When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.

In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.

I think Adams was prescient, since in his story the all powerful computer reaches the answer '42' via incorrect arithmetic.

The Bistromathics? That's not incorrect, it's simply too advanced for us to understand.

“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”

(One) source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1mjudsm/comment/n7d...

You also have the problem that if the both the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything, and the ultimate question to life the universe and everything, are know at the same time in the same universe. The universe is spontaneously replaced with a slightly more absurd universe to ensure that both the question and answer become meaningless.

To quote the message from the universes creators to its creation “We apologise for the inconvenience”. Does seem to sum up Douglas Adam’s views on absurdity of life.

Ok, my Hitchhiker-foo was too weak, thanks!

This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.

If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.

If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?

My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.

If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.

Where does the liquidity come from? You'd get rid of HFTs but you would still need market makers

That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?

This also raises a lot of questions about a certain model notorious for readily producing and distributing a lot legally questionable images. IMHO if the weights are encoding the content, the model contains the content just like a database or a hard drive. Thus, just like it's not the fault of an investigator for running the query to pull it out of the database, it's not the fault of anyone else for running a query ('prompt') that pulls it out of the model.

The question is also if this would then be a valid case of fair use.

Though, in the end, it's probably more a problem of how much AI companies can "donate" to the orange king to make it legal.

Yes. There does not seem to be any dispute that it is a copy. The questions have been "is this copying okay, because it falls under fair use?"

Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

Yeah this is what I always expected to happen. Cryptographic signing of source material so you can verify who the initial claimant is, and base credibility on the identity of that person.

It was always easy to fake photos too. Just organize the scene, or selectively frame what you want. There is no such thing as any piece of media you can trust.

The construction workers having lunch on the girder in that famous photo were in fact about four feet above a safety platform; it's a masterpiece of framing and cropping. (Ironically the photographer was standing on a girder out over a hundred stories of nothing).

Although I do use the dead internet, I didn't see much of "fake news" like that...

Ah yes the good old days of witch trials and pogroms.

I am no big fan of AI but misinformation is a tale as old as time.

Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...

If there’s anything I would want to run to verify, I ask the author to add a unit test. Generally, the existing CI test + new tests in the PR having run successfully is enough. I might pull and run it if I am not sure whether a particular edge case is handled.

Reviewers wanting to pull and run many PRs makes me think your automated tests need improvement.

In fact ‘computer’ used to be a job description: a person who computes.

Yes, definitely. And "nice" used to mean "insignificant". But they don't have those meanings now.