displays also support hdmi too though. In the last though there were usually tradeoffs in using the hdmi input. Now hdmi has caught up enough that usually there’s no difference, assuming the manufacturer is using the latest standard.

Oh yeah those are problematic, but I’m pretty sure a court has ruled in a customer’s favor when the AI fucked up, which is good at least.

Chatbots are fine as long as it’s clearly disclosed to the user that anything they generate could be wrong. They’re super useful just as an idea generating machine for example, or even as a starting point for technical questions when you don’t know what the right vocabulary is to describe a problem.

How would an LLM answering questions about a git repo be legally different from a person answering those same questions (think stackoverflow)? Specific to this case, US law does not consider “APIs” to be copyrightable (Oracle v Google, Google reimplemented Java using the same APIs but their own implementation code, court ruled that Oracle couldn’t copyright the APIs).

Regarding “replace”, the primary use of the git repo is the code itself, not the Q&A about how to use it. The LLM doesn’t generate code that fully replaces that library or program, or if it does, it is distinct enough to be a different work.

I mean, this is how courts work. Someone will sue because a work they hold copyright to was used in a training set without their authorization, the defendant will claim it was fair use, the judge will pick a side. To the best of my knowledge this hasn’t happened just yet, and since I’m not a judge, I use “probably”. Fair use is both vague and broad, and this is important to ensure copyright holders don’t have complete control over their work. It was recognized a long time ago that you can make works that utilize another copyrighted work, but don’t functionally replace the original work, and are therefore fair use. The whole point was to try and foster innovation, not to allow copyright holders to dictate how their works are used, and fair use is an essential part of that.

Training an LLM with a work doesn’t functionally replace that work. If there is a filter that prevents 1:1 reproduction, then it literally cannot. It also provides significant benefit to have these LLMs, they are a unique and valuable work themselves. That’s why it’s fair use.