Some sites these days won't show anything at all without Javascript, so I actually give the site kudos for working well with no Javascript.

Evidently Javascript causes cancer.

So indeed it seems there was no intent to allow the grant of monopoly to pass to one's heirs.

There were no "dirty tricks". The C++ standards committee works by a vaguely defined "consensus", which requires more than "the majority rules". Contracts got added to the C++26 draft. Then there was consensus that Contracts needed to be fixed, but they could never get consensus on any particular fix. So they cruised along relatively unchanged.

In the end, the only way to NOT accept a marginal Contracts feature was to vote down the full language spec. Now they'll regroup and decide how to proceed.

The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Creative expression that is not useful therefore is not constitutionally copyrightable.

But that aside, I agree with the author that the Copyright Office refusing to further expand the already vastly over-expanded scope of copyrights is a rare positive ruling.

Exactly, the same copyright rules should and do apply to both parties.

I'm glad copyright law didn't prevent the creation of LLMs. I'm also glad it doesn't prevent others from creating LLMs. I think that benefits us all.

Without government intervention, I think distillation will prevent these giant AI companies from recouping their investment. But that's not our problem.

But asking the trained model lots of questions, and creating a similar but different open weights model? No, that's fair use.

The current copyright rules cover both cases well and benefit everyone, I think. (I think copyrights are waaay too long, but that's another topic....) Whether trillion dollar companies can ever make a profit once open weights competitors distill them is, frankly, not our concern.

And also, training an open weights AI on the outputs of an AI trained using "fair use", is itself "fair use" that benefits everyone.

Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.

Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.

But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.

That sounds great! Though software engineers are all about being lazy - typically in a good way. So I expect in practice they'll use LLMs to generate some code, iterate a few times until it works well enough for them, and then have the LLM generate "a curated prose document describing the software..."

I have no evidence but suspect most of the actual top 10% of managers are in the other 10%.

Thanks! I've heard numerous examples of this. E.g. paint rollers, and later paint sprayers, made painting so much more efficient and cheaper that people wanted their houses and apartments painted more often, ultimately increasing house painter employment. But I didn't realize the phenomenon had a name.

My guess is that's the point - now you understand how San Francisco property developers feel.

Uh, Mike Tomlin resigned / reitired from the Steelers after 18 seasons without ever having a losing season. He wasn't let go.

It's just so powerful that, like, the WORLD can't handle it, man!

Regulations to "slow down" AI are necessary so they can drop R&D expenses and finally make a profit. They can't keep these years of $100 billion of revenue on $200 billion in expenses going forever.