AnyOldName3

Lower emissions, and natural gas is cheaper than diesel. Also, the lead time is much shorter, as there aren’t many manufacturers of large diesel generators that could keep up with AI datacentre demand, whereas there are lots of airliner turbofans being retired that could be refurbished to become these generators.

America’s first amendment doesn’t grant a total right to free speech. Conspiracy to commit murder is just speech, but is very much illegal, and so is copyright infringement.

If you saw a fruit stand and it had a sign saying you were allowed to try one grape without committing to buy a bunch, and the owner noticed you were doing anything with grapes other than buying them or trying one, they’d be allowed to ban you from their stand or if they really wanted to be a dick about it, take you to small claims court to recover the cost of any stolen grapes. If the local police wanted to be dicks about it rather than just not show up over something so petty, they could treat it like any other kind of low-value shoplifting and arrest you. The owner letting you have a free evaluation grape doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with grapes, whether or not you invent loopholes like claiming you’re a different customer if you walk away from the grapes and come back again or that it’s fine as long as you ony take one grape from each bunch or that it should be fine as long as you pretend you’re evaluating the grapes even though it’s obvious that you were never going to actually buy grapes. They are not your grapes until you’ve paid for them, and while they’re not your grapes, what the shopkeeper says is allowed is what’s allowed, and it’s up to their sole discretion whether you’re taking the piss and need to stop.

If you ask a random person off the street or on social media, they might well agree with you that making a link publicly available means it’s legal to download the linked thing, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. If you read the text of the DMCA (or equivalent in another country), ask a lawyer, or read a summery in plain English of the DMCA written by a lawyer, it’s really clear that, barring some very specific exceptions, you have no rights to do anything with anything unless either you’re the copyright holder, you’ve been granted a licence to do specific things by the copyright holder, or you’ve bought a copy from the copyright holder and have implicit rights to do things with the copy you’ve bought (which is why, typically, software is sold as a licence, not a copy, as that stops you getting your implicit First Sale Doctrine rights). A lawyer would tell you that Microsoft haven’t granted you, as someone who is not evaluating whether to deploy Windows 11 IoT LTSC for a specific project, permission to download the ISO, so you don’t have permission to download the ISO.

The fact that you mention DMCA takedown requests here shows a serious misconception about what the DMCA is and how it works, because they’re a very specific and minor part of the DMCA that has no relevance to normal people. Takedown requests are a mechanism between copyright holders and online service providers when the service provider is hosting infringing content on behalf of someone else, without necessarily knowing that it’s infringing, and the DMCA introduced them because previously your ISP and any websites you visited were also liable for any crimes you comitted using their services. The person downloading the Windows ISO isn’t an online service provider, so the consequences for them wouldn’t be a takedown request. There are much more exciting consequences for normal people, like unlimited fines and jail sentences.

The fact that the DMCA is so broadly overreaching and draconian that it’s impossible to enforce, and that therefore you don’t need to worry about only breaking the law a little bit as no one’s going to care doesn’t mean that what it says isn’t the law. Plenty of people who’ve ended up in trouble for something else have ended up prosecuted for various copyright offences that were easier to make stick than whatever painted a target on their back in the first place.

Despite it not being a problem for normal people, if you’re a big company with enough money to be worth going after, minor things like getting a Windows ISO from the wrong link can cause trouble. Generally, companies have learned that it’s bad for business to sue their customers, but it’s still worth their while to add on extra fees and charges for breaches of contract as long as they’re not so big that the customer bothers disputing them. To avoid these problems, large companies have compliance departments, and they’ll absolutely discipline employees for doing things like downloading things from the wrong link that wouldn’t matter at all for a home user.

I’m still replying because you keep responding with misconceptions and general nonsense and asserting that it’s factual. That’s enough of a reason on its own when the topic’s something as objective as what the law as written is. It should be obvious from the number of times I’ve said that the law is dumb, draconian and overreaching that I’m in favour of it changing, and that would require more people to know that the law is dumb and makes things illegal that no one would expect to be legal. However, a lot of your last few posts has basically been that if anyone makes any of their property freely available to certain people under certain conditions, in the eyes of the law, it’s okay for anyone else to take it, too, which is obviously bogus in any society with the concept of property. The rest seems to be that somehow, all the lawyers working for the multibillion dollar intellectual property holders that lobbied for world governments to implement current copyright law managed not to notice obvious and easily-exploitable loopholes, and then the lawyers working at those companies today left links up that make the loopholes exploitable, which is a really naive viewpoint. In battles against millions of dollars worth of legal advice, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Copyright law is written as if magically duplicating the fruit is the same thing as stealing it. In a discussion about what the law is rather than what it should be in a sensible society, the analogy is fine. As Microsoft is the copyright holder, you only have the right to do anything with their files that they have deigned to grant you, and anything else is legally piracy. In the case of this specific link, they’ve granted the public the right to use it for evaluation purposes, but they’ve not granted any other rights, so it is legal to use the link to download the file for evaluation purposes, and illegal to use it for anything else.

If you want a slightly different analogy, it’s a little like how if Disney put on a free screening of the latest Marvel film for disabled children at a cinema, and didn’t check at the door, an able bodied adult could wander in, past signs saying that the screening was for disabled children only, and watch the film for free, but the fact that they could physically gain access doesn’t mean they had any legal right to be there. They could be ejected from the cinema and/or sued for the cost of a ticket and any legal costs. You do not have a legal right to click link on Microsoft’s website next to some text saying that it’s for evaluation purposes only unless you’re clicking it for evaluation purposes only. Just because you’ve made it to the link, it doesn’t mean you can ignore the text saying who is and isn’t allowed to click it.

It’s freely available for evaluation purposes (from that link - it’s freely available for other purposes from other links, too, and so are other editions of Windows), but that doesn’t mean you’re legally allowed to use those public links however you want. If the copyright holder says they’re for evaluation purposes only, then if you know you aren’t intending to pay even if you like it, then you’re not evaluating whether or not the download link is public, so it still counts as piracy. It’s still stealing to take produce from a roadside stall with an honesty box if you don’t pay even though the produce was just sitting out in the open.

No, they’re illegal several times over as you’ve got to pirate the thing in the first place to end up in a situation where you need one, and then they’re inherently a DRM circumvention device, which are illegal to possess, and then using them circumvents DRM, which is illegal to do. The upside is that you’re unlikely to be caught.

Legally, it isn’t. The DMCA (and compatible laws in non-US countries, which those countries have to have or they’re not allowed a trade deal, and not having a trade deal with the US is devastating for an economy) doesn’t require copyright holders to do anything to defend their copyright. It does make it illegal to do (nearly) anything with copyrighted media that you don’t have explicit permission to do from the copyright holder (there are some exceptions, but people generally think they go further than they really do). It also makes it illegal to do (nearly) anything to circumvent DRM, even if you have a legal right to use the thing that the DRM is protecting, no matter how crappy the DRM is and how easily it can be bypassed.

You’re allowed to think that the law is stupid (it’s the DMCA - everyone who looks at it and isn’t a multibillion dollar publishing company thinks it’s stupid), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not the law, and for legal terms like piracy, you can’t just substitute your own definition based on what should be legal if it conflicts with the definition that says what really is legal.

The reason why non-crap DRM exists when there’s no legal reason to make it not crap is the same reason why DRM exists at all when there’s no legal reason to have DRM at all when piracy of DRM-free stuff is already a crime. It’s that publishers think that the more of a hassle it is to pirate things, the more likely people are to buy things legally. Technically, a shareholder could sue a company for using crap DRM that failed to protect their IP, but the company has a decent defence by saying that they felt that intrusive DRM would hurt their reputation with legitimate customers, so not using strong DRM is not grounds to say a company’s been negligent and liable for any losses they make due to piracy.

Circumventing DRM by any means, whether that’s by modifying it so it doesn’t work or just clicking buttons that the DRM provider doesn’t want you to click, is legally considered piracy in most of the world. If you didn’t get the activation code from Microsoft (or someone Microsoft authorised to give it to you), it’s pirated.

Technically Temu doesn’t import anything. They’re allowed to sell toxic or otherwise dangerous goods because the customer’s the one importing them, and there are plenty of things you’re allowed to import for personal use that you wouldn’t be allowed to import for retail. The EU’s working on closing this loophole, but the UK isn’t in the EU anymore.

They got lots of consultants in from MindGeek who own Pornhub etc. and several age-verification services. They told the government that the consultants who were raising issues were overreacting, and the government believed them because obviously the world’s largest porn company wouldn’t encourage them to enact a law that would do bad things to the porn industry. They didn’t stop to think that the law as written means there’s now a requirement for smaller compliant porn sites to either spend more than their total revenue implementing an age-verification system or buy in one of the ones MindGeek own.

The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.

You’re thinking of firmware, not drivers. To make a GPU work, you need new enough versions of the kernel, driver and firmware. The open source drivers for Nvidia GPUs are still slower and less featureful than the proprietary ones.

AMD’s GPUs were much faster than Intel’s, and making GPUs for this kind of application was something AMD already did. Nvidia didn’t, so would have to design a whole chip from scratch, and didn’t really have a power efficiency advantage (in recent generations where AMD’s desktop cards have run hot, it’s because they’ve been clocked high to keep up with Nvidia’s cards, but the same architecture runs cool when clocked lower for mobile applications, e.g. Vega was notoriously inefficient on the desktop due to being delayed two years and having to compete with a different generation than it was designed to, but was great in laptop APUs). Intel would also have gained experience with chiplets and packaging a fast GPU with a CPU. It let everyone involved make more money than doing it any other way.

The good advice that they just won’t take is spot on for the Arch Wiki, though.

You not mentioning LLMs doesn’t mean the post you were replying to wasn’t talking about LLM-based AGI. If someone responds to an article about the obvious improbability of LLM-based AGI with a comment about the obviously make-believe genie, the only obviously make-believe genie they could be referring to is the one from the article. If they’re referring to something outside the article, there’s nothing more to suggest it’s non-LLM-based AGI than there is Robin Williams’ character from Aladdin.

AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn’t mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it’s LLMs that investors have bet on. It’s been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren’t getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It’s pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that’s what the article’s discussing.

As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.

My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.

The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.

As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.

• Teenagers can find out their parents’ passwords (or their friends’ parents’ passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other’s porn usage, they’re anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they’re using their parents’ credentials. 2FA helps, but it’s not like teenagers never see their parents’ phones.
• There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
• As I said in the post above, if it’s too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there’s very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don’t care about obeying the law or can’t do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn’t be any online piracy.

They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.