Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result.
It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
Weather training on code is fair use is still an open legal question, and it may well be fair use. The way a license works is by saying "you have my permission to use this code as long as you follow these conditions", but if no license is required than the conditions are irrelevant.
There is an active case on this, where Microsoft has been sued over GitHub copilot, and it has been slowly moving through the court system since 2022. Most of the claims have been dismissed, and the prediction market is at 11%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
Let's actually look at the MIT license, a very permissive license
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to ***use***, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
So, you can use it but need to cite the usage. It's not that hard. Fair use if you just acknowledge usage.
Is it really that difficult to acknowledge that you didn't do everything on your own? People aren't asking for money. It's just basic acknowledgement.
Forget the courts for a second, just ask yourself what is the right thing to do. Ethically.
> Forget the courts for a second, just ask yourself what is the right thing to do
Forgetting the courts, whether reading the source code and learning from it is intended to count as "use" is not clear to me, and I would have guessed no. Using a tool and examining a tool are pretty different.
Human reading code? Ambiguous. But I think you're using it. Running code? Not ambiguous.
Machine processing code? I don't think that's ambiguous. It's using the code. A person is using the code to make their machine better.
This really isn't that hard.
Let's think about it this way. How do you use a book?
I think you need to be careful that you're not justifying the answer you want and instead are looking for what the right answer is. I'm saying this because you quoted me saying "what is right" and you just didn't address it. To quote Feynman (<- look, I cited my work. I fulfilled the MIT license obligations!)
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
The key question is whether it is sufficiently "transformative". See Authors Guild vs Google, Kelly vs Arriba Soft, and Sony vs Universal. This is a way a judge could definitely rule, and at this point I think is the most likely outcome.
> Microsoft will forever be a pariah if they get away with this.
I doubt this. Talking to developers, it seems like the majority are pretty excited about coding assistants. Including the ones that many companies other than Microsoft (especially Anthropic) are putting out.
We need a reasonable alternative to some of what Cloudflare does that can be easily installed as a package on Linux distributions without any of the following to install it.
* curl | bash
* Docker
* Anything that smacks of cryptocurrency or other scams
Just a standard repo for Debian and RHEL derived distros. Fully open source so everyone can use it. (apt/dnf install no-bad-actors)
Until that exists, using Cloudflare is inevitable.
It needs to be able to at least:
* provide some basic security (something to check for sql injection, etc)
* rate limiting
* User agent blocking
* IP address and ASN blocking
Make it easy to set up with sensible defaults and a way to subscribe to blocklists.
I remember using mod_security with Apache long ago for some of this, looks like it's still around and now also supports Nginx and IIS: https://modsecurity.org/
Thank you. This doesn't have everything I'm looking for, but apparently it has been packaged in Debian at least. I don't know why the website doesn't mention this.
The proof of work stuff feels so cryptocurrency adjacent that I've been looking at other tools for my own thing, but I've seen Anubis on other websites and it seems to do a good job.
Also: Anubis does not mine cryptocurrency. Proof of work is easy to validate on the server and economically scales poorly in the wild for abusive scrapers.
If you have suggestions for JS based challenges that don't become a case of "read the source code to figure out how to make playwright lie", I'm all ears for the ideas :)
This unsubstantiated anti-cryptocurrency bias on HN is quite disappointing. Did you hear about filecoin, which allows to buy and sell disk space independently on large companies? Why wouldn't an anonymous cryptocurrency like Monero help with this real problem? What would the downsides be?
It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
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