The Supreme Court has blessed this new form of government, declaring that the President is immune to all laws, but retaining for themselves the right to reverse any tweet on the "shadow docket".

If they start excluding random content (eg: .git) without effective notice, maybe they AREN'T backing up everything you think they are.

> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.

I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should.

A skilled communicator will craft their message for the audience. Some want "just the facts" with no social lubricant. Others want the banter to build person-to-person relationships. Some want a quick statement of context for everything. If you can adjust the message to the audience you will be more successful at working with them.

I have begun including "how I want you to communicate with me" as part of my standard "introduce myself to new team members" talk.

Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.

I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.

Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.

Perhaps their TOS involves additional evils they are performing in the world, and it would be good to know about that.

Perhaps their TOS is restricting the US military from misusing the product and create unmonitored killbots.

Perhaps the person (as I do) does not feel that "laundering people's work at a massive scale" is unethical, any more than using human knowledge is unethical when those humans were allowed to spend decades reading copyrighted material in and out of school and most of what the human knows is derived from those materials and other conversations with people who didn't sign release forms before conversing.

Just because you think one thing is bad about someone doesn't mean no one should ever discuss any other topic about them.

"Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?"

"Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers."

"For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers."

"Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"

But that's not true!

According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!

I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.

It won't convince me because I HAVE BEEN USING IT, and IT HAS ACTUALLY MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE.

Hype (whether positive or negative) can be extremely powerful, but eventually it loses out to reality. It is certainly true that there are some people who have overhyped AI. But it is not true that it "was a scam" or is anything less than revolutionary.

> I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.

I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.