baryphonic (u/baryphonic)

baryphonic commented on TikTok goes dark in the US techcrunch.com/2025/01/18... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".

baryphonic · a year ago

(American here.)

I don't think I'd support a ban if ByteDance was a European company or Indian or South Korean or Japanese. China is a unique threat given the totalitarian turn they've taken over the past decade combined with the fact that no Chinese company is truly private in its day-to-day operations. All Chinese companies must have CCP influence as a matter of Chinese policy. It would be like if T-Mobile (the US mobile division of Deutsche Telekom) was required to have the influence of the German government including the monitoring and reporting of phone calls to senior party officials.

baryphonic commented on How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022) statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/tchalla

snakeyjake · a year ago

>The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex.

You didn't look it up very well.

>In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).[122] He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.

I think that if you:

1. are the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society,

2. stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912,

3. saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues, and

4. started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal

..you are a eugenicist.

My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted.

baryphonic · a year ago

>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes

Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.

baryphonic commented on Doomsday Book (2006) [pdf] crisesnotes.com/content/f... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

marcusestes · a year ago

Came here to say the same thing. It’s a chilling font choice for a document like this.

baryphonic · a year ago

2006 was peak "Great Moderation," where there hadn't been any serious financial crises since the 80s. The consensus wisdom was that many of the policies of the 80s & 90s, particularly around inflation and reducing uncertainty, had made financial crises almost obsolete.

It seems dark today given that we know the outcome, but I'm sure at the time, Comic Sans seemed appropriate for a set of tools that they thought likely would never be used. Or maybe it indicates a certain hubris undone within about 18 months.

baryphonic commented on Extracting AI models from mobile apps altayakkus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/smoser

jonpo · a year ago

You can say the same about compiled executable code though.

baryphonic · a year ago

Each compiled executable has a one-to-one relation with its source code, which has an author (except for LLM code and/or infinite monkeys). Thus compiled executables are derivative works.

There is an argument also that LLMs are derivative works of the training data, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to, though clearly there's a difference and lots of ambiguity about which contributions to which weights correspond to any particular source work.

Again IANAL, and this is my opinion based on reading the law & precedents. Consult a real copyright attorney for real advice.

baryphonic commented on Extracting AI models from mobile apps altayakkus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/smoser

Lerc · a year ago

I'm not even sure if event the first part is true. Has it been determined if AI models are intellectual property? Machine generated content may not be copyrightable. It isn't just the output of generative AI that falls under this, the models themselves are.

Can you copyright a set of coefficients for a formula? In the sense of a JPEG it would be considered that the image being reproduced is the thing that has the copyright. Being the first to run the calculations that produces a compressed version of that data should not grant you any special rights to that compressed form.

An AI model is just a form of that writ large. When the models generalize and create new content, it seems hard to see how that either the output or the model that generated it could be considered someone's property.

People possess models, I'm not sure if they own them.

There are however billions of dollars at play here and enough money can buy you whichever legal opinion you want.

baryphonic · a year ago

Going a step further, weights, i.e. coefficients, aren't produced by a person at all – they're produced by machine algorithms. Because a human did not create the weights, the weights have no author. Thus they are ineligible for copyright in the first place and are in the public domain. Whether the model architecture is copyrightable is more of an open question, but I think a solid argument could be that the model architecture is simply a mathematical expression – albeit a complex one –, though Python or other source code is almost certainly copyrighted. But I imagine clean-room methods could avoid problems there, and with much less effort than most software.

IANAL, but I have serious doubts about the applicability of current copyright law to existing AI models. I imagine the courts will decide the same.

baryphonic commented on A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

jajko · 2 years ago

Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN?

Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior.

Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.

baryphonic · 2 years ago

> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).

This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?

We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.

> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).

Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.

baryphonic commented on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops old.reddit.com/r/crowdstr... · Posted by u/BLKNSLVR

monocasa · 2 years ago

Kernel driver bug that essentially defaults, then on reboot loads the same driver early on segfaults and reboots again, ad nauseum.

baryphonic · 2 years ago

s/defaults/segfaults/ # stupid autocorrect

baryphonic commented on Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine axios.com/2024/06/28/supr... · Posted by u/wumeow

mushufasa · 2 years ago

This is a complete disaster. The ramifications will be felt for decades. Now businesses must factor in the uncertainty of any random person launching a lawsuit that causes a local court to reverse a federal agency policy. Huge potential impacts to product / revenue, not just legal fees to fight everything. And immeasurable impacts of cowing all bold business decisions to avoid the ire of any person or group, no matter how niche or extreme.

Even if a new supreme court reverts this decision, now people are going to be concerned about the unpredictability of the Supreme Court.

baryphonic · 2 years ago

I fail to see how this parade of horribles will happen. Under the Chevron regime, any random person could still sue, and provided that the lawsuit survived an initial motion to dismiss, then any questions involving an administrative agency policy would defer to that agency's interpretation of their own policy and the law authorizing that policy.

The only change now is that the agency will have to demonstrate to an independent Article III court that its policy is correct and compatible with the authorizing law. Stare decisis will still control the lower courts once new precedents are set, and people will have meaningful appeals again.

There might be some disruption in the short term, but in a decade or two, I expect the new normal will be fine, but with the benefit that people can meaningfully appeal self-aggrandizing administrative state rulings.

baryphonic commented on Weighing Up Galileo's Evidence historytoday.com/archive/... · Posted by u/Hooke

bonzini · 2 years ago

It is easy to treat Galileo as fighting the obscurantist church of the 15th century, but as the article explains briefly:

> provocatively voiced the pope’s own arguments through an obtuse Aristotelian called Simplicio

... Galileo's ordeal with the inquisition was mostly due to him making fun of the pope (probably not a good idea). The truth is that until Kepler introduced elliptical orbits and variable orbital speeds, the Copernican heliocentric model still needed epicycles and was not much better than the ptolemaic model.

And the church didn't even care _that_ much. Copernicus himself was a priest and, while he himself was wary of publishing it and framed it as a way to do astronomical calculations without any kind of philosophical implication, in the end it circulated without much fuss.

This of course should not diminish his contributions to the scientific method and his other contribution to astronomical observations (mostly the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, though his instrument wasn't good enough to recognize them as rings).

baryphonic · 2 years ago

Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.

When Kepler's model arrived, it was so much better at predicting the positions of all planets except Mercury than any previous model that it was clearly superior. Galileo's was bad at predicting and just contradicted the accepted observations of the day.

IMO Galileo should be better remembered for objects of different masses falling at the same rate and the original idea that all motion is relative (when observing from an internal frame).

baryphonic commented on Chat Control: Incompatible with Fundamental Rights (2022) freiheitsrechte.org/en/th... · Posted by u/Bluestein

elzbardico · 2 years ago

The funny thing about the EU is that while they do all this theatre of parliamentary elections, the bulk of such decisions are always taken by an unelected organ, the EU commission. It is not that I think they have mischievous intentions, on the contrary, but any unchecked managerial bureaucracy always go to the path of endless regulation and control.

baryphonic · 2 years ago

I find this bizarre as well. The EU Parliament has no initiative, possessing only the power to approve or veto legislation proposed by the Commission. And then when they occasionally exercise their veto power, the Commission can just resubmit substantially the same legislation as before, as is happening here.

This also means the Parliament has no independent power to repeal previous law that it might have regretted passing. It must again wait for the Commission to propose repeal. I can count how many times an unelected administrative bureaucracy has proposed removing its own power on zero hands.

The whole thing strikes me as a sham democracy.