I did not see this argument in your first post at all. Instead you tried to dismiss the author's complaints, arguing that none of their complaints are new. (Which is true in a sense, but it ignores the most important point: that of scale)

> I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.

Fair enough, the author did not propose any concrete solutions. However, their analysis is still correct. The first step towards change is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Your first reply did not seem to do that, on the contrary, it seemed to downplay the authors concerns. Maybe that was not your intention, but that's how I read it.

I certainly agree that we need to find solutions. Yes, the cat is out of the bag, but with proper legal frameworks and regulations we can keep it from pissing all over the living room.

If you are using LLMs to write your e-mails, deceiving me in thinking I'm conversing with a human, you are violating me.

If you are publishing AI generated books or music without a big disclaimer, you are violating me.

If you are scraping the net and using my work for AI training, you are violating me.

If you are scraping the net and overloading my servers, you are violating me.

Etc.

This is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Fair use is much more complex than you think.

Who is "we"? The concept of "fair use" is pretty specific to the US. There is no "fair use" in Germany, for example.

Personally, I like the idea of "fair use", but I personally don't think that it applies to commercial closed-source AI model training. The US Copyright Office seems to agree with this assessement:

> Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market. When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

> Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer.

Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?

The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale! We have reached a tipping point where many people are (rightfully) furious.

> Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet.

People do not have a problem with Google indexing the web because they want their websites to be found. That's the entire purpose of putting stuff out on the internet. AI is now doing the opposite: traffic is directed to chatbots and platforms are flooded with AI slop.

As you said, people were already complaining when Google started to show their own summaries, preventing users from visiting the original sources. People have been complaining about Facebook drowning the frontpage with clickbait. But this time it is so much worse.

Sure, LLMs can be useful, but on the other hand the potential for abuse is humongous. People are already seeing the negative consequences and they are rightfully angry.

> Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.

I do think that the author made a good point by bringing up the issue of consent. We are now in a situation where I can't post anything online without AI companies possibly scraping the content and feeding it into their models without any attribution or permission. And there is no way of opting out. Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?

The platforms are now flooded with AI slop and it's getting more and more difficult to discover new (honest) art and to present your own art to the public. The problem is exactly that there's no consent: we can't prevent AI companies from using our art or software for training and we can barely prevent our platforms from being eroded by AI slop.

> Either way AI is too useful

The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.

> It's not great but that's the way it is.

Why does it have to keep that way? Do you also think like this about political topics? Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale? Did anyone ask us if we actually want this? As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change". Yes, there is no going back, but we can still shape the direction we are heading!

How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/no-oscar-wilde-did-not-say-...

Where exactly have you seen this "parade of sycophants" in the C++ standards committee?

As far as I know, Bjarne is just a regular committee members with just as many votes as everyone else and no veto powers. The committee frequently accepts or rejects proposals against his will. For a recent example, see his harsh criticism of the new 'contracts' feature in C++26.

I wrote "presumably", but you are 100% correct. I'm always happy to be proven wrong.

N3851 actually deals with multi-dimensional spans and goes way beyond a simple slice/span type. To me it seems closer to std::mdspan than std::span.

The earliest proposal I could find that does propose something similar to std::span dates back to 2012: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n33...

I really don't understand why this was not pursued further. At the very least, this should have made it into C++17 together with std::string_view.

> because of course neither of these were actually proposed as core language features even though that's what they naturally should be

Should it really? What would this even look like in C++? IMO std::span works perfectly fine as a library type.

> C++ is just a terrible programming language, standardized by a committee (WG21) which exists in large part to boost the ego of one man, Bjarne Stroustrup.

That's certainly not the reason why it was standardized. Pre-C++98 was wild west with every compiler offering there own (incompatible) idea of what C++ is. Yes, there are many problems with design by committee in general (and the C++ committee in particular), but there was a very good reason for standardizing the language. The committee is not a one man show and there are many occasions where Bjarne has publicly voiced his frustration and disagreement.