They have but it does feel like they are developing a closed platform aka Apple.
Apple has shortcuts, but they haven’t propped it up like a standard that other people can use.
To contrast this is something you can use even if you have nothing to do with Claude, and your tools created will be compatible with the wider ecosystem.
Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.
Ironically OpenAI used Kenyan workers[1] to train its AI and now we've come to the point where Kenyans are being excluded because they sound too much like the AI that they helped train.
I actually think that's a great endorsement of Kenyan education. I don't deal with English-speaking African countries that often (I'm Portuguese, so naturally we have ties to other bits of the continent), but I've often been impressed by how well they communicate regardless of the profession they're in--I don't mean that as a bias, but rather as it befitting the kind of conversation you'd have with an English major in the UK (to which I have a lot of exposure).
Perhaps the US-centric "optimization" of English is to blame here, since it is so obvious in regular US media we all consume across the planet, and is likely the contrasting style.
I think it is. The irony is that the people you hired to help make your machine seem human are seen as mechanical because of their distinct and uniformly sophisticated tone. Thus we have a situation that’s contrary to expectations.
In many countries, company names are unique to that country. And combined with country TLDs controlled by the nation-state itself, it'd be possible for at least barclays.co.uk to be provably owned by the UK bank itself when a EV cert is presented by the domain.
In the US though, every state has it's own registry, and names overlap without the power of trademark protection applying to markets your company is not in.
Are company names even unique within the UK? Sure, there can be only one bank named Barclays because of trademark laws, but can't there be a company in a different sector with the same name? Like Apple the computer business vs Apple the record company?
Or don't you have small local businesses (restaurants, pubs, stores) with duplicate names as long as they're in different locations? I know here in Flanders we have, for example, tens if not more places called "Café Onder den toren" (roughly translated as "Pub beneath the tower"). Do all local businesses in the UK have different names?
That's not exactly a great example, is it? "Barclay" even has a disambiguation page on Wikipedia, because it's a reasonably common Scottish surname.
For example, there used to be a Scottish company constructing steam locomotives which traded under the "Barclays & Co" name - because it was founded by one Andrew Barclay. There's also the Barclay Academy secondary school, and a Bentley dealer which until recently operated as Jack Barclay Ltd.
And that's just the UK ones! Barclays operates internationally, which means they want "barclays.com", so suddenly there's also Barclay-the-record-label, Barclay-the-cigarette-brand, Barclay-the-liquor-brand, Barclay College, golf tournament The Barclays, Barclays Center (whose naming rights were bought by the bank, but they of course want their own completely distinct website), Barclay Theatre, three Barclay Hotels.
Of course there's also all the stuff under "Barkley", "Barkly", "Berkley", and probably a dozen other variations just waiting to be used to scam dyslexic Barclays custumers.
Barclays used to operate under Barclays Bank PLC. IMO, if disambiguation was problematic online they would have reverted back to that name.
You bring up good points, but I don't think that company naming has to be 100% proof against confusion, it's just one more helpful thing for consumers to identify whom they are doing business with.
In the case of close names like "Barkley", if they're doing banking, there is probably a trademark case against if they actually use it to confuse customers.
We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source.
Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze.
Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache.
We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source.
While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability.
Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'?
I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.
I ran a shared services org in a Fortune 50. Enterprise costs don’t scale down well, and things that are absolutely essential to supporting 100k people sound insane for 100 people. Our senior leaders would sometimes demand we try and the CFO and I would just eyeroll.
Nobody would hire the JP Morgan IT team to run a dentist practice IT workload. Likewise, AWS can save you money at scale, but if your business can run on 3 2U servers, it should.
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
> Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.
Which is why the artist may deserve royalties over a number of years: they did the work (a possible multi-year investment of time/effort can deserve a multi-year payback period). It does not explain why their (grand)children, who may not have even been born when the work was done, deserve royalties.
The Hobbit was published in 1937, and the final volume of LotR in 1955: does Simon Tolkien (b. 1959) deserve royalties?
I didn't say anyone deserved anything -- I'm just saying that as a society we do have other (potentially) income generating assets that do pass down to heirs who didn't "do anything to deserve them".
e.g. Some cultures think it is normal that someone can own thousands of acres of wilderness land that they've never even seen just because a distant relative hundreds of years ago had a piece of paper that says they own it. Other cultures believe the earth is a collective resource that is merely used by humans for their lifetime.
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all.
That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
Isn't the question whether it's reasonable for people to be rentiers? Clearly lots of the population are, but wouldn't it be better if they carried on creating rather than sitting back and doing nothing for the remainder of their place on earth?
I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan).
Not at all, that question has quite real and far reaching economic and political consequences, it's not about endless debating, it's about proper and timely deciding, precisely in the framework of economics and politics within the Constitution.
I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.
> Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
I would suggest that artists who say they're producing fully original works are just poorly educated in art history. Making something that has no prior influences would be extraordinary in the modern world.
Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply don't have the resources to keep something relevant decade after decade save for a very small handful of exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.
I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.
It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.
My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.
Oh really? You don't think all the creators who do things like make video essays on 20 year old movies would benefit from not getting the rug pulled out from under them? You don't think they would prefer being legally in the right making money from analysis of media that was a generation ago?
You don't think the Techmoans and Technology connections would prefer having better demonstration material than whatever recordings from 1912 exist, so that they could actually show you what they are trying to demonstrate without having their livelihood threatened by a capricious and byzantine system hell bent on pleasing a few megacorps?
You don't think the creatives who made "The Katering show" for example would prefer that more people watch their artistic output than have it locked behind some business leaving it languishing in a random digital storefront rather than letting more people buy it because they just cannot be assed? Oh, you don't actually have to guess, because they uploaded a youtube video where they encourage people to pirate their work so they can see it.
Creatives and artists tend to enjoy their work being consumed and riffed on (not plagiarized) and well adjusted artists recognize that there's "nothing new under the sun" and that remixing and riffing are essential parts of the creative and artistic process.
Hell, the music industry even understands this, which is why letting songs get licensed out for remixes and future use is common.
However, ultimately, few people really are holding any cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be able to generate income and benefit from existing publishing infrastructure.
Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
I actually don’t mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could conceivably never “die”. (In fact, I wouldn’t even be too opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).
But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs. And I’m a guy who’s not a creative.
I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in and just copy it while you’re alive without paying you?
The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of time following your death. But while you’re alive, what you made should be yours.
> But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs.
But it is theirs... well, until they sell it. We aren't talking about the things they make but about copies of them. I can't believe there are people who still don't understand the difference.
The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't natural property and it's not a natural right, that much is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name "Intellectual Property".
I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it was originally limited to, there are good reasons for those limits.
Maybe, but their economic role might be more like an angel investor or VC— fund a hundred failed efforts and hang on for dear life to the few runaway successes.
The sweet spot would have been an initial term of 14years or something like that, and generous duration thereafter, limited to works that are registered and re-registered on a regular basis.
Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't realize that a much shorter copyright can help them creatively in the near term.
Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.
Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.
IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.
You surprise me with a proposal for shorter copyright terms. Interesting!
For fun, here's an interesting discussion countering my own earlier statements - Once a work is in the public domain, it seems there's very little to do with an idea except drag it through the mud. Audacity is what drives commerce i suppose. For example as soon as Mickey Mouse entered public domain all the news could talk about was horror films and "adult" films capitalizing on the "what're you gonna do about it" of the moment.
Similarly when Peter Pan entered the public domain there was a short glut of "now he's a nightmare / villain" representations before becoming irrelevant again.
Imagine creating something like Sesame Street or Mr Roger Neighborhood then a mere 30 years later everyone has more fun making "Mr Grouch Goes On A Murder Rampage" bloodbath and "Mr Rogers + Freddie Kruger Teamup" art / film / trite youtube videos.
It'd be pretty soul crushing.
"Tragedy of the commons", as it were.
With this in mind, perhaps... your idea could deal with that via tiered pricing of "official / approved / canon" works are charged the standard fee whilst "unofficial / unapproved" works tithe a larger proportion of the proceeds to the original author...
The biggest annoyance here is the discussion always focuses on protecting individual creators whilst the laws and benefits seem to go to large corporations. e.g. Disney would have no problem using Peter Pan without consequence, while the rest of us wouldn't dare use Steamboat Willie.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.
I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:
- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall
- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used
- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded
And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.
How are you going to do table reservations and accept payments without being online? Yes I know it’s technically possible to accept credit cards offline. But no one does that anymore.
We're not in the US (hence all the power outages), so our recepits are 60% cash, 30% Mobile Money (our country specific accounts attached to your cell phone number), ~5% neighborhood credit for regulars and 10% for tourists using credit cards.
Even though we can accept cards for everyone, transaction fees means no one wants to use it.
Credit cards payments do work during blackouts, but process slowly. It goes from <30 seconds to receipt to 10 minutes+. The bank software just continually retries until it gets all the data it needs.
We take table reservations over the phone, or via WhatsApp. There's no real complexity to it. The data just needs to be with us at one location, the resturaunt, since that's the same place the customer will be coming to. Being online grants us nothing.
Protects them from what may I ask? I live in a city where chickens are permitted, and my neighbors chickens are all roaming the streets free-range, and their greatest danger is cars which roosters can't stop.
Why is capitalism only creating homeless encampments in San Fran and not generally in the US? Maybe it’s not capitalism at fault here but a government that is unwilling or unable to supply standard social safety nets like homeless shelters and addiction therapy.
SF attracts homeless from all over the US, given its mild weather (great for living outside) and generous social services. It has been like that forever also, you can watch old movies from the 1920s about hobos jumping trains to get to SF (or LA, or Seattle, or Portland, or even Vancouver BC, choose any of the west coast cities, all for similar reasons).
People have freedom of movement in the USA, and they mostly take advantage of it.
> Maybe it’s not capitalism at fault here but a government that is unwilling or unable to supply standard social safety nets like homeless shelters and addiction therapy.
The issue is then how do you prevent one locality from having their resources swamped fixing what is really a national problem. SF can't fix the nations problems, so its voters/tax payers get jaded really quickly.
Apple has shortcuts, but they haven’t propped it up like a standard that other people can use.
To contrast this is something you can use even if you have nothing to do with Claude, and your tools created will be compatible with the wider ecosystem.
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