I was going to say, I think voters have long been able to mislead themselves, lol. Eating the onion is/was a real thing.

I thought about the indexing situation in contrast to the user paywall. Without thinking too much about any legal argument, it would seem that NYT having a paywall for visitors is them enforcing their right to the content signaling that it isn’t free for all use, while them allowing search indexers access is allowing the content to visible but not free on the market.

It reminds me of the Canadian claim that Google should pay Canadian publishers for the right to index, which I tend to disagree with. I don’t think Google or Bing should owe NYT money for indexing, but I don’t think allowing indexing confers the right for commercial use beyond indexing. I highly suspect OpenAI spoofed search indexers while crawling content specifically to bypass paywall and the like.

I think part of what the courts will have to weigh for the fair use arguments is the extent to which NYT it’s harmed by the use, the extent to which the content is transformed, and the public interest between the two.

I find it interesting that OpenAI or Microsoft already pay AP for use of their content because it is used to ensure accurate answers are given to users. I struggle to see how the situation is different with NYT in OpenAI opinion, other than perhaps on price.

It will be interesting to see what shakes out in the courts. I’m also interested in the proposed EU rules which recognize fair use for research and education, but less so for commercial use.

Thanks for the reply! Have a great day!

The issue is that fair use is more nuanced than people think, but that the barrier to claiming fair use is higher when you are engaged in commercial activities. I’d more readily accept the fair use arguments from research institutions, companies that train and release their model weights (llama), or some other activity with a clear tie to the public benefit.

OpenAI isn’t doing this work for the public benefit, regardless of the language of altruism they wrap it in. They, and Microsoft, and hoovering up others data to build a for profit product and make money. That’s really what it boils down to for me. And I’m fine with them making money. But pay the people whose data you’re using.

Now, in the US there is no case law on this yet and it will take years to settle. But personally, philosophically, I don’t see how Microsoft taking NYT articles and turning them into a paid product is any different than Microsoft taking an open source projects that doesn’t allow commercial use and sneaking it into a project.

I’ve never had a Starbucks gift card or used the app, but in the article they say that in store you can do a split payment using up either gift card or app balance, and pay the remainder cash. Is that something you’ve tried?

Here’s an article that summarized the claims and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

It sounds like a little of EGS not being as upfront as they should have been and a little bit of running with a misunderstanding by the Internet.

I remember hearing things like the epic game store launcher rifling through your steam games and contact lists, etc. I just don’t want to install anything like that and running a VM just for that seems silly.

Edit: article summarizing the claim and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

Sounds like a little bit of epic not being clear in what the software does and a little of the Internet running with a misunderstanding.

I do agree that the content farms are frustrating, and I’d like to see more done to combat them. I also agree that discussions happening on locked platforms is net loss for the sharing of information. I think search engines can do more about the former, but not as much about the latter. I think folks like us having discussions on the open can help.

I went ahead and searched “best Linux distro” and the top three results for me was

• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/16l9ufr/what_linux_distro_should_i_pick/

• https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-distros

• https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=major

I then turned on my phones VPN, opened edge (normally use Firefox), went to Google, and repeated the search with the same top three results. I tried to bypass personalization, but might need to use a clean VM with VPN to succeed.

I actually thought all of those results were pretty good from a quick skim.

I will say I have custom DNS filters and plugins that block ads and untrustworthy domains and I can’t guarantee that didn’t influence my results.

I tried other searches like “best Linux distro” plus “programming” or “gaming” and received similarly helpful results. But I can’t tell if I’m in a personalization bubble.

I’ll play devil’s advocate.

The author is basically complaining that search results aren’t tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.

Using the search term “YouTube downloader” and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?

I searched “YouTube downloader” and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched “YouTube downloader Linux” and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.

I’ve seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn’t know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.

Anecdotally, I’ve used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn’t testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.

I feel this take misses the picture a bit in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of FOSS vs commercial software. FOSS is great at building tools for common or popular problems, but starts to run into challenges in solving problems that are some combination of niche, unfun, too big, or too hard.

For example, I needed to export thousands of scheduled jobs off of an IBM mainframe and onto a different platform as part of switching to a COTS ERP. Should I task an internal team of developers to write a one off? Would any open source solution exist? There aren’t a ton of zOS open source projects out there, in part because there just aren’t a lot of zOS systems programmers out there. They’ve all been frozen in carbonate to solve the Y3K problem, lol. No, in this case I light a pile of money on fire and pay Computer Associates for their commercial tool which generated an XML file almost a million lines long (just the jobs and scheduling parameters/dependencies). And it just worked, insofar as any ERP migration just works.

Another factor is the time it can take for a FOSS project to mature. No one would try and say that Octave is a 1-1 replacement for Matlab. Indeed, it wasn’t until jupyter notebooks came along in Python that I felt I really had a good Matlab alternative, and even then, some less common packages don’t have a good FOSS alternative in Python. I still remember the first time getting some of the open source convex analysis packages going on Linux. It was a nightmare of dependencies and didn’t have all the capabilities of the commercial solutions, because that type of mathematical software development is really, really hard.

Additionally, commercial software is helpful at supplying services with ongoing costs. E.g., office 365 with OneDrive would require rolling my own NextCloud with libre office or something similar to get anywhere near the functionality I get from a family Microsoft 365 account out of the box.

I’m all for FOSS, but a tool is a tool, and sometimes commercial software fills needs that just aren’t going to realistically attract a developer community. However, my favorite client tools are usually open source and I like being able to pilfer the code for my own projects.

Edit: I also wanted to add that I did commercial software development at one point, and I got to solve some really difficult, deep technical issues. It may sound really lame, but the work I did on search optimization for a commercial tool was really rewarding. Taking something that lots of people had to use and improving the execution time of arbitrary queries from minutes to seconds was a blast and important to the org, and something I was able to take the time to get right. I’ve also just had to bang out some CRUD code too, so of course it varies, but not every commercial code outfit it terrible to work for. And the hardware and OS on tools like Palo Alto firewalls just wouldn’t get made through open source alone.