Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggregate knowledge in the world and added a small bit of their own ideas.
I think it is bad taste to pass another's work as your own, and I believe people should be economically compensated for creating art and generating ideas, but I do not believe people are entitled to claim any "ownership" of ideas. IMHO, it is grossly egoistic.
Sure, you can't claim ownership of ideas, but if you verbatim repeat other people's content as if it is your own, and are unable to attribute it to its original creator, is that not a bit shitty? That's what LLMs are doing
If a human learns to code by reading other people's code, and then writes their own new code, should they have to attribute all the code they ever read?
Plagiarism is a concept from academia because in academia you rise through the ranks by publishing papers and getting citations. Using someone else's work but not citing them breaks that system.
The real world doesn't work like that: your value to the world is how much you improve it. It would not help the world if everyone were forced to account for all the shoulders they have stood on like academics do. Rather, it's sufficient to merely attribute your most substantial influences and leave it at that.
If a human copies someone else's code verbatim, they should attribute the source, yes. If they learn from it and write original code, no, they don't have to cite every single piece of code they've ever read
Yes, you've stated the current social and legal rule we have to follow.
But I don't think you've given any moral justification for the rule, and in particular, why LLMs (who are not humans and have no legal rights or obligations) have to follow it.
I have no stake in this FDA thing, but it's very amusing to read economic arguments of why FDA should approve something because a US company spent $x and should be entitled to get such thing approved...
Very interesting when people complain about "corruption" when money suddenly cannot buy favors.
It is a bit funny given the origins of the FDA. That said, there does need to be some legitimacy. The value of the FDA is that the rules are being applied in a fair and logical manner. This sort of unfairness because of clear bias against mRNA tech is what is gross.
By all means, if there's a good test that's lacking or clear problems that can be demonstrated I absolutely want the FDA to use it's power to stop a drug from coming to market or even pull and existing drug from the market.
The problem I have is that when the FDA acts in an illegitimate manner, it opens the doors to questions like "do we even need this institution" or "should the power of the FDA be reduced." Both of which are things that are both bad and dangerous.
The FDA doesn't need it's powers curbed, it needs competent leadership that will follow the data.
I am absolutely NOT making any economic argument for approval or that an investment beyond $x should somehow guarantee approval! They are all professionals and know the risks and how to manage them.
And NO this is not about "money suddenly cannot buy favors". This is about illegitimate denial of even a hearing because the person occupying the agency's chair promotes idiotic conspiracy theories in order to cultivate a particularly stupid slice of the voting base. The corruption here is political.
The ONLY argument I am making is:
1) The govt agency should AT LEAST give a fair review of all applications, especially when the same agency previously gave guidance, which the applicants followed, on how the studies should be run.
2) The govt agency should NOT be issuing rare "Refusal To File" denials based on an obvious and unsubstantiated bias against a particular technology (in this case mRNA) because the leader of the agency is a conspiracy theorist.
If you aren't going to read the article before commenting, at least read the comment before replying.
It seems you missed the point entirely once you saw the word "Chinese". The point isn't that the models are from China. It's that the weights are open. You can download the weights and finetune them yourself. Nobody is beholden to anything.
The main issue with novel things is that they look like random noise / trashy ideas / incomprehensible to most people.
Even if LLMs or some more advanced mechanical processes were able to generate novel ideas that are "good", people won't recognize those ideas for what they are.
You actually need a chain of progressively more "average" minds to popularize good ideas to the mainstream psyche, i.e. prototypically, the mad scientist comes up with this crazy idea, the well-respected thought leader who recognizes the potential and popularizes it to people within the niche field, the practitioners who apply and refine the idea, and lastly the popular-science efforts let the general public understand a simplified version of what it's all about.
Usually it takes decades.
You're not going to appreciate it if your LLM starts spewing mathematics not seen before on Earth. You'd think it's a glitch. The LLM is not trained to give responses that humans don't like. It's all by design.
When you folks say AI can't bring new ideas, you're right in practice, but you actually don't know what you're asking for. Not even entities with True Intelligence can give you what you think you want.
Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow stop pestering you about the why.
I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow.
On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we now know how to reduce apparent intelligence into relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training data), but that doesn't imply anything about social dynamics or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking particle physicists how we should fix the economy or something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)
In science these days, the term "Law" is almost never used anymore, the term "Theory" replaced it. E.g Theory of special relativity instead of Law of special relativity.
There is the autistic spectrum, and there is understanding of people and psychology. Autistic people might have a hard time understanding people, but it's not like everyone else is magically super knowledgable about human psychology and other people's thought patterns. If that were the case, then any non-autistic person could be a psychologist, no fancy study or degrees required!
Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic. I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the alleged hype.
Even putting aside issue of geopolitics, it's quite baffling to me that every country besides China and Russia are paying ~0.2% "sales tax" to corporate America.
Visa: 1.3% to 2.3%
Mastercard: 1.5% to 2.6%
Mastercard: 2.3% to 3.5%
Nothing precise as it depends on whether that's debit vs credit cards, and the type of card. Also volume related and what the bank may subsidize, or take on top.
The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.
A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.
*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.
The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low.
Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.
The rates I posted are the full range. Because it varies yes.
You suspect average percentage is low but try to get a payment processor agreement and see within two years what you actually pay overall. It may get even above the rates I mentioned with fix costs the jeopardy to your business when a fraud does occur and the issuer blocks you from accepting any payment, or worse, accuses you of being the fraudster.
We are well educated by the financial system and VISA/Mastercard to believe this technology is for our own good. Many in the financial industry denounces their predatory practice, that of a cartel of 2 or 3 that imposed a dictate for decades. Things are finally changing, resistance will continue but you will see QR or some alternative will settle in.
Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.
EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.
Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.
That's the full cap for "consumer cards", so cards owned by "normal people".
There are exceptions for business cards, as said in the document:
> provides for a limited number of exemptions, such as business cards used only for business expenses being charged directly to the account of the company;
These regulations were the reason that American Express pulled out of various European markets (but not all) as it became less/not profitable for them to issue their cards in those markets.
Co-branded Amex cards essentially became considered no different than 4-party cards and stopped being exempted from the cap interchange in 2018. Nothing changed for Amex proper. How would you even define interchange when it's indistinguishable from the scheme fee?
There's a reason every European PSP charges 2-4x higher fees with Amex cards.
There was a recent case of one Serbian company being sanctioned by the USA, and Visa and Master refused to process payments. No big deal, since even a small country like Serbia has its payment system called Dina that kept the company afloat.
There's not a single technical reason for bigger and richer countries to develop their own card payment system. It's not rocket science. The only reason they didn't is their regulators wanted a dependency on the USA payment processors.
I don't know for France, but in Germany, they did everything they could to reduce Girocard usage. Today, every bank offers Visa debit, but if you want Girocard, it's difficult to find a bank that offers it.
There's nothing wrong with having national cards, since >90% of transactions are national anyway. That's how German Girocard worked for decades until the coordinated push to switch to Visa Debit happened.
And the government did nothing to protect domestic payment systems. As if they value foreign dependency more than the independence.
I set up accounts in two different German banks. Both gave me girocard by default. I had to request Visa from one to attach to google wallet. I have no idea how to request Visa from the other bank.
This. And don't forget that most businesses have in their payment processing contract terms (set forth by Visa/MC ) that prevent the business from directly charging card users the card processing fees. Which means that everybody - even cash users - pay for those fees. What a racket.
I think this is one of the biggest issues here, that the EU is actually forbidding to charge credit card users the transaction fee. On the contrary, it should make it mandatory that card users have to pay the transaction fees themselves. This would automatically force card providers to reduce their fees, because nobody wants to use cards with high fees. It would also get rid of nonsensical cash-back systems.
The EU also regulated the fee to be very low, something like 0.1% of the transaction value, comparable to the implicit costs of handling cash. If it was America–style 5% then it would be a problem, but at 0.1% it's not.
The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).
Wow I didn't see that. Usually it's forbidden in the terms of agreement between the merchant and the payment processor to add a surcharge for using the card so everyone else ends up subsidising it.
Vienna/Austria is such a strange place wrt payment right now. Some places are cashless, many are cash only, many are card only above a certain amount. I had one lady running a ramen restaurant accept instant SEPA.
And it's going to be interesting tax wise when they remove the requirement for receipts on transactions under 35 EUR.
There are lots of restaurants in the US these days that charge 3% for use of any credit card. One that I've been even has a sign posted at the entrance about it, that it's legal to do so. Must have gotten a lot of complaints that it was somehow illegal, or perhaps against card processing rules. Because it's one thing to post a sign that says you charge the fee, it's another for that sign to mention the legality of it.
This has broke down in the last 5 years in the Asean region. Now most shops (that still accept cards) charges you 3-5% if you pay with Visa/Mastercard.
The crime of "conspiracy to publish seditious materials" is an unethical law and should be abolished. We can argue that point if you'd like? Furthermore, promoting self rule is not seditious, it's anti imperialist. We can argue that one as well?
The charge of colluding with foreign governments is blowing his actions way out of proportion so as to artificially inflate the severity of his "crime" for political reasons. We can argue that?
We could also argue that the reason the CPC is doing this is to suppress any Hong Kong self-determinist agitation?
Is anything I've said disagreeable on the premise of them being strawmen?
The strawman is saying " legitimate to put a 78 years old from a former democratic city forcefully reintegrated to another state in jail for 20 years because he is saying that the will of the people should be heard?" That's not even close to reality.
I don't think anything you said is a strawman though. You can of course argue whether that's right or wrong or how it fits into the greater whole. That's showing nuance. You can come to it with your own opinions and feelings but it's another thing to approach with a predetermined idea of what happened that is nothing like what happened.
Yeah and the actual strawman I tried to point out was assuming that a random person held a very specific belief of how Lai came to be imprisoned and that it was justified.
I mean, originally you only complained about the hyperbole and lack of nuances, there wasn't even anything that implied you agreed with the conviction, let alone the rationale.
Feels like you're trying to purity test. My point still is about the excess of hyperbole and lack of nuance. Whether that's "China did nothing wrong" or "Jimmy is the best person ever." Which you seem to agree with. My feelings on it are kind of irrelevant to that and much more complex than that.
Well, it is difficult to have a nuanced conversation about it, when the dialog coming from the Party itself is always hyperbole like "Make criminals like rats scurrying across the street, with everyone shouting 'Beat them!'"
Like the charges themselves seem hyperbolic to me.
Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggregate knowledge in the world and added a small bit of their own ideas.
I think it is bad taste to pass another's work as your own, and I believe people should be economically compensated for creating art and generating ideas, but I do not believe people are entitled to claim any "ownership" of ideas. IMHO, it is grossly egoistic.
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