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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Is that intended as a legal or moral position?

    As far as I know, the law doesn’t care much if you make money off of IP violations. There are many cases of individuals getting hefty fines for both the personal use and free distribution of IP. I think if there is commercial use of IP the profits are forfeit to the IP holder. I’m not a lawyer though, so don’t bank on that.

    There’s still the initial question too. At present, we let the courts decide if the usage, whether profitable or not, meets the standard of IP violation. Artists routinely take inspiration from one another and sometimes they take it too far. Why should we assume that AI automatically takes it too far and always meets the standard of IP violation?


  • Yes but there’s a threshold of how much you need to copy before it’s an IP violation.

    Copying a single word is usually only enough if it’s a neologism.
    Two matching words in a row usually isn’t enough either.
    At some point it is enough though and it’s not clear what that point is.

    On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.

    Until now we’ve basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.

    We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to “reasonable”. In theory it’s supposed to be at a level that’s sufficient to, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

    Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?


  • nednobbins@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldI can't code.
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    1 year ago

    I’m not talking about any particular language.

    Modern programming languages are as complex as natural languages. They have sophisticated and flexible grammars. They have huge vocabularies. They’re rich enough that individual projects will have a particular “style”. Programming languages tend to emphasize the imperative and the interrogative over the indicative but they’re all there.

    Most programming languages have a few common elements:
    Some way to remember things
    Some way to repeat sets of instructions
    Some way to tell the user what it’s done
    Some way to make decisions (ie if X then do Y)

    Programmers mix and match those and, depending on the skill of the people involved, end up with Shakespear, Bulwer-Lytton, or something in between.

    The essence of programming is to arrange those elements into a configuration that does something useful for you. It’s going to be hard to know what kinds of useful things you can do if you’re completely fresh to the field.

    Python and Javascript are great. The main reasons I wouldn’t recommend them for an absolute beginner is that it takes some time to set up and, even after that, there’s a bit of a curve before you can do something interesting.
    If they go and change configuration settings in an app, they’re learning to manipulate variables.
    If they click a “do this N times” they’ve learned to create a loop.
    etc.


  • I’d actually start by playing around with the automation and customization functionality you already have. Learn to set email sorting filters, get some cool browser extensions and configure them, maybe even start by customizing your windows preferences or making some red stone stuff in Minecraft.

    Computers are just tools. Programs are just stuff you tell a computer to do over and over again. All the fancy programming languages give you really good control over how you talk to a computer but I’d start with the computer equivalent of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”