One probably important distinction is that the Voynich manuscript was deliberately obfuscated. Puzzling it out requires context that may not even exist anymore (consider discovering an intact TLS log a thousand years in the future, without the private cert you'd never know it was just someone posting to HN!).
The notes in the linked article are presumptively-legible notes made in good faith, just not with enough detail for someone-who-is-not-the-author to understand . AI training sets are much broader than mere human intuition now.
> history as a universally recognized store of value.
History of what now? Gold is a volatile commodity. It has crashed, many times, often catastrophically, and had bear markets that dwarf anything you see in stocks.. A quick search tells me that inflation-adjusted gold prices dropped like 80% between 1979 and 2000.
And given its value right now, it's probably due for another.
To add some context, gold was actually something backed by the US government during the Bretton Woods era (40s-70s), where 1 ounce of gold was pegged to 35 dollars. This was only possible because the US accumulated so much wealth relative to rest of the world after WWII, so they controlled the majority of the gold supply. After the golden age of Keynesian America ended with stagflation in the 70s, the US government had to stop all of their gold from fleeing the country, so this guarantee had to end. Which leads to the Nixon shock, where the dollar (and all other currencies as well) became free-floating, and we enter a brave new world where humanity hasn't lived before (neo-liberalism).
Given all that, it's easy to see why the value of gold has plummeted during the 70s - 00s. Though I could see two reasons as to why gold prices are rising during the last decade:
- Gold is actually just a part of the asset bubble (in the same group as housing, stocks, and crypto), and investment in it is aided by too much money printed by the US government not being used towards productive ends but towards rampant asset speculation.
- The current era of neo-liberalism is going to end pretty soon, and some goldbugs are rooting for the revival of late 19th-century classical capitalism, where gold was actually the international standard. I think this is very unlikely though, even if the US dollar loses its status with the end of the petrodollar system. My guess is we're going to deal with free-floating currencies for quite some time, especially when wars are going to happen and governments have to print more money to sustain their war efforts. (I think the best monetary system would be neither gold or crypto, but instead something like the Bancor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor))
As a "measurement of value" they both suck. Gold is (extremely) volatile and currency inflates.
Well, you can't do much to correct for the speculation noise in gold. But maybe we can attack from the other side. Maybe we could record prices for various representative products in a giant data set somewhere and calculate and record, I dunno, a "price index" that normalizes the prices to a value that is stable over time.
I bet people would pay good money to look at a chart like that. Maybe we could find one.
Unfortunately Goodhart's law has rendered official inflation measures borderline useless, as anyone who has been shopping for food for the last decade can tell you.
Taking your example in good faith: Gold is four times as expensive today as it was at this time in 2015. Has food seen a 4x increase? No, right? So gold is volatile on a level way beyond inflation. QED.
Are CPI measurements difficult? Sure. It takes a bunch of expert eggheads and a lot of shouting to come to consensus. Still better than trusting some kind of magical commodity market to tell you.
> Gold is four times as expensive today as it was at this time in 2015
easy to explain. Gold has a supply constraint. More demand causes prices to rise. When you have a currency following a heavy inflationary trend, people buy Gold, so the price of Gold goes up.
People buying gold speculatively as an inflation hedge is exactly the opposite of gold being a source of stable value, though. Gold is "inflating" far, far faster than currency (edit to clarify: far faster than currency-valued goods; gold "interpreted as" a currency is deflating catastrophically), you just pointed it out!
There are a shocking number of gold-happy nerds on this site who are going to be shocked and horrified the next time it crashes (which is has, and will again). The nonsense the largely-partisan smarter-than-thou media you're watching is feeding you is nonsense, and at some point you're going to discover that via great suffering.
You don't even need to trust CPI alone when looking in history, where things have evened out a bit: we have historical short-term bond yield data, even the yield curve: people bidding on short periods with the safest debtor expecting changes in nominal value.
Not to suggest CPI is redundant, there's a reason why central bankers read it after all. For one, it's the most timely data they have. But it's impossible to nudge it year after year -- accumulative error -- without it become obviously decoupled from other data, including the long-term bond market data. It just so happens commodities are the wrong yardstick.
> The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is.
Their investors surely do (absent outrageous fraud).
> For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter.
If they were, their investors would be freaking out (or complicit in the resulting fraud). This seems unlikely. In point of fact it seems like they're playing commodities market-cornering games[1] with their excess cash, which implies strongly that they know how to spend it even if they don't have anything useful to spend it on.
> For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter.
Right, this is nonsense. Even if investors wanted to be complicit in fraud, it's an insane investment. "Give us money so we can survive the AI winter" is a pitch you might try with the government, but a profit-motivated investor will... probably not actually laugh in your face, but tell you they'll call you and laugh about you later.
> ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there
This really is the critical bit. A year ago, the spin was "ChatGPT AI results are better than search, why would you use Google?", now it's "Search result AI is just as good as ChatGPT, why bother?".
When they were disruptive, it was enough to be different to believe that they'd win. Now they need to actually be better. And... they kinda aren't, really? I mean, lots of people like them! But for Regular Janes at the keyboard, who cares? Just type your search and see what it says.
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Note that you should never buy raw cells from Amazon. They are always fake or under-spec. At the very least, this seller claims "Multiple Protections" when this is a fully unprotected cell.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
FWIW, this is definitely the opinion among Ego tool users on reddit. The aftermarket stuff comes with a discount and the possibility of a free surprise inside every box.
> The replacement will probably be a multinational currency with strictly controlled quantity tied to [...] probably [...] gold.
This is econolibertarian fan fiction. Literally no one wants that except people already involved in speculating[1] on gold. Are there bad externalities to relying on a unlitaterally controlled reserve currency? Yes. Are they made better by handing financial control over to a bunch of fucking mine and vault operators? Let's be real, here.
Basically this idea appeals to people who've convinced themselves they can get rich betting on financial policy and stay rich by burying their loot in their metaphorical backyard.
[1] The very fact that such speculation even exists should be a triple exclamation point red flag on any argument about hard currency, but alas no.
SDR valuations were tied to gold when the USD was still gold-based. Needless to say Bretton Woods didn't survive that transition at all. Again, it was a failed (!) experiment, not a recipe to try again. Believing otherwise is fan fiction.
> Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing.
"All the other players" aren't deliberately tuning their AI to reflect specific political ideology, nor are all the other players producing Nazi gaffes or racist rhetoric as a result of routine tuning[1].
Yes, it's true that AI is going to reflect its internal prompt engineering and training data, and that's going to be subject to bias on the part of the engineers who produced and curated it. That's not remotely the same thing as deliberately producing an ideological chat engine.
[1] It's also worth pointing out that grok has gotten objectively much worse at political content after all this muckery. It used to be a pretty reasonable fact check and worth reading. Now it tends to disappear on anything political, and where it shows up it's either doing the most limited/bland fact check or engaging in what amounts to spin.
They didn't, though? The multiracial founding fathers thing was a side effect of what one assumes is pretty normal prompt engineering. Marketing departments everywhere have rules and standards designed to prevent racial discrimination, and this looks like "make sure we have a reasonable mix of ethnicities in our artwork" in practice. That's surely "bias", like I said, but it's not deliberate political ideology. No one said[1] "we need to retcon the racial makeup of 18th century America", it was just a mistake.
[1] Or if they did, it's surely not attested. I invite links if you have them.
That's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
They should be covered as an aggregation, provided the LGPL was intact.
The contention is that the ffmpeg code was "cut and pasted" without attribution and without preserving the license (e.g. the LGPLv2 LICENSE file). Obviously I can't check this because I don't have a clone and the repository is now blocked behind the DMCA enforcement. But at least Github/Microsoft seem to agree that there was a violation.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. DMCA takedown enforcement is 100% the responsibility of the Online Service Providers per statute. It's the mechanism by which they receive safe harbor from liability for hosting infringing content.
Yes, but Microsoft/Github do not make any determination about the validity of the claim.
Once a valid (from a process perspective) claim is submitted, the provider is required to take the claimed content down for 10 days. From there the counter claim and court processes can go back and forth.
Could there have been other / better moves with sending a reminder.
I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution.
Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
> ... the offending repository maintainers were informed of the problem almost 2 years ago ([private]), and did nothing to resolve it. Worse, their last comment ([private]) suggests they do not intend to resolve it at all.
Seems like the reporter gave them a lot of time to fix the problem, then when it because obvious (to them) that it was never going to be fixed they took an appropriate next step.
That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.
Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.
To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications
It's a call to push the devs to freely say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc, nothing much, these questions are deliberately open.
Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
> - Rockchip's code is gone
> - FFmpeg gets nothing back
> - Community loses whatever improvements existed
> - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
The OP deleted that sentence and I don't think it should have be flagged and unseen by others so I have vouched for it. I understand a lot of people disagree with it, and may downvote it but that is different to flagging. ( I have upvoted in just in case )
He offer perspective from a Chinese POV, so I think it is worth people reading it. ( Not that I agree with it in any shape or form )
You are right, and the FFmpeg devs are also 100% right and I perfectly understand that.
In fact I like the idea to push the big corps and strongly enforce devs' rights.
I think earlier enforcement would have been beneficial here, just that dropping a bomb after 1 year of silence and no reminder (and we still don't know if that was the case), is a bit unpredictable, so I wanted to raise that question
There hasn't been a year of silence. Multiple people from the community have continued bugging Rockchip to address the matter in a public issue on the now-gone Github repo. The idea of a potential DMCA claim was also brought.
All they could say was "we are too busy with the other 1000s chips we have, we will delay this indefinitely".
If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins
The notes in the linked article are presumptively-legible notes made in good faith, just not with enough detail for someone-who-is-not-the-author to understand . AI training sets are much broader than mere human intuition now.
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