The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.

It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.

I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.

As well as being an ethical approach - I think it's wrong to try to impersonate humans and/or not announce AI output as AI - it would also be handy for new filter options: all bot posts are OK, hide bot leaf comments, or hide all threads with bot comments. etc.

[edited as my robot unicode/emoji char didn't come through]

If the requirement is, "Show the balance _as it was_ at that point in time", this system doesn't fulfil it. They even say so in the article: if something is wrong, throw away the state and re-run the events. That's necessarily different behaviour. To do this requirement, you actually have to audit every enquiry and say what you thought the result was, including the various errors/miscalculations.

If the requirement is, "Show the balance as it should have been at that point in time", then it's fine.

I think your point about write-ahead logging etc is a good one. If you need a decent transactional system, you're probably using a system with some kind of WAL. If you're event sourcing and putting events into something which already implements a WAL, you need to give your head a wobble - why is the same thing being implemented twice? There can be great reasons, but I've seen (a few times) people using a perfectly fine transactional DB of some kind to implement an event store, effectively throwing away all the guarantees of the system underneath.

2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few Kb through to MS Flight Simulator 2020 on a suite of several DVDs. If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.

The issue wasn't that crypto markets in general were down at that point; the issue was they were doing frauds.

Where the lockfile doesn't exist, it creates it from whatever current is, and the lockfile then gets thrown away later. So it's equivalent to what you're saying, it just avoids having two completely separate install paths. I think it's the correct approach.

The alternative is Judges letting people off just because they're politicians. That seems like an extremely poor precedent to set, those in political life should be held to higher standards.

I would say, though, that to people _outside_ the dialect, there may be many more words that are indistinguishable. Listening to Scots speakers requires a lot more effort for me because to my ears, many of the differences in the words are extremely subtle.

But because this is clean data, I wonder if there's basically a big gap here: the codec that encodes the "correct rule" can achieve a step-change lower bandwidth requirement than similar-looking solutions. The most elegant ruleset - at least in this set of puzzles - always compresses markedly better. And so you can kind of brute-force the correct rule by trying lots of encoding strategies, and just identify which one gets you that step-change compression benefit.

Each puzzle is kind of a similar format, and the data that changes in the puzzle is almost precisely that needed to deduce the rule. By reducing the amount of information needed to describe the rule, you almost have to reduce your codec to what the rule itself is doing - to minimise the information loss.

I feel like if there was more noise or arbitrary data in each puzzle, this technique would not work. Clearly there's a point at which that gets difficult - the puzzle should not be "working out where the puzzle is" - but this only works because each example is just pure information with respect to the puzzle itself.

Having read MS code and starting to generate new code that is heavily inspired - sure, that's not copyright infringement. But, if you had memorized a bunch of code (and this is within human capability; people can recite many works of literature of varying length with total accuracy, given sufficient study) - that would be copyright infringement once the code was a non-trivial amount. The test in copyright is whether the copying is literal, not how the copying was done/did it pass through a human brain.

This scenario rarely comes up because humans are, generally, an awful medium for accurate repetition. However, it's not really been shown than LLMs are not: in fact, CoPilot claims (at least in its Enterprise agreements) to check its output _does not_ parrot existing code identically. The specific commitment they made in their blog post is/was, "We have incorporated filters and other technologies that are designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots return infringing content". To be clear, they only propose to reduce the possibility, not remove it.

LLMs rely on a form of lossy compression which can sometimes give back verbatim content. I think it's pretty clear and unarguable that this is a copyright infringement.

I don't think the location of the outer-loop or the design of it really makes much difference. There is no flock of birds without the individuals, the flock itself doesn't really exist as a tangible thing, but what arises out of the collective adjustments between all these individuals gives rise to a flock. Similarly, we may find groups of LLMs and various outer control loops give rise to an emergent phenomena much greater than the sum of their parts.

It's similar that a lot of wrong answers are being thrown up, but I think this is more like a probabilistic system which is being pruned than a walk of the solution space. It's much smarter, but not as smart as we would like.