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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2023

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  • I looked into this previously, and found that there is a major problem for most users in the Terms of Service at https://codeium.com/terms-of-service-individual.

    Their agreement talks about “Autocomplete User Content” as meaning the context (i.e. the code you write, when you are using it to auto-complete, that the client sends to them) - so it is implied that this counts as “User Content”.

    Then they have terms saying you licence them all your user content:

    “By Posting User Content to or via the Service, you grant Exafunction a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to host, store, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display and transfer User Content, as authorized in these Terms, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from Exafunction’s exercise of the license set forth in this Section.”

    So in other words, let’s say you write a 1000 line piece of software, and release it under the GPL. Then you decide to trial Codeium, and autocomplete a few tiny things, sending your 1000 lines of code as context.

    Then next week, a big corp wants to use your software in their closed source product, and don’t want to comply with the GPL. Exafunction can sell them a licence (“sublicence through multiple tiers”) to allow them to use the software you wrote without complying with the GPL. If it turns out that you used some GPLd code in your codebase (as the GPL allows), and the other developer sues Exafunction for violating the GPL, you have to pay any money owing.

    I emailed them about this back in December, and they didn’t respond or change their terms - so they are aware that their terms allow this interpretation.


  • As if telling Reddit, Facebook, or Google what to put on their roadmap as an ordinary consumer would actually work.

    At least with FLOSS if you want something, and if it is a good thing the developers like, you can likely get it merged. If not, you can fork and still have the feature locally. Good luck getting that freedom with a closed-source product.

    For software I develop, I do find it is helpful if people making feature suggestions tell developers what is useful for them and why, but that doesn’t entitle them any of my time to demand what features I prioritise. The alternative is “I gave you something you like for free, so now I owe you to make it even better for you”, which is obviously nonsense.


  • Programming is the most automated career in history. Functions / subroutines allow one to just reference the function instead of repeating it. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1951; compilers, assemblers, and linkers automate creating machine code. Macros, higher level languages, garbage collectors, type checkers, linters, editors, IDEs, debuggers, code generators, build systems, CI systems, test suite runners, deployment and orchestration tools etc… all automate programming and programming-adjacent tasks, and this has been going on for at least 70 years.

    Programming today would be very different if we still had to wire up ROM or something like that, and even if the entire world population worked as programmers without any automation, we still wouldn’t achieve as much as we do with the current programmer population + automation. So it is fair to say automation is widely used in software engineering, and greatly decreases the market for programmers relative to what it would take to achieve the same thing without automation. Programming is also far easier than if there was no automation.

    However, there are more programmers than ever. It is because programming is getting easier, and automation decreases the cost of doing things and makes new things feasible. The world’s demand for software functionality constantly grows.

    Now, LLMs are driving the next wave of automation to the world’s most automated profession. However, progress is still slow - without building massive very energy expensive models, outputs often need a lot of manual human-in-the-loop work; they are great as a typing assist to predict the next few tokens, and sometimes to spit out a common function that you might otherwise have been able to get from a library. They can often answer questions about code, quickly find things, and help you find the name of a function you know exists but can’t remember the exact name for. And they can do simple tasks that involve translating from well-specified natural language into code. But in practice, trying to use them for big complicated tasks is currently often slower than just doing it without LLM assistance.

    LLMs might improve, but probably not so fast that it is a step change; it will be a continuation of the same trends that have been going for 70+ years. Programming will get easier, there will be more programmers (even if they aren’t called that) using tools including LLMs, and software will continue to get more advanced, as demand for more advanced features increases.


  • If you have control of the domain, you can also get an X.509 certificate from any CA (e.g. for free from LetsEncrypt). Then you can put up a new server on that domain with a valid cert. If that server supports ActivityPub, it can provide new public keys for private keys you control for all users on the server, and can use the corresponding private keys to sign messages from any user on that server to any community those users are still subscribed to. In addition, any users on other servers still posting to / interacting with communities on that server would cause their server to send that to the inbox on the new server.

    This means any usernames or communities on queer.af should no longer be trusted.




  • Ukraine has an oligarch problem (with Putin at the head of it), not a Russia problem. Putin ultimately wants to exploit the resources of Ukraine unimpeded like he does in Russia - and he’s tried puppet governments, and the people fought back, so now he is trying force.

    Ukraine killing Russian civilians (who are also victims of Putin’s greed) is not going to deter Putin. Putin cares about one person - himself - and everything else is only a means to enriching and protecting himself and his status. He only cares about Russian civilians to the extent that those civilians living is in his best interests.

    So killing random Russian civilians is unlikely to achieve much except depriving some innocent family of some of its member. Targeting Putin and his property, oligarchs and generals is much more likely to make a real difference.


  • I think it would be a real shame, and would fragment the fediverse as a whole - some of Beehaw’s communities are some of the best on the Fediverse (and I really appreciate the work of the mods of communities on Beehaw), but the Fediverse / Lemmyverse is a lot bigger than just the Beehaw instance, and I really like being able to participate in communities from all over. Having to create accounts separately on lots of walled garden instances is probably not worth it, so I think it would make both Beehaw and the rest of the Fediverse weaker.

    Overall I’d be sad about it, and discourage, but I’m sure the fediverse would live on despite it, in a weakened form.

    Perhaps the real question is why would you consider doing that? It seems like a lose/lose for everyone. Would you be able to elaborate on what the exact problem you are trying to solve is? Perhaps the community could help you come up with a better solution.


  • I’d pick an irrational number, say pi, and ask for every decimal digit of it. Then, I have infinite time to walk around the world in explore mode (i.e. I can’t die, and hence don’t need to eat etc…, and am effectively an infinite energy source, and can interact with objects) while time is frozen. This effectively makes me a god, but only for one point in time, with the ability to create a discontinuity in the world state at that point. I’d travel around the whole world (even if it involved swimming oceans) and try to make it so that the infinite sum of each action I take while the world is frozen converges on a world that is in a much better state infinitesimally after the moment compared to infinitesimally before.


  • Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don’t enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw

    That doesn’t seem quite correct for any game meeting those criteria (I’d also add that the game is deterministic - no true randomness in the game either, since that is distinct from state - otherwise the outcome could trivially depend on random events). There are two other possibilities for a deterministic game: that optimal gameplay by both players will always end in the second (or another player if more than two) winning, or that optimal gameplay by both players will result in a game that never ends (impossible for games with a finite number of states, and rule that the game ends in an outcome if the same state recurs too many times - like chess).

    A trivial example of a (poor) game that would meets your criterion but where the first player loses under optimal strategy: Players take turns placing a counter anywhere in the play area from an infinite supply of counters. Players cannot skip a turn. If there are an even number of counters on the board after a player’s turn, the player who placed the counter can optionally declare victory and win. Not a game I’d play, but it does prove there exist deterministic open state games where one player moves first where the first player will not win or tie.

    In a 3+ player deterministic open state game, the actions of a player who goes on to lose could impact which of the remaining players win (they are essentially just a different source of non-determinism).

    I think it is correct to say that any two-player deterministic open-state game which can only end in a draw, win, or tie, for any fixed initial conditions, there exists a strategy for one of the two players that will ensure that one of the three outcomes occurs: the game continues forever, that player draws, or that player wins. That can be proved by contradiction: either one or more move in the strategy decision tree can be improved to make the player win, which contradicts the strategy not existing, or the other player can rely on the strategy not existing for the first player to devise a strategy, which also contradicts no strategy existing for either player.



  • I can’t find a good source for how many journalists work in Palestine, but in other countries, it is about 0.1% of the population (I couldn’t imagine it would be higher in Gaza given the oppressive conditions).

    That means there are probably about 5,428 journalists working in Palestine (based of 0.1% of 5,428,542, the best figure for Palestine’s population). 64 have been killed since October 7th, or ~1.2% of all Palestine’s journalists (under the estimate based off worldwide journalism figures). Of Palestine’s population, 19,968 have been killed since October 7th, or ~0.37% of the population.

    Doing a two-sample Z-test for proportions on those proportions gives a Z-score of 25.43, which has a P-value of << 0.001 - in other words, if the probability of journalists being killed was the same as for the general Palestinian population, it is vanishingly unlikely we would see a difference in probabilities of being killed this extreme. This is very strong statistically significant evidence that journalists are more likely to have been killed in Palestine than members of the general Palestinian population.

    The question then is why are journalists more likely to be killed? There could be an argument made that journalism is inherently a more risky occupation. However, the vast majority of journalists seem to have been killed at their home, not while filming military action or anything like that. There is a theoretical possibility journalists have stayed closer to the action and are less likely to have evacuated to another corner of Gaza since their job requires them to stay closer to the action. However, the other, probably more likely and much more disturbing possibility is that the Likud (Netanyahu) controlled IDF is intentionally targeting journalists (which is a serious war crime).


  • Probably more likely they dial more calls than they can scam on the basis that a silent hang up call costs them only the cost of connecting the call, but their scammer’s wages cost them more if not enough people answer and there is no one for the scammer to speak to.

    It’s essentially putting the cost of uncertain numbers of people answering onto the victims rather than the scammer - selfish, but so is scamming people!

    Telemarketers do the same thing, although at least they often have to fear their local regulators in many countries if they do it too much, while scammers are criminals who are going to break the law anyway, so I suspect most silent calls are probably scammers.


  • The quote from the article has it right: “They are human beings. They have bad leaders, like us. We can throw away the leaders on both sides and make peace in a matter of minutes”.

    Hamas and Likud are the instigators of this, and they actually both want to entirely destroy the other side rather than a peaceful resolution. To quote Hamas’ 2017 charter: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” (noting that means the complete destruction of Israel). To quote Netanyahu: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian State has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring of money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy”.

    Deliberately killing civilians is never okay (which both sides are doing - see the article, and Hamas are safe in their tunnels and it has become a trope that after killing many civilians Likud people just automatically claim it was Hamas HQ, with no credibility), and neither side has a right to target civilians.




  • I read the article expecting some kind of hateful comment, and it turns out she was on the side of civilians over Likud and Hamas - which I think is a refreshingly well thought out position. I’d question whether she is really losing fans overall, or if this is just clickbait. Haters are always going to hate, but just because a few people criticise someone doesn’t mean there is a net trend against them.




  • Note that “Reclaim The Net” is very shady and unlikely to be a legitimate civil rights organisation.

    Firstly, they display bias; they only ever say positive things about Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Ron DeSantis, and spin most things in whatever way helps the far-right in the US. They are silent on any Internet related civil rights issues that reflect poorly on the US far-right, or reflect well on central or left parties. Contrast this to more authentic organisations, which criticise things from all over the political spectrum.

    Secondly, they prioritise collecting your personally identifiable information over advocating for civil liberties. Some of their articles are behind a registration wall where you have to give at least an email address to see the content.

    Thirdly, however, they don’t tell you who they are, and go to lengths to hide it. Whois privacy, author names are likely pseudonyms, only contact is an email, no information about governance structures. There are legitimate reasons to be pseudonymous, although given how keen they are to collect data on visitors, it is a bit hypocritical!

    I believe there is a network of single-interest sites the far-right use as hooks to try to gather people with a range of different reasons for being dissatisfied, where the next step is to try to radicalise them and line them up behind Trump.