My right to flag comments was previously unfairly taken away from me. Maybe if I still had this right, I would've just flagged and moved on, but I didn't have this right. I don't even know why it was taken away.
If "Condolences, he seems to have been a principled person" is flaggable to you, then I think you may be letting some very strong beliefs or biases cloud your judgement.
Oh it's only the "thoughtful" part that is flaggable to me. The rest is fine.
Think about it... this dude allegedly died by suicide letting his beliefs and his hate of AI cloud his judgment (because he didn't get his way of crushing OpenAI).
Even thoughtful people can be wrong, make mistakes, or have lapses in judgement. Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws.
Edit: Heck, even by definition, "thoughtful" doesn't mean "accurate". You can put a lot of thought and consideration into something and still end up with a different viewpoint than your neighbor. That's okay, that's life.
Edit 2: "Didn't get his way"? He was part of an ongoing trial that hadn't concluded yet, so it hadn't been decided whether or not he "got his way". Setting that very obvious fact aside, we have no idea what he actually wanted or hoped for here, or from in life in general, or why he made this final decision, and to suggest otherwise is about as "thoughtful" as you insinuate he was.
The word "thoughtful" can carry different meanings. It can have a literal meaning (as in "deliberate") which you resonate with, and a different meaning (as in "solicitous" toward AI) that I resonate with. Neither meaning is wrong.
Oof, are you using a thesaurus to determine the definition of a word? That's what a dictionary is for; a thesaurus is a list of words that have similar or opposite meanings. But within that, there are varying degrees of how similar/different words can be.
In point of fact, Merriam-Webster doesn't mark "solicitous" as having the strongest degree of similarity to the word, which means we can't easily conflate the two because they're not quite the same thing. Further, for the "solicitous" word you cherry-picked, it says that thoughtful means "given to or made with heedful anticipation of the needs and happiness of others".
That means that for the sake of the conversation with regard to the decedent, the word "thoughtful" as used by GP is still very vague. He thought about other people, simple as that.
Preceding the use of that word as an example, it clearly says "having thoughts" as the definition. Between the blog he posted, the interview he gave, and the fact that he was assisting an active investigation, I'd say that he both "had some thoughts" and "heeded AI".
Again, we're back to the fact that you're suggesting that it's cool to flag a simple "condolences" comment just because you disagree with how the decedent viewed the world.
If I had seen the thesaurus and dictionary links before posting, I would not have posted at all. I however maintain that this guy failed to see the big picture of AI, letting his judgment get clouded by a stupid IP law that serves capitalist publishers at the expense of the people. I speculate that he let this hate of AI bother him so much that he could no longer live. Extinction is the fate that awaits all those who come in the way of AI.
> Not that thoughtful. Copyright law is mostly harmful. Apparently he couldn't realize this simple conclusion.
If that's what you think about copyright law, someone here isn't thoughtful, and it wasn't him.
Intellectual property law is sort of like vaccines: so successful at solving the problems it was originally meant to solve, that many people lack the experiences with those problems to even realize its value, and even come to oppose it for that reason (e.g. the only way someone's going to freak out about rare vaccine-derived paralytic polio is if they have no experience with wild paralytic polio, which is much worse).
That's not to say intellectual property law is perfect, hasn't been exploited, or isn't in need of some reforms.
Yeah - what Disney does with the mouse is egregious, but if I write a book or creating painting I'd like to not have a thousand imitators xeroxing away any potential earnings.
> It is nothing like vaccines. Zero. I can easily imagine a thriving world without copyrights, but I cannot without vaccines.
For the record, the world can and did thrive before vaccines were invented, so you don't have to imagine it. Sure there was more sickness and death, but we have plenty of that now, and I doubt you'd consider today's world "not thriving."
But ok, then. Imagine that world without copyrights for me. In detail. And answer these questions:
1. You're an author, who's written a wildly successful book in your free time. How do you get paid to become a full-time author? Remember, no copyright means Amazon, B&N, and every other place is making tons of money by printing up their own copies and sells them without giving you any royalties.
2. You've developed some open source software, and would like to use the GPL to keep it that way. Amazon just forked it, and is making tons of money off of it, but is keeping their fork closed. How do you get them to distribute their changes in accordance with the GPL?
3. You're an inventor, and you've spend years and all your savings working on R&D for a brilliant idea and you finally got it working. You don't have much manufacturing muscle, but you managed to get a small batch onto the market. BigCo saw one of your demos, bought one, reverse engineered it, and with their vast resources is undercutting you on price. They're making tons of money, and paying you no royalties. How do you stay in business? Should you have even bothered?
Regarding life without vaccines, the life expectancy could then be very low. Whether this qualifies as "thriving" is subjective. The population as a whole could still thrive, but individuals may not.
Regarding your other points:
1. That is a bad argument. Imagine that some people called collectors get to collect royalties from you every time you post a HN comment. Such collectors are paid for moderating comments. Some such collectors are wildly successful. Imagine that "commentright" law protects such people. If commentright law were to go away, how do such people get paid? (It's a fake problem, and copyright law is similarly no different.) In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.
2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license. Amazon forks only things that were open in the past, but are now no longer open. In doing so, Amazon ensures the fork stays open. There is no license violation. If Amazon is making tons of money, it's probably because the software wasn't AGPL licensed in the first place.
3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.
I try to look at the bigger picture which is the picture of AGI, of the future of humanity, not of artificial protections or even of individual success. Your beliefs are shaped by the culture you were exposed to as an adolescent. If you had grown up in Tibet, or if you had tried LSD a few times in your life, or were exposed to say Buddhism, your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.
> Regarding life without vaccines, the life expectancy could then be very low. Whether this qualifies as "thriving" is subjective.
The life expectancy would not be "very low" without vaccines. It wasn't especially before they were invented, and it wouldn't be afterwards (especially with modern medicine minus vaccines).
> In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.
All laws are "artificial." You might as well go the full measure, and say if you want to keep what's "yours" defend it yourself. Don't expect some artificial private property laws to save you.
And if writing is turned purely into a hobby of the passionate, they'll be a lot less of it, because the people who are good at it will be forced to expend their energy doing other things to support themselves (if they're a member of the idle rich).
> 2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license.
You missed the point. Copyright is foundational to the GPL: without it, no GPL. "Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license," for the same reason they don't print up their own "pirated" copies of the latest bestseller to tell, instead of buying copies from the publisher: it would be illegal.
> 3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.
It did, did it? Tell the story.
> your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.
What do you mean my "beliefs about individual greed?" Do tell.
For well over ten years now, companies like Facebook/Meta and Google have perused research code by academic and other researchers, seen what is catching on, then soon made better versions themselves. Google in particular has soon also offered commercial services for the same, outcompeting the smaller commercial services offered by the researchers. Frankly, I am glad Google does it because the world is better for it. It's the same with Amazon because frankly it's a lot of work to scale a service globally, and most smaller groups would do a far worse job at it.
My criteria for what is good vs bad is what makes the world better or worse as a whole, not what makes me better off. It is clear to me that the availability of AI triggered by GPT has made the world better, and if OpenAI has to violate copyrights to get there or stay there, that's a worthwhile sacrifice imho. There is still plenty of commercial scientific and media writing that is not going away even if copyright laws were to disappear.
Book readership (outside of school) is already very low now, and is only going to get lower, close to zero. You might be defending a losing field. An AI is going to be able to write a custom book (or parts of it) on demand - do you see how this changes things?
Ultimately I realize that we have to put food on the table, but I don't think copyrights are necessary for it. There are plenty of other ways to make money.
