We steal your data: $5 We steal your data and tell you we don’t: $10

Absolutely. Especially if you have company info / IP that someone else would pay a lot for. This is a question for lawyers and managers to negotiate with the lawyers at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, not for us little people to decide. I’m not throwing company data in an online service that is not cleared for us to use, and I don’t even work with spicy stuff. Back in my IT days we would have called that a data breach, which would have lead to something from an unpleasant hour in the boss’ office to a promotion to customer.

Better at replicating closed source software.

It surely gets better at coding in general, after all there are smart people at anthropic with near limitless budgets, but my conspiracy thesis is that it gets a lot better at replicating stuff it has seen before, but really shouldn’t have.

Tinfoil hat time:

A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.

I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn’t exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.

At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I’d give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn’t act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn’t be that much larger.

Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.

Yeah, it is not an age thing. I’m very happy that my mother has always been pretty good at programming solving. Although she never did any real tech related job, I believe this is a question of attitude more than anything else.

When she proudly tells me she used my dad’s phone to google for a fix for her phone acting up, my inner first year support monkey is proud :)

I remember a large company picking MS over Google Docs, because at least at the time, MS proudly advertised that you could show up with a wagon full of HDDs at their data centre and get your stored stuff. Although, a lot of enshittification happened since then.

Nah, that would be productive and not flashy enough for a publicity stunt.

Same. My 60+ mother got a new computer recently, saw the prices of MS Office and told me “install that free thing”. So far no complaints, first remark was “well, looks like it has all the same buttons, works for me”

The way I unterstand it, at least in European practice, the code itself is copyrighted, as in, the actual text, not the concept behing it. Decompiled source is not the same as original source, it goes through rounds of compiler optimisations and the process of reversing that includes a lot of guesswork. So, in practice, decompiling and working on the decompiled source was at least tolerated, probably because it would have been a grey area at worst.

Meh, the 70s had half the world population that we have now, and created much of the kick-ass music and arts that we still hold in high value. And, to be honest, a 3b pencil is really a luxury first world problem. Besides, the more important metric for that will be population density. In a city of 100000 or more, it makes sense to have a dedicated arts and crafts store, maybe even more. In a village of 1000, not so much.

How convenient. Go for as long or short as your partner needs.

“Nicer” cities are growing in almost all parts of the world, right? If anything, rural infrastructure will dwindle as people move to the cities for opportunities and amenities.

What matters even more is total productivity per citizen. It does not matter if a house is built by 20 builders with shovels or 5 builders with excavators. What matters is the house being built. And productivity per worker has massively risen and is, in my opinion, going to rise further.

Username checks out… I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don’t think “but they are not the US” is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.

Thanks for actually bringing the receipts, that is sadly rare even here.

The future is uncertain and the end is always near. 2100 is a long way to go, if we make it there without a global war, mass death due to land becoming inhabitable with climate change, and good ol’ empires violently collapsing, that would be something already.

Many of the countries that experience lower fertility rates are way below what they should realistically carry. India for example, a country with lots of poverty that is already struggling to feed its population after just a little bit of fuel price jumping, has no business being at what, 1.4 billion? Why should we continue to grow even further beyond the limits of a country?

There’s no real connection here between these countries and “the global south.”

Well, there is, if you don’t use a binary indicator of above/below replacement rate, and don’t just take “south” as geographically south, but rather as “poor, exploited countries, usually (but not always and exclusively) in the south”.

Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.