Oh, I don’t think any court would rule that using LLM generated code automatically infringes on the copyright of everyone whose text was used to train it, independently of the degree of similarity between the generated output and the original text(s).

But LLMs have a habit of sometime, and not too infrequently either, reproducing parts of their training material verbatim, as their output. As long as it’s only sufficiently small “snippets” of text or code, it’s unlikely to raise significant copyright concerns - but the fact is that it’s not actually that rare that an LLM will replicate larger sections of text from its training material, spanning across many lines. What’s more, LLMs don’t advise you of this, when their output is a replica of a significant part of an already-existing, copyrighted text. But you’ll be infringing on somebody’s copyright, whether you know it or not, irregardless of whether you aquired the text from an LLM or elsewise. That’s a big liability to accept in a large project, that frequently uses LLM-generated code. It would be a minefield.

This isn’t a matter of grammar, though. It’s simply that these are two things that mean the opposite of each other. A negated sentence, that is, a sentence with the word the word “not” added to it, tends to mean the opposite of the original sentemce. Compare these two example sentences:

I like pancakes.

I do not like pancakes.

Or these two examples:

I could swim across.

I couldn’t swim across.

In the same way, the sentence “I could care less” means the opposite of the expression “I couldn’t care less”. But due to how similar they sound, “I could care less” has, for a long time, been a common mistaken way to invoke the usual expression of “I couldn’t care less”. But they are not interchangeable, as they literally mean the opposite of each other due to the difference of “could” vs. “couldn’t” (contraction of “could not”). When you say “I could care less”, you are actually saying the exact opposite of what you most likely intend.

Perhaps it helps to break down each sentence in your head, as if you had just heard them for the first time, and try to make yourself conscious of what each of them actually means and expresses at their most basic. I’m sure you will find that only “I couldn’t care less” actually expresses a sentiment of “not caring” about something, whereas “I could care less” says that you actually do care about something, but is unclear about whether you care a lot or only a little.

Sorry if I’m overexplaining here, I’m just trying to find the words that best make it make sense to you. :)

On top of that, regardless of however you feel about AI, there are so many questions about copyright and ownership here, that as-of-yet remain untried and unanswered by the courts, that it’s essentially impossible to know what the legal ramifications will turn out to be, when accepting “AI code” in your project. I definitely fear that it could turn out to be a sort of trojan horse against especially the GPL, and other copyleft licenses. I conaider it to be risky to use AI code, on that basis alone.

I absolutely agree. What good is retribution, in the face of all the untold future injustices and suffering that could be prevented by allowing dictators and their ilk to simply… stop being dictators?

At the end of the day, “just desserts” really aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be. Tasty as they may be, they are just desserts. Have a strudel or a pudding instead.

I just want a picture of a gawd dang hot dog!

Indeed, but Helium is the new kid on the block. What might surprise you more is how many people won’t have any idea what “a Firefox” is.

Calling it a “major” browser in the first place is pretty disingenuous by this article, when the popular usage metrics clearly show it to be a niche, if not obscure, choice of browser. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude more users than Firefox.

But things get truly silly when other niche/browsers are ignored in that same breath. Chrome has more than an order of magnitude larger userbase than Brave, too, but like with Firefox, it’s still less than two orders of magnitudes of difference. And while Firefox has a few times more users than Brave, there’s nowhere near an order of magnitude’s worth of difference either. Meaning, while they are not equivalent in size, they are certainly comparable.

If Firefox is a “major” browser, then Brave would have to at the very least be considered a “big” player, too. And we all know it ain’t a big player - not by a long shot.

You think that’s a safety boot you’ve got there? It’s anything but! It is clearly the bottommost part of a certain powered hazmat suit - why, it’s a Hazard Boot! You’ll need to ask one of the egg heads whether Secure Boot is a part of its boot sequence, though.

Poor Gordon Freeman, running around out there somewhere, with just one Hazard Boot. I guess you’ll find that his other leg is running with Insecure Foot, then.

Coming from XP, 7 felt like an upgrade, but I wouldn’t say I was enamoured. Peak Windows for me was 2000, and while it probably lacks more useful modern features than I recall, I definitely still think it’s the best looking, and the visually most well put together version of Windows there has ever been.

I love Linux, and I love how it has managed to bring back, or even surpass, the enjoyment and the sense of wonder and possibilities, that I used to feel in regards to computer use, back then. And I love how it enables me to install, create and customise any graphical elements of the desktop environment to my liking. One of the first things I managed to do, after switching to Linux, was, in fact, to convert my desktop into a very convincing Windows 2000 look-alike - just looking at the desktop, I doubt many people would have been able to tell that it wasn’t actually the real McCoy. Nowadays, though, I wouldn’t want my desktop to look like Windows of any variety. I use a few different styles, depending on mood, that are all either replicas of other, real desktop environments from the 90’s, or they’re imaginary “fantasy desktops” from the 90’s of an alternate reality. I love that can just do that, not just because I love that particular aesthetic, but also because it is SO much more usable for me. The current trends in visual design, aren’t just off putting to me, it’s difficult and straining to parse too, what with the contrasts that are all out of whack, and lines and outlines all but seemingly banned, and with all the drop shadows and the transparency effects, and things fading and sliding around everywhere all the time, it’s just so much visual noise, and it makes my head hurt. The late 90’s is when GUIs and the graphical part of UX were at their peak, in terms of usability and readability, if you ask me. It’s sad to me that almost every type of design since has seemingly been a direct or indirect rejection of that period. I wonder how much better GUIs could be, if they had stuck with all the things that worked well from back then, and had then continued to build off of that.

Sorry I think I went off on a tangent there.

As for 7 being the peak in terms of usability, what with some of the features it had over earlier versions, you may be right. I think 7 was the first version that had indexed searches, or at least had them enabled by default, and I remember how good that felt, experiencing it for the first time. But wasn’t 10, on release, pretty equivalent to 7, really? IIRC, much of its dark patterns, ads, spyware and enshittification was only added gradually over its lifetime, wasn’t it? Going by memory, I think I even appreciated the minor facelift it got, as it seemed essentially like the same thing, but with the Vista-esque/Aero-style glassy, glossy, noisy stuff gone or heavily muted and toned down, which made it much less distracting.

Is she related to Jacob Zuma, I wonder?

Are you also tired of being told that you are the one person responsible for choosing to live in a location that necessitates driving a car, or do you reckon it might be good to be told that a bit more, then?

I’m asking first, because I wouldn’t want to tire you any more, just because the world hastily on its way to hell in a hand basket, what with climate change, and all the disastrous knock-on effects that follow from it.

I hope you have a pleasant commute.

A hassle, huh?

Security questions are an idiotic type of “security”, so of course I never enable them if they’re optional, which they almost always are. As I said, I can count on half a hand how often I’ve used them in recent years.

Occasionally, though, they can be the least bad two-factor option available on a service that either requires 2FA or which makes itself, indeed, a hassle to use when you don’t have any 2FA enabled, such as by throwing captchas at you up the wazoo. If such a service only offers 2FA by email, text message or security questions, then hell yeah, I’ll take the latter option any day of the week. Needing an emailed link or code to log in, now that’s a hassle. Same deal with text messages, but with the additional benefit of them being insecure as hell. You know what’s not a hassle, though? Having one extra field auto-filled by your password manager. That’s the hassle-free option.

As for taking things seriously or not - are you really trying to tell me that you don’t have anything that’s important enough to care about keeping secure? And if not, why would you not care about keeping anything that’s important secure? Especially when it’s so easy, and indeed, hassle-free, to have that security fully automated and handled by your password manager. If your gut reaction to security is that it’s a hassle, then I’m sorry to say that you most likely have both poor security, and unnecessarily difficult or annoying-to-use security, too. Do you subject yourself to the mental load of having to remember all of your hundreds of passwords in your head? Talk about a hassle. Or do you just use the same password for everything? Now that would be a hassle, to have not just one random account somewhere compromised, but to have all of your accounts, everywhere at once, compromised.

You had to share your password over the phone? That’s asinine. And you say it was your bank, and a major one, to boot? Wow. If that’s their approach to security, I’d tell them they can just look up my password in their database, which I’d assume to be in plaintext too (and to actually just be a really big Excel sheet).

Anyway, regardless, you need some passphrases in your life! So much easier to deal with, if you ever have to share it out loud, and more importantly, a whole lot easier for you to parse and manually type, on the occasions where it can’t be auto-filled. As I said before, Correct Horse Battery Staple! :)

As long as you can choose the answer, you can also choose what the question really is. You can just decide that questions about your mum’s maiden name are actually asking you about the last name of the doctor that delivered your first born.

Or, better yet don’t tie security to personal or externally verifiable information about yourself. In the one or two cases, in recent years, where I’ve had to fill out such (in)security questions, I’ve just treated them as additional password fields, where I just create additional fields for them in my password manager, and generate long, random responses as their correct answers. Why yes, my mother’s maiden name is Correct7Horse@Battery!Staple, why do you ask?

Lynx? Hah, I must chortle in your general direction.

Elinks is the powerful, featureful and versatile, yet light, CLI browser of today. If you haven’t tried it, or if it’s been years since you’ve tried it, then I can only recommend taking it for a spin.

It even has a minimal, partial ECMAScript/JavaScipt implementation that’s optionally available, meaning that it can browse and navigate the modern web to a much greater degree than other CLI browsers, but of course with the trade-off that you’re now executing some amount of JavaScript code again, which is probably what you’re trying to escape in the first place when you’re firing up a CLI browser instead of a conventional browser.

They’re kinda kinky like that >:)

Coming from someone also without a car - KDE Itinerary is the best thing I’ve used for that purpose yet, and it’s free and open source too. Perhaps it’ll fulfill your use case too?

Huh? The UK wasn’t a founding member. They didn’t join until 1973.

Is it not possible to require Proton, Mullvad, etc. to verify your age before doing business with you?

There already is a big, thriving black market for cigarettes in the EU country I’m in, simply due to high tobacco taxes. I can only assume the same will be true for other places that tax similarly. Are you really saying that an outright ban won’t result in a greater unmet demand, and thus more customers shopping at the black markets? It sounds unlikely to me that black market dealers will close up shop, because of a ban on the legal sale of cigarettes. The black market is already banned, but that’s not exactly stopping them.

The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that’s a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.

This is by design, and it’s what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it’s a trade off.

But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won’t meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.