So, firstly, you have split the particle 5 times. That's not infinite times. You can split it more, so that would be 6 times. And more. Even if you could split it 1000 times, that's not infinity.
The standard argument for infinity is that "you can always add 1 to any number, so there must be an infinity of them", and the refutation is that no matter how many times you add 1 to a number, all you've done is create a larger number. You never reach the point of actual infinity, no matter how long you keep doing this. You need to have infinite time in order to create an infinity by adding 1 to each number, so you're starting with the axiom that infinity exists (because you need an infinite number of operations to actually create an infinity). If you don't start with that axiom, then you can never reach infinity by addition (or any operation).
Time has nothing to do with it. There are an infinite number of ways to divide anything. You don’t need time to prove that. Whatever number you think of you can divide by a larger number.
> But in the late 1800s, Georg Cantor and other mathematicians showed that the infinite really can exist.
I think, as I understand it, the objection is this. The proposition that infinity is "real", and there are actually infinite (not just very many) things.
[Citation Needed] As I understand it, the debate on whether social media is responsible for actual harms in kids is still open and ongoing. Social media has been found to do both harm and good for kids, and for some kids the good outweighs the harms [0]. Scientists are hoping to get some verification from the actual social experiments that we're conducting in the UK and Australia on this.
Mandating OS-level age verification effectively means not allowing kids access to OSS platforms, a step way too far in my opinion. For instance, we would have to outlaw Steam Decks for kids.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12165459/
"Social media and technological advancements’ impact on adolescent mental health is complex. It can be both a risk factor and a valuable support system. Excessive and problematic use has been linked to increased rates of MDD, anxiety, and mood dysregulation, while also exacerbating symptoms of ADHD, bipolar disorder, and BDD. Simultaneously, digital platforms provide opportunities for social connection, peer support, and mental health management, particularly for individuals with ASD and those seeking online mental health communities. The challenge is finding a balance. Although social media offers benefits, it also poses risks like addiction, negative social comparison, cyberbullying, and impulsive online behaviors"
> Social media has been found to do both harm and good for kids, and for some kids the good outweighs the harms
Indeed. For example, the strongest evidence for harm shows that negative mental health is correlated with increasing social media use, but it's an important question of whether using social media more causes mental health problems, or mental health problems mean more social media use (or both, which would suggest a spiraling effect is important to look out for and prevent).
> Mandating OS-level age verification effectively means not allowing kids access to OSS platforms, a step way too far in my opinion. For instance, we would have to outlaw Steam Decks for kids.
This is entirely false scare tactic nonsense, and you really need to look at where you sourced that idea and no longer use them as a reference point. There isn't even a concept of a method of doing this that would make that true, and certainly not in any of the implementations being considered in the US. The federal bill is called the Parents Decide Act, if it gives you some idea where the goal in decisionmaking is supposed to be.
We have not just woefully bad parental controls, but in the name of privacy, modern platforms make it exceptionally hard to implement parental controls. What is being pushed here is largely a mandate that a system for parents to control what their kids can reach needs to exist and Internet companies need to support it.
(Steam is, FWIW, probably one of the best actors in this regard already, Steam Family is incredibly nuanced in the features and tools it gives parents. I have a lot of gripes about Steam but this is not a place they will have difficulty complying with the law. Heck, Steam is better at parental controls than Nintendo and Disney).
> There isn't even a concept of a method of doing this that would make that true, and certainly not in any of the implementations being considered in the US. The federal bill is called the Parents Decide Act, if it gives you some idea where the goal in decisionmaking is supposed to be.
The Parents Decide Act (PDA) goes considerably farther than superficially similar sounding laws like California's.
The California law requires that an OS allow the parent or guarding to associate an age or birthdate with the account when setting up a child's account on a device that will primarily be used for the child. It does not require any verification of the age information that the parent provides.
The PDA requires that the birthdate be provided for anyone who has an account on the device, and leaves much of the details up to the Federal Trade Commission to work out in the first 180 days after is passed. The wording of the list of things the Commission is to do suggests that the OS is supposed to actually verify age information, rather than just accept whatever a parent enters when setting up the child's device and account, and that it also has to verify that it will require the birthdate of the parent and verify that.
The California bill, which is not called the Parents Decide Act, lets parents decide. The federal Parents Decide Act doesn't say whether parents can decide or not - it says a commission shall decide whether parents shall be able to decide, and we can predict what that commission will decide.
A Steam Deck is just an Arch Linux box. There is, intentionally by by design, no method of securing it against its user. Anyone with root access can change anything on it. There is no method of enforcing an age verification scheme on it in a way that cannot be removed or altered by a sufficiently bright and motivated teenager.
the conclusion from that discussion was that kids should not be allowed Steam Decks because that would provide them a way of getting around age certification.
Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.
Copyright works on derivative rules - is the component of the work unmistakenly derived from another copyrighted work.
Under at least EU AI Act, any work done by AI is not granted copyright. But it does not mean copyright does not apply, it means the amount of work credited to AI is set at 0% (simplification). A human working off another's work unless it's perfect copy will have "credit" for changes that are judged creative/transformative, meaning a human plagiarizing something still can claim to have some degree of authorship. An AI won't.
In a sense, the copyright status of final work is a sort of "sum with dilution" were each work involved adds to claims, but AI's output is set at 0 - the prompt or further rework by human is not.
As for employer, details vary but generally "work for hire" rules and contracts do reassignment of material rights (in EU and some other places you can not reassign moral rights which are a different thing).
When you write code by hand, you are the author. As part of your contract with your employer you grant copyright and authorship to your employer by default (as stated in the contract).
The LLM is not employed by you or your employer, because you can't enter contracts with non human or non human organizations.
When you license a non-LLM code generation service (like a page that creates a website for you), that company owns the copyright of the generated website because their deterministic system generated code by defined rules and mechanisms that were defined by the code generation system. Assuming no LLM as part of that, there is no code that is generated by the system outside of the rules that they defined (it's not filling in the blanks that you or the code generation system didn't explicitly define).
Since they own the copyright of the website, they can then assign the copyright and authorship to you because of your license agreement to them.
Since the LLM is filling in the blanks on its own in undefined ways, it is the author and not Anthropic/OpenAI/ETC. That means that even though you have a license agreement with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.. to transfer copyright, they didn't have copyright/authorship, the LLM did. And since the LLM can't legally own copyright/authorship (since it isn't a human) then it can't grant it to you and you can't then grant it to your employer.
yeah this is what I understand - that it's the copyright ownership that is being transferred. But if there's no copyright to transfer, what does the company end up owning?
I think what this means is that the employee may not be the copyright owner for multiple reasons, which are possibly applicable simultaneously. It does not imply that the employer owns copyright over the work that is in public domain, which would be a contradiction.
I would like to include some dynamic content in my documents. Could we include some kind of simple scripting language?
Maybe call it something like that really popular, Java language? But of course, have it share no concepts with Java, because that would be too straightforward.
I think the point was that this is a company that is willing to pay for the work, but corporate procurement doesn't work like that.
If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive providers?
Not to mention that if the supplier isn't VAT/GST registered, the accounts department can be operationally incapable of accepting an invoice or issuing payment.
Not malicious, this is best practice for a large organisation that needs to prove that it is not doing fraud. But it does present a huge obstacle to buying from small organisations, startups, and one-person OSS maintainers.
Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?
I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions.
One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departments negotiate/demand looong invoice payment deadlines).
That still leaves more problems - like the sales cycle, it can take two years or more for a large corp to go from an "we want to buy this" from a department head to an actual purchase order from procurement. You could short-cut that if you were already an approved supplier, and had a team who knew the process and could respond much more quickly to the insane amount of bureaucracy involved.
You'd need to be large (large corps hate buying from small companies), well-funded (so there's no argument that you'll run out of funds, or not be able to compensate them if something goes wrong), heavily insured (see above), with a team who knows their way around everything that a large procurement department could throw at you. You could pro-actively try getting on the approved suppliers list for every large corp in a sector, and then advertise your services to OSS/startups/small corps, who would be your customer.
Dayuum!!! I guess then we should focus only on making that "pay something to this OSS developer" easy.. everything else still stays the same... no guarantees, no offloaded liabilities, no expedited timelines, etc.
I'm not sure making the payment part easy is going to help that much. The ideal, of course, is to get the cost under the departmental discretionary budget; most large corps allow small purchases to go through with less oversight.
Atlassian managed to do this during their initial B2D selling-to-devs stage, so it might be worth reading up how they did it.
> Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity
This is a major difference between US and Euro workplaces that I have noticed. In the USA, there is plenty of time for chat with colleagues, and everyone stays at work longer. In Euro workplaces it tends to be more focused on work and then everyone goes home at 5.
The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.
I've worked with German colleagues who were ex-large-consultancies and they all said the same thing about working in the USA; that Americans spend a lot of their day chatting and stay in the office much longer. It drove the Germans crazy, "they would be so much more efficient if they just stopped talking and did the work!".
I'm not holding Europe up as an example to emulate; I don't think Europeans are that much happier at the moment, particularly the UK, but I wanted to push back on this idea as work == social space.
> The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.
I want to call out that while generally, Irish working hours are pretty capped, most people at most companies definitely don't go to the pub at 5pm. I am Irish, and work in Ireland (but mostly for multinationals) so 5pm pub time (unfortunately) doesn't work when you need to talk to California.
Additionally, I normally agitate for the whole 8 and only 8 hours of work, as lots of professional people in Ireland are quite driven (or people pleasing) and tend to work longer hours.
That being said, there are some employers where this definitely is a thing (particularly on Thursday or Friday), but it's 100% not the standard.
I've only worked at this one place in Ireland, so there was definitely a tendency to say "the Irish" when I actually only knew "this one workplace in Ireland". Thanks for the clarification :) From now I'll preface it with "it's not the norm, but I worked at this one place in Ireland where...".
> I've only worked at this one place in Ireland, so there was definitely a tendency to say "the Irish" when I actually only knew "this one workplace in Ireland".
To be fair, this does happen a lot if there are visitors to the office. I can certainly believe everyone going out in that case. Alternatively, if the team is pretty young and single this would definitely happen. When I worked at FB there was a big drinking culture (not just in Ireland), so again I'd believe it of there.
So, firstly, you have split the particle 5 times. That's not infinite times. You can split it more, so that would be 6 times. And more. Even if you could split it 1000 times, that's not infinity.
The standard argument for infinity is that "you can always add 1 to any number, so there must be an infinity of them", and the refutation is that no matter how many times you add 1 to a number, all you've done is create a larger number. You never reach the point of actual infinity, no matter how long you keep doing this. You need to have infinite time in order to create an infinity by adding 1 to each number, so you're starting with the axiom that infinity exists (because you need an infinite number of operations to actually create an infinity). If you don't start with that axiom, then you can never reach infinity by addition (or any operation).
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