I don't think anyone is suggesting one build Linux from scratch and then use it as their primary OS.
The value of LFS is not in having the system you build, it's in understanding it. After you've read and worked through the book, you've managed to produce a functioning GNU/Linux OS, and presumably you know what all the parts are.
From there, understanding any published distribution is a matter of understanding what makes it unique, maybe a different package manager or init system, or different userland packages. Regardless, the fundamentals still stand, and your ownership of the system is improved by having worked through the book.
Wasn’t them finally implementing competent (if overly annoying) iCloud MFA the result of this kind of thing, with social engineering/photo leaks from celebrities or something?
This article is poorly written. It’s so desperate to be clever and edgy that it’s hard to get the facts out of it.
ChatGPT isn’t really a solution because the source is both low quality and has questionable motives. Going to any of the other good articles on the subject that have been linked in this comment section is much better.
While I’ve seen a plenty of silly reports from big bank analysts, they usually have the advantage of not coming across like complete idiots when saying things like this
> We assign a preliminary A+ rating to the notes, one notch below Meta’s issuer credit rating,
It’s hard to get away with that when the report is attributed to a company and person which don’t seem to exist, hosted on some randos substack. Wording like that works way better when it comes from a sender with an address ending with @bigbank.com
Of course, the latter parts of the post (Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability) do reveal pretty definitively that this is obviously not intended to be a serious report.
As for the content itself? The author tries really hard to turn a whole lot of nothing into something, and horribly misinterprets the GAAP in the process.
How does it not have anything to do with the quality of the writing? The writing is supposed to convey some facts, but it's too busy pushing narratives and layering on snark that it fails to convey real facts. Even in this comment section the people who applaud the article don't really understand what's happening because they soaked up so much of the narrative-pushing from the article.
this is the future of human-written articles - they will obligatory be written like this as 99% of article comments on HN these days is “oh, this is AI written.” :)
It is not the reader's fault if the article is unreadable in the first place.
Not to mention that asking help to explain a text is extremely common. I can read English, but I have never read a US supreme court ruling. There are much better ways for me to understand those rulings to me as a non-lawyer.
Many SCOTUS opinions, especially the major ones, are very readable! The justices and clerks are excellent writers.
The most publicly notable cases (on things like abortion, gerrymandering, gun control, etc.) aren’t so tied down in complex precedent or laws the average person is unfamiliar with.
Although, even some of those (like, for me, issues around Native American sovereignty or maritime law) are quite readable as well.
> I can read English, but I have never read a US supreme court ruling. There are much better ways for me to understand those rulings to me as a non-lawyer.
Having admitted to never having read a SCOTUS ruling, how can you then proclaim there are better ways for you to understand? How could you possibly make that assertion if you've never read a SCOTUS ruling?
> Having admitted to never having read a SCOTUS ruling, how can you then proclaim there are better ways for you to understand? How could you possibly make that assertion if you've never read a SCOTUS ruling?
A SCOTUS ruling is a primary source, and there's a pretty good universal rule that primary sources can be difficult to properly digest if you don't fully have the context of the source; for most people, reading a secondary source or a tertiary source will be a superior vehicle than the primary source for understanding. Although that said, some secondary and tertiary sources do end up being just utter garbage (a standard example is the university press release for any scientific paper--the actual merits of that paper is generally mangled to hell.)
The difficulty understanding this piece comes from lack of knowledge about finance and ratings, not from an inability to read. The blog assumes a large amount of financial knowledge which is not common among the HN audience.
It seems fairly understandable even without financial knowledge?
1. Facebook creates a shell company.
2. The shell company borrows billions of dollars, and builds a data center.
3. Facebook leases the data center.
4. The fact that it is technically only a four-year lease with only one possible tenant can conveniently be ignored, as Facebook assumes essentially all possible risks. The shell company could only possibly lose money if Facebook itself goes under, so the lenders can treat the loan as just as reliable as Facebook itself.
5. Because Facebook technically only has a four-year lease, it can pretend it doesn't actually control the shell company: after all, it can always just decide not to renew the lease. The fact that is assumes essentially all possible risks can conveniently be ignored, so Facebook can treat it as a separate entity and doesn't have to treat the debt as its own.
So the lenders are happy because there's no real risk to them, and Facebook is happy because they can pretend a $27B loan doesn't exist. It's a win-win, except for the part where they are lying to their shareholders about not taking on a $27B loan.
This is a subtweet in blog form. Without concrete examples or critiques it isn’t any more substantial than whining about “kids these days”
Edit: I admit there are plenty of concrete critiques in the article, but if we’re supposed to stand up against slop, isn’t naming names the first step?
I'm not a fan of NYT either, but this feels like you're stretching for your conclusion:
> They hired "experts" who used prompt engineering and thousands of repetitions to find highly unusual and specific methods of eliciting text from training data that matched their articles....would have been the end of the situation if NYT was engaging in good faith.
I mean, if I was performing a bunch of investigative work and my publication was considered the source of truth in a great deal of journalistic effort and publication of information, and somebody just stole my newspaper off the back of a delivery truck every day and started rewriting my articles, and then suddenly nobody read my paper anymore because they could just ask chatgpt for free, that's a loss for everyone, right?
Even if I disagree with how they editorialize, the Times still does a hell of a lot of journalism, and chatgpt can never, and will never be able to actually do journalism.
> they want to insert themselves as middlemen - pure rent seeking, second hander, sleazy lawyer behavior
I'd love to hear exactly what you mean by this.
Between what and what are they trying to insert themselves as middlemen, and why is chatgpt the victim in their attempts to do it?
What does 'rent seeking' mean in this context?
What does 'second hander' mean?
I'm guessing that 'sleazy lawyer' is added as an intensifier, but I'm curious if it means something more specific than that as well, I suppose.
> Copyright law....the rest of it
Yeah. IP rights and laws are fucked basically everywhere. I'm not smart enough to think of ways to fix it, though. If you've got some viable ideas, let's go fix it. Until then, the Times kinda need to work with what we've got. Otherwise, OpenAI is going to keep taking their lunch money, along with every other journalist's on the internet, until there's no lunch money to be had from anyone.
They are still considered a paper of record, but I chose to use a hypothetical outfit because I don’t love the Times myself but I believe the argument to be valid.
I’m not interested in arguing about whether or not they deserve to fail, because that whole discussion is orthogonal to whether OpenAI is in the wrong.
If I’m on my deathbed, and somebody tries to smother me, I still hope they face consequences
This is the part that Times won't talk about because people stopped reading their paper long before AI, and they haven't been able to point to any credible harm in terms of reduced readership as a result of open AI launching. They just think that people might be using ChatGPT to read the New York Times without paying. But it's not a very good hypothesis because that's not what ChatGPT is good at.
It's like the people filing the lawsuit don't really understand the technology at all.
It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize.
I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process.
If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do.
*Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement
It sounds like the alternate path you're suggesting is for NYT to stop being wrong and let OpenAI continue being right, which doesn't sound much like a compromise to me.
The value of LFS is not in having the system you build, it's in understanding it. After you've read and worked through the book, you've managed to produce a functioning GNU/Linux OS, and presumably you know what all the parts are.
From there, understanding any published distribution is a matter of understanding what makes it unique, maybe a different package manager or init system, or different userland packages. Regardless, the fundamentals still stand, and your ownership of the system is improved by having worked through the book.
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