Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.

One of many lessons that can be taken away from this exercise is to understand your audience and challenge the assumptions you make about their prior knowledge, culture, kind of peanut butter, et deters.

The value of LFS is not in having the system you build, it's in understanding it. After you've read and worked through the book, you've managed to produce a functioning GNU/Linux OS, and presumably you know what all the parts are.

From there, understanding any published distribution is a matter of understanding what makes it unique, maybe a different package manager or init system, or different userland packages. Regardless, the fundamentals still stand, and your ownership of the system is improved by having worked through the book.

We redirect our AAWMness into our pedantry when we don’t want to wear it on our sleeves

Edit: I admit there are plenty of concrete critiques in the article, but if we’re supposed to stand up against slop, isn’t naming names the first step?

As for whether the Times should be developing their own LLM bot, why on earth would they want that?

I’m not interested in arguing about whether or not they deserve to fail, because that whole discussion is orthogonal to whether OpenAI is in the wrong.

If I’m on my deathbed, and somebody tries to smother me, I still hope they face consequences

> They hired "experts" who used prompt engineering and thousands of repetitions to find highly unusual and specific methods of eliciting text from training data that matched their articles....would have been the end of the situation if NYT was engaging in good faith.

I mean, if I was performing a bunch of investigative work and my publication was considered the source of truth in a great deal of journalistic effort and publication of information, and somebody just stole my newspaper off the back of a delivery truck every day and started rewriting my articles, and then suddenly nobody read my paper anymore because they could just ask chatgpt for free, that's a loss for everyone, right?

Even if I disagree with how they editorialize, the Times still does a hell of a lot of journalism, and chatgpt can never, and will never be able to actually do journalism.

> they want to insert themselves as middlemen - pure rent seeking, second hander, sleazy lawyer behavior

I'd love to hear exactly what you mean by this.

Between what and what are they trying to insert themselves as middlemen, and why is chatgpt the victim in their attempts to do it?

What does 'rent seeking' mean in this context?

What does 'second hander' mean?

I'm guessing that 'sleazy lawyer' is added as an intensifier, but I'm curious if it means something more specific than that as well, I suppose.

> Copyright law....the rest of it

Yeah. IP rights and laws are fucked basically everywhere. I'm not smart enough to think of ways to fix it, though. If you've got some viable ideas, let's go fix it. Until then, the Times kinda need to work with what we've got. Otherwise, OpenAI is going to keep taking their lunch money, along with every other journalist's on the internet, until there's no lunch money to be had from anyone.

It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize.

I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process.

If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do.

*Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement

I'm confused by this phrase. I may be misreading but it sounds like you're frustrated, or at least cynical about NYT wanting to preserve their business model of writing about things that happen and selling the publication. To me it seems reasonable they'd want to keep doing that, and to protect their content from being stolen.

They certainly aren't the sole publication of written content about current events, so calling them "the middle-man between events and users" feels a bit strange.

If your concern is that they're trying to prevent OpenAI from getting a foot in the door of journalism, that confuses me even more. There are so, so many sources of news: other news agencies, independent journalists, randos spreading word-of-mouth information.

It is impossible for chatgpt to take over any aspect of being a "middle-man between events and users" because it can't tell you the news. it can only resynthesize journalism that it's stolen from somewhere else, and without stealing from others, it would be worse than the least reliable of the above sources. How could it ever be anything else?

This right here feels like probably a good understanding of why NYT wants openai to keep their gross little paws off their content. If I stole a newspaper off the back of a truck, and then turned around and charged $200 a month for the service of plagiarizing it to my customers, I would not be surprised if the Times's finest lawyers knocked on my door either.

Then again, I may be misinterpreting what you said. I tend to side with people who sue LLM companies for gobbling up all their work and regurgitating it, and spend zero effort trying to avoid that bias

Sometimes it’s fun to just enjoy something, and to share that you enjoyed it. These pictures aren’t here to impress anyone, they’re here because each one is a record of someone who had a bit of fun decorating their laptop, and an invitation to share in the fun. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.