crote
Born on July 11, 2016•12507 Karma
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Obviously. But it does kill the usual "piracy is bad because companies lose money" argument - especially for a 22-year-old game.
> Source available is not the same as open source.
Obviously. But it does show that Valve is more interested in preserving old genre-defying games for the general public, rather than milking every last cent of revenue out of it.
God, AI keeps making life better than I could've ever imagined!
So that makes it okay to pirate and steal games developed by your fellow indie game developers as well?
> Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Try doing the same thing to Nintendo.
Even large companies like Anthropic were not going to risk going to trial and getting bankrupted of over $120B+ in damages in using pirated copyrighted eBooks for training. The best case was a settlement for $1.5B which that is a record settlement in copyright law.
Model improvement is already hitting diminishing returns, and people aren't willing to pay substantially more for a slightly better model. There's no "accelerating away" when the new models don't open up a huge new market. If anything, the companies burning huge amounts of money on marginal improvements will be undercut by companies happy to sell current models at a significantly lower cost.
You're being beaten by a Chinese company? Why improve your own process when you can just lobby for sanctions and tariffs instead!
Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service.
David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics.
“The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
These people don't get that academics publish their research in openly available journals. They go to conferences around the world and tell everyone who will listen exactly what they are working on. Unless you're working in a secretive government weapons lab, there's nothing to hide.
In the US, people like Mr. Vigneault instituted a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese researchers, and ended up messing with the lives of all sorts of innocent people, including the director of MIT's mechanical engineering department. They found zero spies. Just a bunch of scientists working normally.
The main advantages the Chinese car industry has right now are: they lead in battery R&D, production is highly automated, they iterate quickly, Chinese work culture is extremely competitive and things get done fast, and the Chinese state has policies to promote EV adoption, so there's a huge domestic market.
Note that the last point is different from subsidies to car manufacturers. Cities made it difficult to get license plates for ICE cars. The government encouraged the massive buildout of charging infrastructure. And it used consumer rebates, like California did.
but it's also thanks to protectionism, and their strictly controlled (not freely traded) cheap currency.
if china had to play by the same rules as japan or germany it would not be quite as successful. but the west walked into this trap, hoping their win-win proposal would be satisfactory for all. now the west is too dependent on chinese production to enforce equal standing.
of course the US has its own unfair advantages, e.g. the global reserve currency and the massive post-WWII headstart.
For a brief second, Germany was in a position to become a solar power global player. But our conservative government was more interested in protecting their local, bad industry. Including destroying forests for coal all projections said we would never actually need.
Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.
And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year.
I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.
The state-of-the-art models aren't at "can fully replace knowledge worker" levels yet and I doubt they'll get there any time soon, so charging $2000 / month for access isn't going to happen. Right now everyone and their dog is being handed subsidized credits to play with AI, but the actual outcome is rarely good enough to be worth the money they'd need to charge for it. It might very well take another order of magnitude or two to get LLMs to be truly good (if it is even possible at all), and considering how much money is already being pumped into it I just don't see that happening.
On the other hand, the dumb models are more than adequate for simple noncritical tasks, like directing a user to the appropriate FAQ entry, or playing phone decision tree. There's a lot of money in making chatbot assistants actually useful, or in augmenting website search. Turning it into a glorified "language-to-API-call" translator doesn't take a lot of smarts, but as long as it's cheap you can make a killing in volume.
This is a lane I’ve been experimenting in —- seeing what I can get out of models that work in 16GB VRAM for simple tasks (screen scraping, decision tree navigation, natural language queries). It’s interesting for sure (certainly reveals non-deterministic limits) and promising for low criticality review-opportunity tasks, but I also feel like I need better sources/community for understanding and reflection. Preferably those that aren’t hype channels. Any pointers?
In terms of realpolitik or execution it can be.
9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.
The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.
Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.
Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle.
If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y candidate, leading to a strong Y victory. But if side X votes for a moderate-X candidate during the primaries, the main election will be moderate-X vs moderate-Y, and they have a pretty good chance of securing the slightly-more-than-half of the middle they need for an X victory.
Of course you now end up with a lukewarm moderate X victor who isn't going to represent your far-X views, but at least you're not dealing with an even worse Y-side victor.
The real solution is to get rid of the winner-takes-all system inherently resulting in a two-party election, but Good Luck doing that kind of overhaul!
For example, ranked-choice voting would reduce the spoiler effect and allow you vote for your real choice, however it would not (on its own) change that races have a single winner, who eventually "takes all."
This matters because even if it's preferable to have both, ranked-choice is easier to introduce incrementally and with fewer amendments to various constitutions.
The UK has winner takes all parliamentary elections but still has multiple parties represented in it. There seem to be a lot of other barriers to other parties in the US doing the same.