If a company built a tool like Copilot to help students write essays, is that considered plagiarism? Probably yes, and the reason is that regurgitating blobs of text without actually thinking like a human and writing them anew doesn't feel like actual work, just direct re-use.
Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright
It’s already fairly commonplace for news agencies to generate articles using ML solutions such as https://ai-writer.com/
So by your logic ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC have all been plagiarizing and violating copyright for doing so? I’m not sure if there’s been a legal challenge/precedent set in that case yet, but that seems like a more apples to apples comparison than the Google Books metaphor being used.
Disclosure: I work at GitHub but am not involved in CoPilot
The big question here is: On what data was the model trained? Presumably the news stations trained theirs on public-domain works and their own backlog of news articles, so even with manual copying there would be no infringement. In contrast, Copilot was trained on other people's code with active copyright.
That’s quite a big presumption IMO. Training sets need to be quite large in order to produce reasonable output. My understanding is that these companies provide the model themselves, which seems like it’d be trained on more than one company’s publications. But I get your point, and understand both sides of the argument here.
I think this will end up with a large class action lawsuit for sure, tho I really think it’s a toss up as to who would win it. This conversation was bound to happen eventually and we’re in uncharted territory here.
I think it’s going to hinge on whether machine learning is considered equivalent in abstraction to human learning, which will be quite an interesting legal, technological, and philosophical precedent to set if it goes that way.
There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized).
It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.
pg hasn't been running Y Combinator for over 7 years!
You've got your causality reversed. It's not that this essay exists because of YC, it's that YC exists because PG is obsessed with the idea of doing great work. (There are other reasons too, of course, but that was one vector.) He was that way long before YC.
This is clearly true looking from the outside, but people seem so eager to attribute motivations to greed or self interest, and success to luck, inherited wealth, and connections for any famous and successful person.
Is it just jealously and pettiness? Do people downplay the achievements of others to make themselves feel better about achieving nothing remarkable?
There is a rarely used English word I learned for the first time the other day - compersion - which is the opposite of jealousy. When you take joy in other people's success. Let's do more of that as a community and as human beings.
It’s not clearly true at all. Please tell me what was “great” about Viaweb (how pg got where he is today). It was literally about being at the right place at the right time. I think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.
> Is it just jealously and pettiness?
It’s neither, it’s people seeing who gets rewarded, how and why.
> think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.
I would call Arc great! It's one of my favorite things about my job that I get to work in it every day...though not nearly enough every day.
As for Viaweb, are you sure you're not looking at this through hindsight? Those guys were among the first to invent what we now call web apps, years before AJAX. In an era of internet startups coasting on hype, they built a real business - basically what is now called Shopify today. They also did it with a shockingly small team. All that seems pretty great to me.
I guess I don’t find an online store interesting or innovative. It’s hardly the Apple II or Linux. I also wonder if a sub 100M acquisition would be considered a success by pg himself on a YC company.
Have you ever heard of WebObjects? It was light years ahead of what Viaweb was doing at the time.
An online store generator is not an online store. To do that with Lisp macros in 1995 seemed crazily innovative to me when I first read about it in 2001 or so.
Honestly I’m not trying to be rude, sorry if it came off like that. That’s cool you like Arc, I’m a lisp fan myself (mainly Clojure).
I’m just pointing out that there was a lot of innovation happening at the time and what pg did wasn’t really lasting or that innovative. I don’t have a problem with it, until he espouses what I consider toxic work habits as advice. Too many people listen to him uncritically, it’s not good for our industry.
Just because something makes money, that doesn’t make it great. MS is a perfect example. Made a ton of money with products and predatory business practices so bad they held back innovation for years until Linux gave people an alternative and created the foundation for the modern internet. That was great tech from the time period.
It was great compared to what else was available at the time. Yes, it was about being in the right place at the right time - a place and time where three guys could build something that was better than anything out there, that people actually used.
Yes, there's an element of "the right place at the right time". And there's working very hard to make the most of it.
Or look at it this way: That opportunity was there for multiple millions of people who could code at the time. It was Viaweb that took advantage of it, though.
Regardless, the point is that we should not be listening to a guy who got lucky with mediocre software sold to a mediocre (at best) company in the middle of a bubble about how to duplicate his success.
> Regardless, the point is that we should not be listening to a guy who got lucky with mediocre software sold to a mediocre (at best) company in the middle of a bubble about how to duplicate his success.
You're doing exactly what I was taking about. Downplaying his success. Spinning a narrative that makes it look like he just got lucky. Why?
What have you accomplished with your life? Are you bitter about something? Because if we're really honest here, your opinion of Paul Graham seems to have more to do with you than with him.
My beef is that a lot of ignorant people are going to cargo cult this nonsense and create a toxic work environment for everyone. I also have an issue with hero worship, I didn’t become a technologist to prop up billionaires.
> My beef is that a lot of ignorant people are going to cargo cult this nonsense and create a toxic work environment for everyone.
Very little of Paul Graham's essays are written for people in the workplace. When he says work hard, he's not talking about work hard at a 9-5 job to make your employer rich. He's talking to people who found companies. Everyone else would do well to focus on work life balance. I take it you're not one of those people with ambitions to found a large successful company. Most people aren't. There nothing wrong with that, just that these essays are not really aimed at you. Paul Graham is one of those people. So am I, although I'm not successful (yet anyway.)
> I also have an issue with hero worship, I didn’t become a technologist to prop up billionaires.
Because jealously? Why does his wealth enter into this equation at all? Why is it relevant to you? It's fine to be inspired by people who achieve things. It can be taken too far, but you can say that about anything.
You shouldn’t make assumptions. I’ve been a senior leader at multiple very high profile and successful startups. I’ve also founded several VC backed startups. The problem is founders absolutely read stuff like this then create toxic work environments. I say it’s nonsense because I’ve succeeded without working myself or others to the bone.
> Because jealously?
No. Because I think celebrity culture is toxic. It induces the cargo culting effect I’m talking about. I also don’t think wealth inequality is a good thing for society. I would include myself as someone who should not be worshipped. I accurately attribute a lot of my success to luck (including being born at the right time with the right skills). I think you’d find my attitude more prevalent in the early tech industry. I didn’t invent the term “kill your idols” but it’s a good one. If you succeed enough you cross the line from disruptor to disruptee.
You do realize not everyone in our industry agrees on everything right? Tbh you seem pretty junior. PG isn’t some universally loved figure. A lot of people (successful) don’t like YC at all and think they pump out lame ideas. I’ll coach you a bit here and challenge you to go find a senior person in our industry that doesn’t agree with pg. There’s a lot of them out there and you’d definitely expand your horizons.
As to my background, I’d prefer to stay anonymous so I can freely speak my mind. You don’t have to believe me, but it would probably be helpful if you admitted that there are many philosophies on leadership and it’s worth exploring more than one.
Software engineer is a much more common job title now than back then. Back then IT people or developers did a good amount of building & coding, and many would be called software engineers nowadays.
You should work hard if there’s something important to you that you want to achieve. If there’s nothing that you particularly want to accomplish then there isn’t much point in working hard.
Google changing the country in their terms of services without user explicit approval/opt-in is much worse than it seems.
As a user, I might have Germany as my country in Google while living in Malaysia: maybe I like its privacy law better, or I'm a German ambassador on a diplomatic mission, or a German citizen on an exchange program, or a Malaysian citizen who signed up for Google while on vacation in Germany and is now confused about some parts of their account.
The point is, only the last scenario needs some fixing, while in all other cases, the user will understandably prefer to keep the country unchanged. Yet Google forcibly and preemptively switches country in all these scenarios, with no real benefits to the user.
But if there is no real benefit to the end user, and not everyone wants this, why force this change in the first place? Something technical that has to do with local laws.
And that's where it's really bad:
- It's bad as a principle, because if a person signs a contract with an entity under a specific jurisdiction, that person doesn't expect the jurisdiction to change unilaterally.
- It's bad in practice, because instead of knowing with certainty that my data is under a specific jurisdiction, I'm now subject to some automated process that could unilaterally move my data to a random country, resulting in unintended exposure to its laws
Free market includes when competition can reasonably enter a market that's not structured through legislation to be overly favorable towards incumbents.
Note that there are natural monopolies/oligopolies, which are the result of the nature of the market (eg need for scale) rather than legal lobbying.
The Celsius temperature scale is an interval scale [0] which means that it is possible to calculate differences but not ratios. The Kelvin temperature scale is a ratio scale [0] (it has an "absolute zero") that allows to do that.
Beside that if there are uncertainties involved, one should do proper propagation of uncertainty anyways. [1]
This is talking about the error in the difference between two values with the same units though. For temperature, it wouldn’t matter if you’re using C, K, or F for your starting values, the % error of the difference would be the same (I think).
Yes, because there is an arbitrary choice of origin which renders the relative error dependant on units. If you're measuring a length, for instance, or an interval of time, the relative error is independent of which units you choose. If you're measuring e.g. a distance to some point, then again you have an arbitrary choice of origin.
Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)
The key difference here is that it's a venture backed effort, which signals something very different from large state-financed research efforts like Iter.
Namely, that there is a path to financial viability
Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright