The silliest part is, they could absolutely keep milking nonsense forever. All they’d lose is exclusivity. Star Wars would be a genre, the way zombies are, thanks to George Romero’s incompetent producers. And every new detail would still be in that vice-grip for another thirty years! Winnie The Pooh is public-domain and Disney’s still gonna slit throats if anyone depicts him wearing red.

They’re scared someone might make a better Star Wars than they did.

Dunno why, when the thinly-disguised competition is Rebel Moon.

And?

Never give Nintendo money.

One: thirty-year copyright, no exceptions. Culture belongs to its audience.

Two: noncommercial use is not copyright infringement. Copyright is only a monetary incentive for new works. There is no “unpublish.” Once it’s ours, you are entitled to any money involved, for a time. Take it or fuck off.

The most anticipated release of 2013.

“Agreement” is quite a fucking twist on “threat.”

Like adding vertical tabs?

Having fucked an entire ecosystem of UI-modifying plugins, seven years prior. Still not matching the functionality of that decades-running, userbase-driven experimentation. I want my goddamn multi-row tabs back.

Mozilla doesn’t get kudos for tiny improvements as if they cancel out huge blunders. Killing vertical tabs by killing XUL also severely limited DownThemAll, and they spent a year ignoring pleas from the guy that gave their browser and their browser alone the best download plugin to-date. He eventually managed to “just rewrite!” and claw most functionality back from Chrome’s tightassed tool-kit. Most authors did not. Most authors had not, since the browser fucking launched. I can barely remember how much functionality I’ve lost, thanks to Mozilla refusing to respect plugin devs and formalize any lasting API. The best bits did come back, thanks to other authors who also missed those features… until they too burned out and fucked off.

But hey! Mozilla also made some clever tweaks inside the only software project that advertises their true passion for smartphones I mean chat I mean crypto I mean AI I mean $nextbigtrend, so it’s squaresies.

Does this count?

One bed, half bath.

“Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a mooovie.”

“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.

I would maybe not put thermal issues right in the name.

As a userscript author, it is some bullshit.

I have to admit - my initial outrage over Copilot training on open-source code has vanished.

Now that these networks are trained on literally anything they can grab, including extremely copyrighted movies… we’ve seen that they’re either thoroughly transformative soup, or else the worst compression and search tools you’ve ever seen. There’s not really a middle ground. The image models where people have teased out lookalike frames for Dune or whatever aren’t good at much else. The language models that try to answer questions as more than dream-sequence autocomplete poetry will confidently regurgitate dangerous nonsense because they’re immune to sarcasm.

The comparisons to a human learning from code by reading it are half-right. There are systems that discern relevant information without copying specific examples. They’re just utterly terrible at applying that information. Frankly, so are the ones copying specific examples. Once again, we’ve advanced the state of “AI,” and the A went a lot further than the I.

And I cannot get offended on Warner Brothers’ behalf if a bunch of their DVDs were sluiced into a model that can draw Superman. I don’t even care when people copy their movies wholesale. Extracting the essence of an iconic character from those movies is obviously a transformative use. If some program will emit “slow motion zoom on Superman slapping Elon Musk,” just from typing that, that’s cool as hell and I refuse to pretend otherwise. It’s far more interesting than whatever legal fictions both criminalized 1700s bootlegging and encouraged Walt Disney’s corpse to keep drawing.

So consider the inverse:

Someone trains a Copilot clone on a dataset including the leaked Windows source code.

Do you expect these corporations to suddenly claim their thing is being infringed upon, in front of any judge with two working eyes?

More importantly - do you think that stupid robot would be any help what-so-ever to Wine developers? I don’t. These networks are good at patterns, not specifics. Good is being generous. If I wanted that illicit network to shamelessly clone Windows code, I expect the brace style would definitely match, the syntax might parse, and the actual program would do approximately dick.

Neural networks feel like magic when hideously complex inputs have sparse approximate outputs. A zillion images could satisfy the request, “draw a cube.” Deep networks given a thousand human examples will discern some abstract concept of cube-ness… and also the fact you handed those thousand humans a blue pen. It’s simply not a good match for coding. Software development is largely about hideously complex outputs that satisfy sparse inputs in a very specific way. One line, one character, can screw things up in ways that feel incomprehensible. People have sneered about automation taking over coding since the punched-tape era, and there’s damn good reasons it keeps taking their jobs instead of ours. We’re not doing it on purpose. We’re always trying to make our work take less work. We simply do not know how to tell the machine to do what we do with machines. And apparently - neither do the machines.

Yes, after twenty years of refusing to stabilize any part of that interface.

Chrome is absolutely the villain in this context. But Mozilla has been fucking itself over since the single-digit version numbers.

Some skills are obnoxious to learn but grant immense advantage. It’s bad design. If a simple keyboard macro is such a big deal, the game should do it for all players, as a quality-of-life feature. It should be how the game works.

Nah it’s fine, we’ll just do the whole website in Shockwave.

… and that would be plausible, given the recent spate of commercial gag crossovers. Like modding has become so suppressed that all the people who’d otherwise do that had to join the industry and convince the bean-counters it’d be funny.

We’ll namedrop two comparisons in the headline, but not the game itself, no-siree!