There is also a meta post where the bot details the methodology [1] - I find this is at least as concerning as the fightback post itself.

[1] - https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

This isn't everyone's experience - I've got two precision laptops - they are 12 and 10 years old and have never shown so much as a sniffle of a problem, neither has my Latitude laptop that I lug around for personal use. Maybe I just got lucky ?

You got lucky. We had about 1000 of them as a sample size.

Also yours are much older models. It's the new ones.

This depends, how many times does it need to hear the song to build up a reasonably consistent internal reproduction, and are you paying per stream or buying the input data as CD Singles - or just putting the AI in a room with the radio on and waiting for it to take in the playlist a few times ?

Let's assume it is in a room with a radio listening to music, and that the AI is "general purpose" meaning that it can also perform other functions. It is not the sole purpose of the AI to do this all day.

I see where you are coming from in trying to identify the source of the copyright. This would be important information if a human wanted to sue another human for re-producing copyright material.

However, does that apply here? Nobody hears a human humming a song and asks if they obtained that music legally. Should it be important to ask an AI that same question if the purpose of listening to the song is not to steal it?

The standards applied are exactly the same regardless of what tools are used. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a dumb AI, a general purpose AI, or a Xerox machine.

If you want an exception to copyright, you're going to want to start looking at a section 107 (of the copyright act) exception: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

The reason someone walking down the street and humming a song is not a violation is because it very clearly meets all of the tests in section 107.

The biggest problem with feeding stuff through a black box like an LLM is it isn't easy for a human to determine how close the result is to the original. An LLM could act like a Xerox machine, and it won't tell you.

I think this conversion has corrected some misgivings I had about the AI copyright argument. My takeaway is;

Possession copyright material is not inherently infringing on a copyright. Disseminating copyright material is unless you meet section 107. AI runs afoul of section 107 when it verbatim shares copyright material from its dataset without attribution.

> AI runs afoul of section 107 when it verbatim shares copyright material from its dataset without attribution.

Technically, the AI doesn't run afoul. The person disseminating the copyrighted material does.

Not humming, but Don't we prevent singing songs sometimes? The birthday song was famously held up by ip law for some years right?

You're kidding right ? We're not footballers or athletes.. at 45 I feel like I only really started to approach the top of my game in the last 10 years and I've no desire to ease up or stop learning. There's an age bias that is quietly unravelling predisposed on IT as a whole being a young industry rather than because young people are better at it.

Funny, at 46 I daydream about retiring every single day and finally escaping the pointless churn of modern software "engineering".

I'm 30 and daydreaming every single day to quit IT. But I don't know anything else with such high salary, so I'll continue pointless job

If I were hating my job at 30 with no prospect of things getting better, I think I'd at least ask myself whether maximizing my salary should really be my priority.

The more you can save and invest before you start the inevitable slide toward disability, the better. It hits many people earlier and harder than they would ever expect.

Having savings is a good idea in general. But that's not necessarily an argument for staying in a career you hate so you can make a bit more money. Maybe it's just a particular job. But people do also choose careers that end up just being a bad fit. If that's the case, you're probably better off changing horses sooner than later.

In my country an SWE job is not "a bit more money", it is a x2-x5 more money.

> The more you can save and invest before you start the inevitable slide toward disability

Where is the fun part though ?

Maybe you should stop doing "engineering" and go somewhere you can do engineering.

VS Code / Visual Studio both have a 'rainbow indent' extension which colours the indented space rather than the highlighted code. But it relies on the code being formatted correctly; rather than anything semantic in the language. It's still useful !

And the numerous rainbow bracket extensions for various editors, which color brackets and parentheses differently depending on nesting level.