Marshal McLuhan would probably have agreed with this belief -- technologies are essentially prosthetic was one of the core tenets of his general philosophy. It is the essential thesis of his work "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man". AI is typically assigned otherness and separateness in recent discourse, rather than being considered as a directed tool (extension/prosthesis) under our control.
Well some are using Anthropic on AWS Bedrock which is a bit more like the Google paragraph. Perhaps a good thing that Nova models aren't competitive (and many here are asking "What's a Nova model?"). And remember, many businesses aren't flinching at IAM controls and are asking for data privacy contracts.
I have hated Microsoft for decades and am somewhat of an extremist when it comes to avoiding their products. That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical. The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.
Their lawyers would argue, and I agree, that they legally don't have to. It is called Fair Use; there is an epidemic of publisher backed groupthink trying to deny its existence.
The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).
I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.
Read Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Microsoft lawyers would, and may have to, argue that their use of Harry Potter without permission is for valid research purposes. You are actively trying to negate Fair Use with your specious argument. That document may have been naive but it certainly isn't a piracy manual.
There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.
Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.
> That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical
"Web of trust" is an apt name, and I think such broad affiliation is more doomed to gaming than more local approaches. Repo localized guilds, where contribution privileges are earned project to project, might work more effectively. Simple additions to SCM hosting such as pull request filtering by group could facilitate this.
No matter what, if this "Guild" system took off, or webs-of-trust did, there would be multiple ones almost immediately, and several claiming to be the "real" one!
Guild membership will be gamed and acquired by those you are trying filter. And I don't believe this will be an edge case; those going to the trouble of resume padding or exploit insertion etc., will definitely long for and ultimately succeed at membership.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.
It seems that the Messages (iMessage) product manager(s) have never even seen Slack. So difficult to go from such a fun product at work to bland and awkward for the rest of my connected life. Seems completely backwards.
But I'm going to guess HN tried the no-rules approach and found issues with it. Whether I like them or not, there are rules and I often see others reminding us of them.
(Ha ha, and in point of fact, I have never read them except when one is trotted out. Nor have I ever pulled one on someone—I'm the type to ignore and move on.)
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