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fncypants commented on Kilmar Garcia et al. vs. US Department of Homeland Security et al.   documentcloud.org/documen... · Posted by u/belter
fncypants · 5 months ago
It's important to keep in mind what the government is saying here. Set aside the specifics of who this individual is or where they originally came from and grasp what Trump is trying to argue here.

> Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legalgrounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal. Nor does any evidence suggest thatAbrego Garcia is being held in CECOT at the behest of Salvadoran authorities to answer for crimesin that country. _Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless._

In short, they kidnapped someone--I'm using that word precisely because it was "lawless" and that's what elevates a detention to a kidnapping--and flew them to a foreign prison without notice, without hearing. From the street, transported hooded to a plan, and imprisoned in medieval conditions.

It was a mistake they concede. Oh well. Can't do anything about it now.

Do not argue that this individual should not have received a chance to have a court recognize the mistake. There is nothing separating your position from his. If they can kidnap him they can kidnap you. The government's position is, simply put, no one can stop them if they do.

fncypants commented on Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?   retrocomputing.stackexcha... · Posted by u/SeenNotHeard
geetee · 7 months ago
It's exhausting. Each side of every argument is full of misinformation, intentionally or not.
fncypants · 7 months ago
Do not both sides any of this. One cannot claim that both sides present misinformation and then not acknowledge that one side is doing so intentionally and the other is not.

Elon tweeted that there was a lot of 150-year-old recipients. That's all he said. [1] So there was a rush to point out why, if this 150 year old number is the only information he's providing of fraud, it is not a prima facie case of fraud. That was a good faith response to a bad faith, selective release of information.

[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/musk-claims-150-year-ol...

So then Musk provides more data, but again, not enough data to provide all the context. What he leaves out is that there have been multiple, prior good faith attempts to investigate these data entries, identify whether there's any fraud, and address any problems. This was the work of inspectors general whose job is to work in good faith to try to resolve these issues.

There is one side acting only in bad faith. If they were acting in good faith, they would raise these issues through legal channels (inspectors general) and then have an orderly, legal process to address them. That is how it has always been done, for a reason. They are not operating legally because they know that what they are doing is in bad faith and would be found out as such.

What we are witnessing is a dismantling of the rule of law. It's important to recognize that and to not to be complicit in it.

fncypants commented on DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency   wired.com/story/doge-tts-... · Posted by u/qwertox
fncypants · 7 months ago
So let's tear everything down good and bad because in an organization at a scale of trillions of dollars, we found $50 million we don't like.
fncypants commented on DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency   wired.com/story/doge-tts-... · Posted by u/qwertox
fncypants · 7 months ago
"Even though I don't know everything, and especially everything about how an organization like a federal government works, I personally haven't heard about these things, and therefore it must be unnecessary and stupid."
fncypants commented on DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency   wired.com/story/doge-tts-... · Posted by u/qwertox
ck2 · 7 months ago
Every time each one of these actions finally appears in front of a court, it is almost always stopped in whole or part.

There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google

I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again but what exactly happens when they run out of agencies to destroy and refuse court orders to restore?

fncypants · 7 months ago
And what happens when they're successful even in part and we dump a lot of unemployed workers all at once into the job market in the private sector? Measured and calculated reform is one things. Smashing things without addressing what happens next is just kindergarten level stupidity.

But then again, maybe crashing the job market with masses of unemployed, which will drive down wages and labor bargaining power, is exactly their strategy.

fncypants commented on Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US   wired.com/story/thomson-r... · Posted by u/johnneville
anon373839 · 7 months ago
This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time.

One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote from a case to represent that case’s holding on an issue. After all, we would expect many lawyers analyzing the case independently to converge on the same quotes!

The key fact underlying all of this, I think, is that when Ross paid human annotators to write their own versions of the headnotes, they really did crib from West’s wholesale rather than doing their own independent analysis. Source text was paraphrased using curiously similar language to West’s paraphrasing. That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision.

The case has very little to say about the more commonly posed question of whether copyright is infringed in large-scale language modeling.

fncypants · 7 months ago
I think this is the best takeaway. This case and its outcome is restricted to its facts. Most of the LLM activity today is very different than what happened here.
fncypants commented on Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX   blog.jreyesr.com/posts/ty... · Posted by u/judell
vslavkin · a year ago
I don't know which of the several typists plugins are you talking about, but they all seem decent, but years from achieving the features auctex has.

Just to say, the most important features:

Well, the feature you mentioned of clicking the PDF and redirecting to the source.

Preview in the same buffer (window) as the code

It uses other regexps to recognize the enabled packages, and then adds the package's macros and environments to its list, so with a command you can open an environment or macro, and it recognizes which packages you are using, if you are in a math environment, etc. and shows only the ones you can use in the context. It's like a super-intelligent set of macros.

AucTex has also great support for bibtex/biblatex, and glossary/glossaries, both for using the macros and for compiling.

Automatic, intelligent, labeling.

And a lot more (altough this is probably the biggest latex package, there are a lot of other smaller packages that are also extremely useful) . Maybe it's not the hardest package to do, but it needs a lot of people and time to replicate, basically what typst is also lacking, for now.

fncypants · a year ago
The current actively-developed VSCode extension is Tinymist. Its workflow is great and addresses all your issues (to the extent they are even relevant to Typst):

> Well, the feature you mentioned of clicking the PDF and redirecting to the source.

Tinymist does this. Click on text and it redirects the document buffer to the corresponding source text.

> Preview in the same buffer (window) as the code

Tinymist previews in a separate tab for side-by-side real-time writing with a preview.

> It uses other regexps to recognize the enabled packages, and then adds the package's macros and environments to its list, so with a command you can open an environment or macro, and it recognizes which packages you are using, if you are in a math environment, etc. and shows only the ones you can use in the context. It's like a super-intelligent set of macros.

This sounds like an artifact of Tex. The standard Typst library is very thorough. And for everything else, Typst has automatic retrieval of community packages. Just add an #import and it just works:

    #import "@preview/example:0.1.0": add
    #add(2, 7)
> AucTex has also great support for bibtex/biblatex, and glossary/glossaries, both for using the macros and for compiling.

This just works with Typst in-the-box for bibliographies, and with the glossarium package for glossaries (just add with: #import "@preview/glossarium:0.4.2": *). But one thing a Typst IDE like Tinymist or the web service adds to the writing environment is an autocomplete for labels and citations. Just start typing the reference and get autocomplete options.

> Automatic, intelligent, labeling.

Not sure what this means, but you can add a label to headings, figures, etc. and quickly reference them with @label, and the current IDEs

fncypants commented on Patent troll attacks against open source projects are up 100% since last year   zdnet.com/article/patent-... · Posted by u/CrankyBear
jamespo · 3 years ago
The article is terrible and gives no examples or absolute figures
fncypants · 3 years ago
The article gives several examples, including a lawsuit against GNOME Foundation.

It also links to a study that backs up the figures in the title:

> The recent UnifiedPatents, Defending Open Source: An 2022 Litigation Update, report shows patent troll attacks on open-source projects are on track for a 100% increase over 2021.[1]

The report shows its trend graph, and explains its findings:

> Looking specifically at all kinds of NPEs, open-source patent litigation has reached 617 cases, and is on track for over 1,200 cases. This would nearly double the total amount of cases brought in 721 against open source technologies.

[1] https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2022/6/9/defending-o...

fncypants commented on HBO Max pulls nearly 200 ‘Sesame Street’ episodes   nytimes.com/2022/08/20/ar... · Posted by u/carride
antasvara · 3 years ago
A more charitable view of the situation would be a requirement that any content which has taken public funding should always be able to be "reasonably accessed."

This allows private businesses to seek out solutions that are in their best interest, while also offering some protections to consumers. I don't see it as any different from the way we regulate other public utilities, like not allowing power companies to shut off service during the winter.

Note that I specifically used ambiguous language so that a wide range of uses for the content are possible. I don't necessarily have a problem with Sesame Street being behind a paywall, provided that the service isn't priced in an absurd manner.

fncypants · 3 years ago
This is good public policy thinking. At a minimum, if you want to take our tax dollars, you need to do _at least_ the bare minimum to benefit the public.

u/fncypants

KarmaCake day349February 26, 2015View Original