What if your screen breaks or logic board? Top of the line MacBooks cost ~4-5k. I recently had to service a battery and they replaced a top case and a keyboard free of charge. I will continue paying for AppleCare as long as they will allow me
there's a difference between a book and data or music and data. that is their data. if you have a painting and i take a picture of it and store it on my drive. it's my data, i don't own the copyright to it tho, but it's my data and not your data even tho it's a picture of your painting.
When you posted the picture to myspace under the terms of their user agreement you granted them unlimited rights to redistribute that image to anyone in the world.
If you care about privacy don't post private stuff online.
Yup. That's your data now. And also mine (if I have a backup) and also myspace's.
The fact that makes it your data is that you physically can share it with someone else.
At least that's the value system I live by and I believe should be in place for all because it perfectly reflects the reality of what happens with ones and zeroes.
I'd say that it'd be your data but you might not be the copyright holder. But if the data is on a storage media that you own, I would consider it your data.
Lysenko as in the Soviet scientist? I don't really see what, if anything, a mistaken belief about evolution has to do with legal or moral definitions about ownership of data.
Saying "Lysenkoism is true" is factually wrong, but saying "physical possession is equivalent to ownership" is just a very fringe political opinion.
So I don't see how "the GDPR" can be wrong, unless you mean it in the sense of "the death penalty is (morally) wrong", which is just your opinion in that case.
My point is this: If your insurance provider, for example, obtains access to your medical records, and store them on their servers, does that make it "their data" to use as they please? This would imply that:
> But if the data is on a storage media that you own, I would consider it your data
Ah, I meant Lysenkoism being mandated and genetics being outlawed in the Soviet Union.
> but saying "physical possession is equivalent to ownership" is just a very fringe political opinion.
It is a fringe opinion in today's West, but only relatively recently: since the 1970s, one might argue. The fringe opinion, to be clear, is the older one implied to some degree by "possession is nine tenths of the law", and which views copyright and patent as an artificial grant from the State, useful, but not property in the same sense as a table or a knife is someone's property.
Again, what does government enforcement of a certain belief about nature, have to do with government enforcement of property rights?
Ownership of physical property is also an artificial grant from the state. (Or if you will, a recognition by the state of what people in general believe) Perhaps not a table or a knife, but a farm or a factory, have in many countries been suddenly disqualified as legitimate property of their (former) owner, as a result of e.g. a communist revolution. There's nothing more "natural" to owning a piece of land, than to owning a song.
I'm pretty sure physical possession was not generally considered equivalent to ownership before the 1970s, that's an absurd statement. Shareholders of the East India Company in the 1600s weren't in physical possession of the ships, yet they were considered owners. Even purely intellectual property, such as patents, have existed in laws since at least 1474. Albert Einstein famously worked in a patent office.
Property rights themselves are a codification of a belief about nature, from a natural law perspective. There are other conceptions of property, of course, but of the ones that are relatively common, I think the least useful is the one that views property as whatever government says property is. Most people--well, most USians--think property has (and rights have) a meaning more fundamental than whatever the State arbitrarily grants. We note that animals defend scarce territory, that toddlers are upset when something they have is taken from them, that we distinguish jealousy regarding something we have and want to keep versus covetousness of something another has and we want to obtain.
Obviously the idea of copyright and patent as property rights didn't spring fully formed in the 1970s, but the entertainment and software industries during the 1970s and 1980s really drove the idea that copyright infringement is exactly the same thing as theft of something that someone actually has. The idea of copyright and patent in most law, including the US Constitution, are held as special, limited-term grants, not property rights.
> I think the least useful is the one that views property as whatever government says property is.
That's not what I'm saying by a long shot either. And "intellectual property does not exist at all" is a far less useful view.
> We note that animals defend scarce territory, that toddlers are upset when something they have is taken from them, that we distinguish jealousy regarding something we have and want to keep versus covetousness of something another has and we want to obtain.
Well, do you not think this holds for ideas as well? Do you think nobody ever said "That guy stole my joke" before 1970?
Where did you find that picture? If the person printed it out and plastered it on a nearby signpost for everyone to see, I'd say it is no longer personal data.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted when You're just describing typical Internet behavior. How many archive or search engines have come and gone that have scraped, saved, and served data from other sources (verbatim no less) with little to no scrutiny?
You argued that gathering of data signals ownership of it. But I don’t know that reasonable people would agree that that’s about framing.
If you’re going to argue data ownership at all, it seems to me the creator of the data is the owner, unless transfer ownership to another person or to the public domain.
On the other hand, I can understand a stand that data can never be “owned”, but I don’t think you are saying that.
They put in the effort to compile and serve the dataset. That is the useful thing in regard to LLMs.
Particularly when it comes to training AI it's not at all clear to me how traditional copyright benefits society at large. Obviously models regurgitating works wholesale would be problematic. But also obviously models are extremely useful tools and copyright is largely an impediment to creating them.
> You argued that gathering of data signals ownership of it. But I don’t know that reasonable people would agree that that’s about framing.
First of, I am a very reasonable person so you already have one. Second of, even in our sick information economy, public data can be owned when gathered in a database by a third party. The company that created the database can sell access to it and go after people that re-publish the database. Even though it consists 100% of public and free data.
> If you’re going to argue data ownership at all, it seems to me the creator of the data is the owner, unless transfer ownership to another person or to the public domain.
If you go by what's natural, instead of by "please, institutionally protect my obsoleted business model", the creator has the sole ownership of the data until he transfers the data to someone else. If he made a copy and gave it to someone, now they both have the ownership. If he just gave away the data now there's a new single owner of the data. Then IP ownership would work just like ownership of every other actual thing in the universe.
> On the other hand, I can understand a stand that data can never be “owned”, but I don’t think you are saying that.
Oh, it definitely can be owned. I own all zeroes and ones on the computer that I own. Please don't steal them and don't tell me what I can do with them.
I mean yeah, since its the privatization of data but I think the spirit is that data itself doesn't belong to anyone but rather what you can hold is yours? I don't know, it was a tongue in cheek comment and now I'm actually thinking about it.
> I think the spirit is that data itself doesn't belong to anyone but rather what you can hold is yours?
It definitely belongs to someone. To the person holding it (provided that it wasn't stolen). Just as any other actual thing. Except for borrowed items.
I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you, but tons of actual things don't belong to the person "holding" or using it. Leased cars, rented houses, work equipment, stolen items. It is a huge simplification saying that "anything belongs to the person holding it, except for borrowed items", which ignores a bunch of history and legal precedent establishing exactly what it is people mean when they say somebody owns something.
Your definition of data ownership certainly is a definition, but it's far from obvious or mainstream. If you texted an intimate photo to an ex, do you consider them as the owner of the photo, meaning that they're allowed to do whatever they want with that photo (as ownership typically implies)?
> Leased cars, rented houses, work equipment, stolen items.
Basically only borrowed and stolen. Stealing (actual stealing) is a crime by itself. And it doesn't make sense to borrow data. If somebody borrows you a song, you can just make copy yourself and the copy is yours. Which is how reality always worked. Didn't you have a casette player with two slots? Those weren't for playing two tapes simultaneously. Is the new generation so brainwashed by virtual world of fictional intelectual property, terms and conditions nobody reads and licenses which claim to be source of your rights and don't give you any, that they have forgotten how information exchange actually works in the real world?
> which ignores a bunch of history and legal precedent establishing exactly what it is people mean when they say somebody owns something.
I think copyright ignored more. And doesn't reflect reality on top of that.
> but it's far from obvious or mainstream
It's obvious and spontaneously created by anyone who deals with data and doesn't know or care about the (stupid) concept of intelectual property. "Do you have the file?" What does it mean intuitively? Yes, I have it. I can make you a copy.
> If you texted an intimate photo to an ex, do you consider them as the owner of the photo
Yes. Obviously. Just as much as I am. Thinking otherwise would be believing falsehoods about reality.
> meaning that they're allowed to do whatever they want with that photo (as ownership typically implies)?
They obviously can do with it whatever they want to. Are they allowed? Is the sun allowed to rise up in the morning? What's use there is to forbidding it?
They can do thousand copies or delete it from existence. They can modify it. Print it. Whatever.
When they publish it. Well, what happens next depends entirely about whether I'm entitled to protection of things I consider private from being publicized. Or if I'm protected from harassment. I might be or I might not be. However whatever protections I am awarded in that regard have nothing to do with general rules about the data. If I harass a person with a megaphone that I own it still could be illegal.
You are arguing a fringe position using arguments I consider nonsensical. For example:
> They obviously can do with it whatever they want to. Are they allowed? Is the sun allowed to rise up in the morning? What's use there is to forbidding it?
I obviously can go around punching people in the face on the street. What use is there to forbidding that? Perhaps that it's beneficial for society to discourage people from doing certain things?
As for ignoring history, are you aware that patents (N.b. copyright is far from the only law that applies to intellectual property) were created in order to encourage people to share their ideas, with the incentive of an exclusive right to them for a number of years? Because exactly the sort of "free for all" rights you are arguing for meant a huge incentive to keeping everything as secret as possible.
> Thinking otherwise would be believing falsehoods about reality.
There is no "ground truth" to ownership (neither for data nor physical property), only what people as a collective consider it to be. I'd say you're the one believing a falsehood about ownership, given that your position is in the definite minority.
Finally, can you explain what you think stealing is? Why is it a crime for me to take one bike to work but not the other, if they both stand unlocked outside the building?
> I obviously can go around punching people in the face on the street. What use is there to forbidding that? Perhaps that it's beneficial for society to discourage people from doing certain things?
Right. I have to agree. Still, somehow copyright feels more like punishing people for not praying on Sunday than punching people in the face. All forbidden things are definitely not equal and some, naturally, feel more deserving of being forbidden and more easy to enforce the punishment for them without invading personal freedoms and privacy. It's entirely pointless to forbid things that don't (even potentially) harm living beings (there's no human right to having a viable business model) which would require permanent invigilation (even in private) for full enforcement.
> patents (N.b. copyright is far from the only law that applies to intellectual property) were created in order to encourage people to share their ideas
Which pretty much failed spectacularly and should have been ended about 100 years ago when it ran its course. Way before such abomination as software patents spawned in somebody's mind.
> Because exactly the sort of "free for all" rights you are arguing for meant a
The world is free for all. Every industrial economy that got big, got there by disregarding intellectual property. Even US, blatantly copying industrial designs from UK. Intellectual property is kicking off the ladder.
> huge incentive to keeping everything as secret as possible
There's only so much you can keep a secret if you want to go to market with it.
And despite wonderful protections of intellectual property many companies still choose to keep as much as they can secret. Because protections can't physically work 100% and they need to be 100% for them to work at all.
Patents serve many purposes but none of their stated goals.
> Finally, can you explain what you think stealing is?
Depriving someone of possession of something by taking the possession of it yourself. For data economy it can be slightly extended to taking the copy of information that is held by someone else without their permission (hacking basically). To be fair we should make another label for this act if we want to keep the original meaning of the word steal intact.
> Why is it a crime for me to take one bike to work but not the other, if they both stand unlocked outside the building?
Because you can keep your items in public spaces. This changes dynamics of theft a little bit. It is a crime to take my item that I left in publically accessible place because after you did that I no longer have the item.
If you were to just make a perfect copy of my bike that I left in public space, that would be totally ok because I would still have my bike.
The harm in act of stealing is not taking possession but depriving someone else of their possession.
Well, I'm glad you at least seem to agree that taking information without permission is stealing. As in, hacking into a company's servers and copying their customer data, would be stealing, yes?
Now, if you're instead an employee of that company, and have access to their customer data (you're holding it), would you then agree that making a copy and selling it to somebody else, would be stealing? Or would you argue that because you as an employee got permission to hold the data, you thus own it and are allowed to sell it as you want? Or consider if you rent a VHS tape, does that give you ownership of the movie, and let you copy it as you want? If you store your code on a git server hosted by Microsoft, does that mean MS owns your code? If you hand in your laptop for repair, does that give the repair shop carte blance to make a copy of your hard drive?
Is the postal service allowed to read all your letters? After all, they're holding the letters, which would mean they own the data inside, and with modern tech it's easily possible to scan the contents of an envelope without opening or damaging it.
The crux of my position is that simply holding something, does not mean you own it. You seem to agree that physical items can be held by somebody who's not the owner, so why can data not?
To continue on with the bike example, what if I know you're out of town for a week. Then, by using your bike I'm certainly not depriving you of it. You might argue that I'm lowering its value by using it, but would you not then agree that piracy lowers the value of intellectual property?
> As in, hacking into a company's servers and copying their customer data, would be stealing, yes?
I think stealing is when you remove possession and acquire it yourself. So if the hacker also deleted the information they copied then I'd call it stealing. The sheer act of accessing information not intended for publication, which is the main issue here, if data was not deleted, is more akin to eavesdropping than to stealing.
> Now, if you're instead an employee of that company, and have access to their customer data (you're holding it), would you then agree that making a copy and selling it to somebody else, would be stealing?
I'd say the same. Not really stealing. More like violating an agreement about the borrowed data. The crime doesn't stem from the nature of data or ownership but rather from violating signed agreement about keeping borrowed, private data to yourself. If no agreement was made or the agreement contained unlawful clauses, no crime.
> Or consider if you rent a VHS tape, does that give you ownership of the movie, and let you copy it as you want?
Since the movie is out, the information is no longer private. So requiring me to keep the movie to myself might be and example of what should be an unlawful clause in data borrowing agreements. Because that's something you can't reasonably enforce.
Same thing as if you leave your bike in public, out of view of the cameras unlocked. You are practically not afforded protections for your stuff in public places if you didn't reasonably protected it yourself.
If you publish your stuff, society doesn't owe you protection.
You might consider the game I bought, borrowed data. And it's fine. I might even abide by the rules of the borrow I actually agreed to. But if I download some stuff from the internet, I have no agreement with you so there are no rules to abide by.
> If you store your code on a git server hosted by Microsoft, does that mean MS owns your code?
Yes. Unless we have an agreement in which they declare they are going to keep it private and actually delete it on demand. In absence of agreement their ownership of the copy that I give them should be assumed. That's literally how data works.
> If you hand in your laptop for repair, does that give the repair shop carte blance to make a copy of your hard drive?
You are conjuring situations where the problem is not the ownership but privacy protection. In practical situations I am assuming they will make a copy of my drive and so do the people organizing computer repair, that's why the general advice is to clean the drive before you hand it over. If you don't want that, companies might sign a special agreement that they won't access private data on the device you handed them. Good luck enforcing that.
Again it has nothing to do with ownership.
> Is the postal service allowed to read all your letters?
Eavesdropping. Completely irrelevant to data ownership.
> The crux of my position is that simply holding something, does not mean you own it.
It means that. Unless it was borrowed or stolen.
> You seem to agree that physical items can be held by somebody who's not the owner, so why can data not?
It can be borrowed, stolen or owned.
> To continue on with the bike example, what if I know you're out of town for a week. Then, by using your bike I'm certainly not depriving you of it.
I definitely wouldn't call it stealing it if I'm never deprived of it. Rather borrowing without agreement.
> Then, by using your bike I'm certainly not depriving you of it. You might argue that I'm lowering its value by using it, but would you not then agree that piracy lowers the value of intellectual property?
I could agree with all that. But the actual punishment should be proportional to the damage.
And what's the damage done by a kid playing pirated game who'd never buy it? Zero.
What if you repaired my bike while riding it? Maybe I should owe you for the repairs?
What if a kid who plays a pirated game tells about it and somebody else buys a copy? That's improving the value of intellectual property.
Given marketing budgets, hype generated by pirates is worth millions. Piracy is the reason Windows is the most popular operating system. Piracy is the reason many games and other software succeeded. Piracy is not your problem. Obscurity is.
> 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models.
I do think he was overstating the current state of the models by a bit, but this is taken out of context. He is not saying this is where the models are at today.
He gives a spectrum [18:30] of the models taking over the SWE jobs:
- Model writes 90% of code (today)
- Model writes 100% of code
- Model does 90% of today's SWE tasks (end-to-end)
- Model does 100% of today's SWE tasks
- The SWE job creates new tasks that didn't exist before
- Model does the new SWE tasks as well (90% reduction in demand for SWE)
That’s been a trope long before AI. QA coverage has always been cyclical in my experience. In good times there is hiring and QA. Lean times QA is the first to go.
Correct. Trust me if they felt really confident the thing they are working on would up-end society, these jokers would go full steam ahead and not tell you anything.
This experiment is going to fail. I only hope SWEs finally grab their balls and accept the social contract has been fundamentally broken and that they should not treat their employers so kindly next time.
Somehow this article is no longer on the first page[0] (or even second) of hn even though it has more upvotes (and is newer) than other articles with less upvotes (or older ones). Is HN hiding politically controversial articles?
They fall off the main page when people start flagging. If enough people flag it will instead be [flagged]. For a period of time it can get vouched if [flagged] and then [flagged][dead].
Cryptocurrencies create value by creating a financial system that solves some problems that traditional finance can't. For instance, a person in some underdeveloped country can accept a payment from US, however, if there was no Bitcoin then the person would have to rely on SWIFT network (which the country might not be a part of, or under sanctions like Iran). Or just a fact that you can't be randomly locked out from your account due to cancelling or any other reason. Buying a portion of Bitcoin is like buying shares of a bank which provides a service of accepting, sending and storing your money.
Ethereum creates value by providing an infra for dApps that provide financial instruments (like deposits, lending, etc) which also create value.
> Buying a portion of Bitcoin is like buying shares of a bank
Bitcoin payments are settled by "miners". It's therefore the miners who provide the service of settling bitcoins transactions, not the bitcoins themselves (which are the things being transacted from one wallet to another). Yes, miners create value by providing this service, and they get paid for it with transaction fees. However owning bitcoin doesn't confer you ownership rights of the bitcoin mining business, therefore owning bitcoin is completely not like owning shares of a bank which does confer such rights.
Expected by people themselves. Learn your fundamentals, get basic proficiency in maybe 1 or 2 frameworks and you're done. People drive themselves mad thinking they need to know everything. Most of "everything" is irrelevant, the rest you can pick up on the job.
Whenever I see a front-page link about Rails, I always think, "I bet the top comment threads will be about the font or layout rather than the content". Click, and... yep!
It's been about ten years, and you don't see as many Rails posts as you used to, but it still holds true!
I've also been around for getting on 10 years (ok, 8.8, close enough) and this is literally the first time I have heard anyone compliment the typography of a Rails post, let alone noticed it occurring enough to become an identifiable trend.
I know this is off topic, but I noticed the typography too and was just seeing if I could tell what it was before looking. But oddly enough, I can't seem to find out what typeface is used using the developer tools for the life of me. Does anyone know how that could be hidden from the styles pane?
The rendered typeface is Stem Text. If you click on an element with the typeface and go to the computed tab that will show you what font-family style is applied.
Rails is definitely more convenient to prototype, but the magic issue is real. You never know where a variable or a function comes from by reading the source -- you'd need to run a debugger to do that (in Python you can just follow the import statements). The overall Rails architecture feels convoluted and unnecessary complicated (Railties, Engines etc). I also dislike the fact that there is no single source of truth for data in Rails. You have schema.rb, but you can't edit that directly, it is generated by running `rails db:migrate`, so one might say that migration files are a single source of truth, which is inconvenient: I need to generate a migration, then edit the migration file to add any modifications not supported by generator script and finally add accessor and validators in model file. In Django we have a model definition as a single source of truth (data model, validations). Also, once I've created (or updated) a model definition, I run `manage.py makemigrations` and all necessary migrations (which capture the current data model state + what's necessary to do to perform a database migration automatically) are created automatically. I also like the fact that in Django data integrity is enforced by default.
Though, when it comes to prototyping, I think Rails is a much more convenient option. In Rails I can launch a working CRUD app with authentication in 10 minutes, literally. In Django I have to manually create directory structure, manually specify each route mapping, create and program controllers (views), etc. Django doesn't even have a built-in authentication templates, only controllers (views), so I end up writing this boilerplate over and over again. The other thing is that the authentication requires a username and password, which feels kind of clumsy, when every other authentication relies on email and it is not very trivial to modify that (built-in admin dashboard relies on built-in authentication for example).
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