"but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way"
What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post that is arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from another person, is that acceptable to you? Is it only acceptable if it's mechanized?
One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is basically plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course, oversimplified in the case of GenAI, but hoovering up other people's content and then producing other content based on what was "learned" from that (at scale) is what it does.
The ecological impact of GenAI tools and the practices of GenAI companies (as well as the motives behind those companies) remain the same whether one uses them a lot or a little. If a person has an objection to the ethics of GenAI then they're going to wind up with a "binary take" on it. A deal with the devil is a deal with the devil: "I just dabbled with Satan a little bit" isn't really a consolation for those who are dead-set against GenAI in its current forms.
My take on GenAI is a bit more nuanced than "deal with the devil", but not a lot more. But I also respect that there are folks even more against it than I am, and I'd agree from their perspective that any use is too much.
My personal thoughts on gen AI are complicated. A lot of my public work was vacuumed up for gen AI, and I'm not benefitting from it in any real way. But for text, I think we already lost that argument. To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots". Mind you, it pains me to write this. I just think that ship has sailed.
I think we have a better shot at making that argument for music, visual art, etc. Most of it is utilitarian and most people don't care where it comes from, but we have a cultural heritage of recognizing handmade items as more valuable than the mass-produced stuff.
I don't think that ship has sailed as far as you suggest: There are strong proponents of LLMs/GenAI, but not IMO many more than NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and other technologies that ultimately did not hit mainstream adoption.
I don't think GenAI or LLMs are going away entirely - but I'm not convinced that they are inevitable and must be adopted, either. Then again, I'm mostly a hold-out when it comes to things like self checkout, too. I'd rather wait a bit longer in line to help ensure a human has a job than rush through self-checkout if it means some poor soul is going to be out of work.
Sadly, I agree. That's why I removed my works from the open web entirely: there is no effective way for people to protect their works from this abuse on the internet.
> To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them
The way LLMss are now, outside of the tech bubble the average person has no use for them.
> on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots"
This is a bizarre argument. Humans don't "train" on books, they read them. This could be for many reasons, like to learn something new or to feel an emotion. The LLM trains on the book to be able to imitate it without attribution. These activities are not comparable.
Isn’t “visually challenged” (or similar) a useful term for people who have visual impairments, but aren’t technically blind?
Do you have the same objection to, say, “visually impaired” if a person is trying to talk about all people with various vision problems, up to being fully blind?
If those are unacceptable, what would you use in that case?
It's an attempt to whitewash the issues, and not use words which imply real problems. I prefer visually impared, however, in the US, legally blind basically says the same thing.
My gf (blind herself) recently met a teacher on a train, who told her she is working with her class to find a new word to replace "disabled". IMO, just so that she doesn't have to deal with reality. And, mind you, no disabled person around... It is just sad what some people are doing on "behalf of us", just so they don't have to grapple with the fact that some people have a harsh life.
It is hard to explain the sadness, as I also have a language barrier, english being my second language. However, believe me, I virtually know no disabled person who likes these language games. If we are amongst each other, we all agree this patronising is sad and should stop.
> It is just sad what some people are doing on "behalf of us"
I find this very frustrating. Most of the time it seems that people who do this sort of thing haven't even talked to a disabled person and asked what language offends them or makes them feel bad.
> just so they don't have to grapple with the fact that some people have a harsh life.
The cynical part of me thinks that often it's not even this; it's just virtue signaling.
Author here: It was abandoned. I linked to one of the former maintainers who said as much. The current effort is by a few people who asked the LF to take out over, and have (so far) done little after an initial flurry of activity. That, too, is covered in the other article I wrote about the FHS recently.
Prior to the group who started an update effort, it had not been touched in about a decade. That’s not slow-moving: that’s abandoned.
The FHS ultimately belongs to the users collectively, not those maintaining it. I am old enough to remember the horror that existed before the influence of the FHS. It exists in the fact that it is to some extent respected, not because there is a file somewhere that says it is the FHS standard. If you want changes, then sure, do the politics required to develop support for those changes. You can't just declare a new standard and then do whatever you want.
Developers have this thing where they will think of a standard as a specification. Instead it is a statement of political will. Saying that a standard is "abandoned" due to lack of "maintenance" seems like an example of thinking of a standard as the instantation of a specification; an actual program.
I agree--given your contraints of law and 10 years. But what about a law that hasn't been updated for 150 years? There's plenty of those that we regularly ignore.
> Even the silly confusing ones have a long life. E.g. "Rule against perpetuities"
That wouldn't be my go-to example of a silly law. It's what prevents control of property from remaining permanently with the will of a dead person who managed to own the property outright. It says that, at some point, the will can have no more influence and full ownership vests in someone who's alive.
Much of the US/UK legal system is based on common-law rules that are several hundred years old. In some cases those old laws have been codified, in some cases not, but either way there's no need to drop them just because they're old. On the contrary, laws that have stood that long without needing to be changed have demonstrated that they are extraordinarily good ideas.
I’m not sure point to the UK is a good example. There are plenty of weird and obscure laws that simply aren’t enforced or followed anymore. Everything from laws about handling salmon suspiciously, through to various right around who can drive sheep across Tower Bridge.
Those laws survive not because anyone considers them a good idea, but simply because the issues caused by ignoring them are substantially smaller than the effort involved in removing them.
We also have a bunch of laws that are still followed, but only in the most technical sense. Every “Parliament route” train schedule falls into that category. Train services that must be provided at least once a day, sometimes only once a week, which nobody actually uses, and in some cases only travel to stations with no practical public entrances. Those laws don’t survive because anyone things they’re a good idea, it’s just easier to run the train, than it is to get parliament time to abolish the law.
There is no automatic, fixed timeframe after which a law simply stops being followed because it hasn't been updated or looked at; and remember, we're still applying the FHS, it's in active use even if it's not updated.
Laws remain in force until they are formally:
* Repealed (abolished) by the relevant legislative body (Parliament, Congress, etc.).
* Struck down by a court as unconstitutional or otherwise invalid.
A 150 year "delete" timer would genuinely undermine the foundation of the legal system. Lawyers, judges, and businesses rely on the continuity of core laws (e.g., contract, property, and tax law). If a 150-year-old property law suddenly lapsed, it could instantly void millions of land titles and commercial contracts...
> Laws remain in force until they are formally: * Struck down by a court as unconstitutional or otherwise invalid.
False. They are still in force - they have just become unenforceable. There's a crucial difference, as the US is currently finding out: as long as they are in the books, a Supreme Court decision can instantly render them enforceable again - even against the wishes of the population.
The proper thing to do would be to "garbage collect" unenforceable laws, but politicians are (understandably) hesitant to spend political capital on it when it doesn't provide any tangible return.
There are other reasons as well. The body responsible for enforcing a particular law can choose not to enforce it, thereby rendering the law useless. Or a law can become obsolete by changes in technology or society - the original law legislates something that just doesn't happen any more, say. Laws can also be written to handle a specific event that only occurs once. Once that event has passed, the law might as well not exist. It doesn't need to be repealed because it just doesn't apply any more.
In addition, laws are typically regularly amended to handle new societal developments, to clarify wording, or to fit better with other laws or changes in attitudes. A law that has gone 150 years without being amended at all is probably a law that falls into the categories above and is obsolete.
Of course, all this is getting somewhat off-topic, but the point is that laws absolutely can become outdated and unmaintained, either deliberately or by happenstance. And the inverse is also true: most laws that people deal with regularly are kept up-to-date to ensure that they still reflect the needs and wills of the society they're being used in.
Obviously the intent was "Thou shall not murder anyone"... Interpreting it otherwise doesn't make sense, and is inconsistent with the rest of the Bible.
That's the wrong way to look at it. The Bible does not refer to other laws as a source of authority. Saying murder is "just" illegal killing is the real meaningless statement. Clearly people in the Bible are allowed to fight and defend themselves. Murder is typically intentional and unnecessary killing of someone else for malicious reasons (or no reason at all). Malicious reasons would typically be spite, greed, or convenience.
> The Bible does not refer to other laws as a source of authority
The Bible is the source of law here. My point was that interpreting it solely in the way you deem "obvious" does not work: you cannot have "thou shalt not murder" on its own without additional rules clarifying what counts as "murder" and what counts as "lawful killing" - and the Bible contains plenty of those.
> Murder is typically intentional and unnecessary killing of someone else for malicious reasons (or no reason at all). Malicious reasons would typically be spite, greed, or convenience.
That's how you interpret it. Modern law allows for killing out of greed - if the soldier firing the bullet is different from the politician wanting to capture some resources. We allow countries to kill out of spite with retaliatory strikes. We allow cops to kill in self-defense - even when other methods to subdue are theoretically available, but inconvenient. On the other hand, we no longer allow stoning to death people violating the Sabbath.
Clearly, there is a nontrivial list of criteria separating murder from lawful killing, and this list is mutable. In practice this list is codified in the law, which means murder becomes "killing which is not otherwise allowed in the law", which is the point I was trying to make.
Looping back to the original discussion: contrary to what ikiris was originally claiming it is not "thou shalt not kill" but "thou shalt not murder", and we've been updating the definition of "murder" (and by extent the meaning of "thou shalt not murder") quite a lot over the last few thousand years, so it is false to claim that " 'thou shalt not kill' never needs an update ".
>The Bible is the source of law here. My point was that interpreting it solely in the way you deem "obvious" does not work: you cannot have "thou shalt not murder" on its own without additional rules clarifying what counts as "murder" and what counts as "lawful killing" - and the Bible contains plenty of those.
It is obvious to people who know the Bible lol. It may have lots of contradictions but this isn't one of them. Murder was understood in a particular way to these ancient people, that still applies to us today.
>That's how you interpret it. Modern law allows for killing out of greed - if the soldier firing the bullet is different from the politician wanting to capture some resources.
As I said, I am not referring to laws of any country. The laws of modern countries are irrelevant to interpretation of the Bible. The dictionary does not count either.
>Looping back to the original discussion: contrary to what ikiris was originally claiming it is not "thou shalt not kill" but "thou shalt not murder", and we've been updating the definition of "murder" (and by extent the meaning of "thou shalt not murder") quite a lot over the last few thousand years, so it is false to claim that " 'thou shalt not kill' never needs an update ".
The only thing that needs an update is the translation. The meaning is very clear and universal. Don't kill people except in self-defense. It is just as antisocial today as it was thousands of years ago.
"Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
"and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.[a] Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy."
Lol yes... I've heard some alternative explanations of this. The Ten Commandments are not recognized outside of Christianity. They are just some important general sounding rules in a book that is full of rules for Jews, who get into battles with other people at times. Many of those rules in the same book have prescribed punishments of stoning to death, as well. So clearly, killing is at least allowed for purposes of punishment and warfare. Common sense also tells us that no religion can realistically prohibit self-defense.
"Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. 2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”"
Later on it says that he was not happy with the outcome because they didn't kill all the livestock and people... Of course this is a work of mythology, but the message clearly isn't that the Israelites should go and loot from these people.
The US constitution is still in force after 236 years, and even older laws are still enforced. US courts will sometimes look at precedent from England before the colonies existed.
Meanwhile some laws that are months old are ignored by law enforcement because nothing forces them to read it. It’s that effect which is why so many old laws are ignored rather than formally repealed. When nobody is ridding a horse nobody cares how you need to tie one up when visiting a store etc.
> The US constitution is still in force after 236 years
True, but it's been updated a lot more recently than that.
The last update was still much longer ago than 10 years, of course. The most recently ratified amendment to the Constitution - the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, ratified 1992 - was, incredibly enough, proposed in 1789 along with the ten we know as the Bill of Rights and another one which was never ratified. And of the twenty-seven amendments ratified so far, the one most recently proposed by Congress, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, was both proposed and ratified in 1971.
Are you suggesting that appending the constitution in 1992 with: No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Somehow has an impact on anything else? Because by that standard every change to any law updates all existing laws that were not changed. Or I’m just completely misunderstanding your point here.
My point is that merely referencing the centuries-old original age of a document is misleading when it’s been updated dozens of times ending just a few decades ago. (And many of the updates, including the one in 1971, have been far more impactful than the Twenty-Seventh Amendment which you quoted.)
It’s certainly true that the constitution is old and crusty overall and desperately needs an overhaul, but the discussion was about when old laws which haven’t been updated in a while are ignored or enforced.
The constitution is indeed one law, not several different laws, and it’s been updated far more recently than its original year of promulgation or ratification. And it’s still mostly enforced (with increasing exceptions but that’s another discussion entirely).
18 times. 27 total amendments with 1-10 all passing on December 15, 1791.
> a few decades ago
There hasn’t been a meaningful change in over 54 years.
> The constitution is indeed one law, not several different laws
Those recent amendments are a minimum different laws. If you want to call it one law then there’s either 2 federal laws in the US. One needs to be ratified by the states and the others don’t.
> No 18 times. 27 total amendments with 1-10 all passing on December 15, 1791.
Fair correction.
> Those recent amendments are a minimum different laws.
Only in the sense that any new enactment is a new law, but in that sense no law can be updated in a way that preserves its identity as the same law. Which is not useful for the discussion of whether an old law has or hasn’t been updated, since by that definition updates to any law are impossible.
Lawyers and judges don’t exclusively use that sense any more than programmers view a software patch as changing the basic identity (beyond something like a version number) of the patched software program.
They do use that sense when they are referring to individual enactments by Congress, just like programmers refer to patches and patch releases as well as to the things which exist across many patch( release)s over time. Which sense is useful depends on context, and which sense is meant depends on a mixture of context and exact phrasing.
> If you want to call it one law then there’s either 2 federal laws in the US.
There are far more than 2 federal laws in the US, but far fewer than one per enactment except when using the sense of “a federal law” that specifically refers to each enactment.
For example, most federal tax legislation explicitly amends the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, which is still the official name of our federal tax code. Similarly, most immigration legislation amends the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1954 (I could have the year wrong), even more than 70 years later. The many “patch” laws enacted in the meantime all have their own identities via Public Law numbers and often a name, but they do update a specific identifiable underlying law without replacing it.
Other federal laws, like most annual appropriation and authorization bills, stand alone and are not routinely updated but have a finite duration of relevance. Common provisions are often carried forward from one iteration to the next, but they are re-enacted as part of each separate iteration.
And then there are the many parts of the federal legal landscape where the US Code is the official authoritative version instead of a mere convenience version as it is for things like the tax code and immigration law. Amendments to the directly authoritative parts of the US Code explicitly amend the US Code instead of a separately named law, so those directly authoritative parts of the US Code are themselves (whether each or collectively) a single federal law in the sense I’m discussing.
Yes, this stuff is complicated and messy in both the law and the software worlds.
> One needs to be ratified by the states and the others don’t.
Yes, constitutional amendments are laws (in one sense) that amend a law (in the other sense) and which states need to ratify, and regular Acts of Congress are laws (in the first sense) that may or may not amend one or more pre-existing laws (in the second sense) and which states do not need to ratify.
> Yes, constitutional amendments are laws (in one sense) that amend a law (in the other sense) and which states need to ratify, and regular Acts of Congress are laws (in the first sense) that may or may not amend one or more pre-existing laws (in the second sense) and which states do not need to ratify.
Yea, obviously we agree with what’s going on this is just a question of arbitrary definitions that don’t impact anything.
> Which is not useful for the discussion of whether an old law has or hasn’t been updated, since by that definition updates to any law are impossible.
It’s definitely easier work with the law based on the provided organizational structures with tax code being separate from family law etc. Yay, congress is doing something reasonably efficiently.
However, timing matters as making something illegal ex post facto is explicitly banned by the constitution etc. Further, in case of conflict newer laws win even without explicitly declaring the old laws invalid. So each bill is a meaningfully different law, and there’s in effect one law at any given moment after resolving those conflicts.
Net result three mutually contradictory but still useful definitions. But IMO organizational structure is by far the least meaningful one from a legal standpoint while being the most useful one from a practical standpoint.
You mean like those local laws that say you can’t walk a cow backwards through the main streets? Or laws that say a motor vehicle must be preceded by a lamp carrier.
> The FHS ultimately belongs to the users collectively, not those maintaining it.
I completely agree that regular updates are not a requirement for standards to remain relevant, but it does require the ecosystem to still adhere to them - and the problem is that Linux users are increasingly deviating from the FHS.
The FHS does not accurately describe the situation on-the-ground, there are no plans to update the FHS to accurately describe the situation on-the-ground, and there are no plans to update the ecosystem to accurately implement the FHS.
Like it or not: the FHS is dead, and nobody seems interested in reviving it.
I still don't think you adequately explained why that would matter. To reiterate the question OP asked: what updates does it need that it hasn't been getting? It isn't as if one would expect a "put X stuff in y location" document to need maintenance.
The FHS 3.0 doesn’t reflect current practices, such as the /usr merge, nor the /sys directory. There’s other ways it’s either no longer followed or missing developments from the last 10 years.
You don't understand, or don't agree with the complaints. Those are two different things, and I suspect you understand why people are complaining and instead disagree with the complaints.
People are complaining because something was available, they adopted it, then it was discontinued. Apparently with little warning, and after they'd been encouraged to adopt it by the provider of the images.
As it happens, I agree with the general idea that if folks are not paying for the convenience of builds, then it's on them to work from source. However, it's better IMO if a vendor or project start from that position rather than what's seen as a rug-pull.
Of course, it's part of the playbook: when something is new and not widely adopted, the vendor goes to great effort to encourage adoption -- then the vendor starts looking at the paid vs. free usage and sees "huh, we have a 10000:1 ratio of paid to free users, including ten megacorps that show up grabbing binaries every 10 minutes for their CI/CD farm, and asking questions in our forums, but aren't paying a penny toward development and our investors are getting pissy."
Perhaps, but they all have to be exchanged for cash to be of real value to a thief. Unless they just really want a laptop, etc. And all those things are traceable - granted, odds of getting caught when trying to sell those are small, but not zero. Cash is hard to trace.
I often buy a hard copy and then find an ebook online or check it out from the library on Libby. I’m all for supporting authors, but I don’t want to funnel money into books that I don’t really own.
I'm not sure Americans wanted to move for jobs so much as we were resigned to the idea. If you wanted to work in specific industries, you had to go where those jobs were -- which is still true if your job depends on being in a specific location, but less true for a great many jobs that are knowledge work that can be done from anywhere.
I had a good friend in college who never utilized her degree because she was not willing to move out of St. Louis. She wanted to be close to her family more than she wanted to get a job that made use of her degree. Today, she might've been able to find a job that better used her skills and still got to be around for her niece to grow up.
The choice of "family or job" sucks. It's always sucked. (Well, unless you're looking to get away from your family...) Now people have more options.
I was born and raised in small town south GA where I also went to college. Most of my class couldn’t wait to move after graduating from high school or college. It’s the same with people who I know from Mississippi and Alabama.
I can’t say I know anyone who left a small town in the south who pine to go back even if there were jobs.
True, but my perspective is that these people aren't wanting to move for a job, they're wanting to move for other reasons and a job elsewhere is a means by which they can accomplish that.
Also, there are certainly people who actually want to move for a job itself. I'm just asserting that they're a very small minority.
Sure, but the motivation was "I want to get out of this place." A job just helped to facilitate that. I mean, I was in that boat too -- though I moved for college, not a job -- and never seriously considered going back. I would've loved to have stayed where I was after college, but there were no great jobs there, so I moved for a job -- but that meant parting with my then-girlfriend and other friends.
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