More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.)
Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
> More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
Depends on the specific relationship between the parties and the nature of the lawsuit.
If I sue Walmart, the only grocer in my town, for mislabelling the weight of their ground beef, we (as a society/government) probably shouldn't allow Walmart to retaliate by banning me from their stores.
I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think?
As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc.
Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.)
That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!
> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion
That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.
No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.
> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick
That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.
On the one hand, I agree that LLMs wherever perceptibly used do nothing to aid legibility, and much to hamper it. That is legitimately irritating.
On the other, it isn't at all new, is it? How LLMs write best, or at least how they write most, is just an outgrowth of the same methylphenidate style that's characterized online writing broadly construed since the days of the original Buzzfeed, which might as well have been called "Slopchute" if we were using those words that way then. Certainly it more than any other one source is responsible for the decay of cultural discourse that made the current troubles first possible and then inevitable - especially thanks to the huge volume of such useless crap (and its worse imitators) in these models' training sets.
I would certainly like less of the slop, as much as anyone. On the other hand, it's surprising to me at this late date to encounter people who read a lot online, and have not become accustomed to dealing with wordy junk written by Adderall casualties - that is, accustomed to dispassionately filleting a longform article on sight, skimming and glancing back and forth to identify what thesis may be present if any, and only actually settling in to read sequentially in the uncommon case where something initially mistaken for "content" has proven to be worth that level of effort.
It's surprising to me because I expect people to respect the value of their own interested attention, and not permit it be idly wasted. Sometimes someone has something worthwhile to say, but not the skill to do a competent job of actually saying it, and so the reader is required to meet the writer considerably more than halfway. I described above what that process looks like in practice. It isn't really something I tried to learn, just something I began doing out of frustration with having my time wasted. (Is that unusual? A little while back someone here had to explain to me, with obviously strained patience, that most people experience pleasure as a direct effect of opiates, and not only as a side effect of the sudden surcease of pain. That clarified for me why so many people get hooked so easily, but it also suggests I may not be the best judge of what's "normal" in these matters, I suppose.)
In terms of difference in practice, LLM output is a little wordier, a little more of a slurry, sure - but on the other hand, precisely because the results tend to exhibit such a strong or "pattern language" form of stereotypy, I find it's actually often simpler to dissect a large quantity of LLM output for the sentence or two of actual thought underlying it, than to do the same with something of similar length which was written by a human, whose paragraphs will almost never be instantly dismissible en bloc, the way most LLM-output paragraphs are.
I suppose that last may sound distasteful, but consider: the paragraphs we're discussing, wherever originating, are filler and that's why we don't like their presence. These paragraphs have been filler since this was The Atlantic's unique house style back when that was still a real magazine, and these paragraphs were never not going to be anything but filler, so whether they were excreted by a human or a robot has nothing to say about the artistic quality of what we've already agreed, indeed taken as axiomatic, is not art. It's styrofoam! It's packing material, which we were never going to care more about than the minimal effort required to throw it away. So why care all that much whether it's hand-blown or machine-extruded?
10,408 by 5,408 pixels, or about 30" by 15" at 300dpi - but for this you'd want half that or less, so the result is large enough that the print is actually readable. Even redone to a less extreme aspect ratio, it would certainly fill a binder and probably cover a wall.
Well, from the look of it, to touch the thing wrong must be its own punishment, which is brutalism indeed. It insists on itself far too loudly, though, in what I would call a pseudapocalypticist or "Falloutpunk" manner. Too bad. There's nothing much wrong with it for its own sake, other than the ergonomy, but it sticks out from its environment like a sore thumb, adding nothing of value save the demand its presence be flattered and celebrated for its own sake - you know what? I take it back; you've not only recapitulated the brutalist concept, but apotheosized it. Congratulations on a successful work! It must have been a blast to build, which is where the real joy always is to be found of course, and I look forward to seeing which school of design you satirize next.
(Did you really immure a power strip in cement? The MOVs in those are wearing items, you know, and can though rarely do fail short circuit...)
It should make you wonder instead about the appropriateness of testing over man(1) output, I suppose unless you're actually generating the format for use as man(1) input, in which case congratulations on your functional tests doing their job!
A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.)
Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
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