And the reason for Cloudflare to do it is because there are several (apparently) very juicy businesses to be built by slapping a chat UI and off the shelf coding agent on top of Cloudflare infra... Not saying they should do this, but the rationale is pretty self-evident.
The reason for Replit to try going down the stack is platform risk and compressing margins from competitors who also have the brilliant idea of slapping a text box and off the shelf coding agents onto Cloudflare.
For example, say you want to search for bugs in 100 code files. Ask Claude to “use subagents to look for bugs across these files” and it will likely spin up 5 agents, each taking a different section of the codebase. Theoretically in the limit case this is 5x faster than Claude doing it without subagents.
Any kind of problem shaped like map reduce can be accelerated this way: Looking through your banking records, searching through a database, asking Claude to find that one weird file you remember from three years ago but forgot where you saved it, etc.
Just know that there’s no quicker way to hit your limits than to use subagents. So use them if it’s paid for by your work or whenever you need the 5x speed boost.
It’s a mouse. If you think feeding one to a snake is ethical, then it’s a little strange this would be unethical. At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.
That’s not quite equivalent. For one, a responsible owner is not feeding live mice to a snake. There’s at least an opportunity to ethically euthanize the mice prior to the act.
> At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.
This is a good way to injure your snake, it definitely depends on the species and the individual temperament of the snake, but there are ways to entice a snake to eat dead mice (you can warm them, and wiggle them).
It helps to understand how snakes detect and catch prey.
Not saying that this resolves the broader issue, but I'm not aware of any vegetarian snakes. It seems possible to differentiate this from animal experimentation.
I don’t personally agree with the stance, but it’s not prima facie illogical to consider raising and killing animals for food to be potentially more humane than animal testing, and thus to be a fan of one but not the other. See the thousands of reddit posts about small farms, raising your own etc etc.
no, it is completely illogical. Animal testing at least has amortisation properties and is utilitarian at its core. Factory farming and eating animals for food can be completely avoided.
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.
Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.
Did he even break into a network? Seems to me he was on the student network he was authorised to be on, he just needed a safe place to hide his laptop with power and networking, so he left it in a server closet, instead of leaving it behind a radiator in the student library.
Criminal law, "beyond a reasonable doubt", doesn't mean "there exists, however implausible, an explanation".
He did break into the network - he was spoofing MAC addresses. You don't have a level of technical sophistication allowing you to do this, and then say "oh, I assumed the server closet with an "Authorized access only" sign, usually locked, seemed like a safe place, that's all, and since I was there, I figured I might as well just plug directly into a network switch in there."
Many judges are not technical. Most judges are not idiots.
Spoofing a MAC address because IT security has specifically sought to block you from network access (whether you think they "should" or not) just magically handwaved away because "he was really just looking for somewhere to keep his computer secure" (while it circumvented network access controls).
(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.
If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.
Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.
Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.
What matters is how you got it. Accepting a watch someone freely offers you is different from breaking into a house to steal it, even if the watch you were given turns out to be stolen.
In reference to the laws handling stolen goods; the law holds you accountable if a reasonable person in your exact situation would have suspected the item was stolen.
For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.
Which is why GP should never have attempted the "theft" analogy. No part of what Aaron Swartz did was theft - so every single statute you can cite regarding knowingly receiving stolen property is irrelevant.
The act of theft in my analogy is irrelevant, you can pick theft or any other analogy you like. What matters is that, under the law, there was another unlawful act in that process, one that falls under a different section and constitutes a different crime. That's what makes these cases different. You can agree or disagree with that, but that's how the law works and how it's interpreted.
Deliberate traps are a modern 20th-century practice. In old times, each mapmaker made their own innocent mistakes, and those mistakes got copied into other mapmakers' work. In other words, historians can plot "family trees" of maps, and figure out who copied from whom, based on which errors appear on which maps and on what date. Apparently California drawn as an island lasted about a century because engravers copied each other.
There were a few factors discouraging mapmakers from blatantly copying each other:
Rulers granted printing monopolies from the late 1400s. A mapmaker like Ortelius would print "cum privilegio" (lol) on a map. If you copied it, your expensive copper plates could be seized, along with a hefty fine.
Spain and Portugal each had a master chart which were state secrets because they held navigation knowledge worth a fortune. Portugal handed out severe punishments for leaking charts. (Leaks still happened: the Cantino planisphere was smuggled from Lisbon to Italy in 1502.)
Booksellers' guilds kept registers of who owned which work, and enforced it.
And lastly, copying meant hand-engraving a new copper plate, which took months of work and real skill. The practical barriers alone got rid of most of the copiers, but it didn't stop the big houses.
(I used Claude to research this fascinating rabbit hole, so I'm basically paraphrasing here. But this comment is my own original writing, so treat it as you like.)
For me it refused to move Claude transcripts from point A to point B on my local machine. It kept getting flagged as reasoning extraction or something. The line of "It's my machine, I can move files wherever I want" shouldn't be crossed. Someday file managers are going to go extinct and LLMs will organize everything, and they shouldn't choose what files you can and can't access on your own computer.
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