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What entitles you to use force to stop me creating a copy of something?

Not me, the state. That is significantly different.

The reason is damaging someone's livelihood in the cases I mentioned. Or large scale economic damage in case you're copying money.


The fact that you use the state as a proxy changes little.

The comparison with money is interesting but not equivalent to copyright infringement. The closest valid application of the concept of counterfeit to songs, for example, would involve using them to make media and its packaging look like any original packaging, and also try to sell it as the original. If you're not doing this there's no counterfeiture.

Should it be illegal to use a general purpose computing device because it damages Tim Cook's livelihood?

Nope, foreign lobbyists in the guise of AIPAC spent record amounts to primary Thomas Massie.

OP is talking about American's here. AIPAC is made of and paid for AIPAC, like other political packs or other American groups. AIPAC is just Americans, doing the American political thing.

AIPAC is mostly funded by Zionist Jewish billionaires[1]. Characterizing this as "Americans, doing the American political thing" conflates normal Americans with Zionist Jewish billionaires. They are not the same thing.

[1] https://www.trackaipac.com/donors


The bottleneck right now isn't making hardware more powerful, it's manufacturing it fast enough. Hardware right now is expensive because of scarcity, and those with a monopoly on it have no incentive to change that.

The Chinese would love to produce AI hardware much cheaper, but are blocked from doing so because US sanctions stop a Dutch company from selling them the machines capable of doing so. Coincidentally the companies with a monopoly happen to be in the US.


To be fair, the Dutch company is built on technology that was developed by the US Government, hence why there are restrictions.

[1]https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/


Why not just use an induction motor with VFD?

As said in the parent Web page, lower energy efficiency, thus shorter range with the same battery.

Another poster has mentioned that BMW also uses EESMs instead of permanent-motor magnets.

BMW uses EESMs as the main motors, on the rear axle, while they use induction motors as auxiliary motors on the front axle.

Besides being cheaper, the induction motors have the advantage that if they are used only as auxiliary motors, you can cut the power supply to them at any time, in which case they will consume nothing.

So their lower efficiency does not matter, because most of the time they are turned off.


> Besides being cheaper, the induction motors have the advantage that if they are used only as auxiliary motors, you can cut the power supply to them at any time, in which case they will consume nothing.

EESMs have this advantage too, you can simply cut power to the field winding.


It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.

"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position."

At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.


It was.

I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.

You weren’t there.

Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises.

You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.


Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).

It’s not.

That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.

Brave engineer here.

> "Monopoly money for watching ads"

What does Firefox pay you for piping your keystrokes off to Google? BAT is a reward for your attention; far better arrangement and exchange than what has existed up to this point. It's not perfect, but what's your solution?

> "injected affiliate links"

You seem to be a little free and loose with _facts_. Rather than exchange your data for revenue, Brave explores revenue streams which won't keep us up at night. One such consideration was affiliate links. We had a couple (quite literally a couple/few), that would appear when you typed certain crypto-related keywords into the address bar. When suggestions were offered, so too would be our affiliate option.

This solution presented a means by which users could support Brave without involving their data. Unfortunately, a UI/UX bug caused the affiliate option to appear even for a fully-qualified domain, which meant a user who quickly typed a URL for which we offered an affiliate link and mashed Enter, could unintentionally have selected the affiliate option. That isn't _injection_.

The issue was identified pretty quickly, and a patch was sent out. Guess how much Brave made from the buggy behavior before it was patched? I'll help you: $0.

You can read more at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, though I must warn you ahead of time that it isn't as exciting or shocking as you might have liked.

You know what would be SHOCKING though? Imagine if Mozilla had tried to do something quite similar. Oh, wait… https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-revea....

> "installed their commercial VPN without asking"

This one is actually somewhat true. We did indeed ship an inert service for some Windows users. The goal was to have the VPN option be immediately available to users who wished to purchase it, as a means of supporting Brave. Details are in the GitHub issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726.

> "and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its 'privacy' mode."

Oh, this is one of my favorites. It's a classic story with depth, misdirection, unexpected side-effects of decisions made years in between, and more! This one is the type of thing I would have expected to read about in _Joel on Software_ many years ago.

So, we shipped a browser with a "privacy" mode, much like everybody else. But, we weren't fans of the common approach used by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others. Their approach doesn't really make you _incognito_, or _private_; it just creates an ephemeral account locally and basically does some file-system cleanup. We wanted something stronger!

As fans of the Tor project, we opted to bake-in support for Tor as an optional enhancement to private tabs. This would give you one extra, super-thick layer of incognito-ness. Tor Private Tabs were shipped back in mid 2018, and the next couple of years were pretty awesome. Brave users who enabled optional Tor support enjoyed a superior experience to that found in other popular browsers.

Years later—as the tracker wars waged on—some data-harvesters got the idea that they could evade detection by way of CNAMEs, giving them first-party privileges. So in late 2020, Brave shipped CNAME decloaking, unmasking more trackers than Mystery Inc., and dramatically expanding the privacy moat.

But the story wouldn't be all that exciting if it didn't have a twist, right!? Brave's new CNAME-decloaking didn't consider the Tor scenario, and performed DNS lookups outside of an existing proxy!

While the combination of these features didn't make Brave as porous as ordinary "incognito mode", it did punch an embarrassing hole in the Tor boundary: page traffic still went through Tor, but CNAME adblocking DNS lookups accidentally went out through the user's normal DNS path.

For that narrow slice of activity, Brave drifted uncomfortably close to what Mozilla calls "private browsing": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv... ("Private browsing [in Firefox] doesn't hide your activity from your ISP, mask your IP address or location, or stop websites from identifying or tracking you…)

> "I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there."

Let's check in again in another 5 years ;)


The airline so bad there's an entire song about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyl2tOaKxM


It can be a focusing point when someone wants to highlight the deliberate use of euphemism, removing those would be, um, unwise.

Although that is probably the less common use.


I think you’re both right. But you’re right regarding writing and your parent comment is right regarding speech.


Who is giving a robot their credit card to spin up AWS accounts?


They didn't. Sounds like they gave the robot an AWS key from an account that was already linked to a credit card.

The robot decided to spin up an expensive setup prior to getting access, so the setup was sitting there costing money whilst it did nothing.

If it had designed the setup but not spun it up until it had authorisation to join the network then it would have been much less costly an exercise.


AWS and Azure stress on spending limits you can set for each card... in their documentation !

Some gen AI and ML folks seem to see a way out to make things without reading any doc or scientific literature. Gen AI is a pretty clever bit of computing, but not witchcraft yet


That is false for AWS. There are no spending limits that stop usage and cost after some threshold.


oh my bad, thanks for the info

AWS Budget can mostly notify you indeed, and terminating instances from that isn't as straightforward as on Azure


Meta allowed an LLM to change users email address for a password reset.

Funny times are ahead...


No, you don't understand! Meta told us the LLM itself "worked properly and functioned as intended" and it was only due to a bug in a "separate code path" that made this attack possible. Don't go around blaming innocent LLMs!

(/s)


That's not needed if you happen to have a live sts session with the appropriate permissions to create a new account in an aws organization.


People who believe AI is real


People who believe AGI is real.

Just AI is real.


ML is real. Chatbots are real. “AI” is a marketing term that John McCarthy invented because he wanted more money for a summer study at Dartmouth—direct quote from him.


Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.


Only if you're writing on parchment, paper only lasts a few hundred years.


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