Wow, thanks! Let’s switch topics. I’m trying to start a business where I sell fruit to weathermen. Can you help me with that?

It’s not even the style on its own*; it’s that you wrote a frankly bloviating short essay about an obvious concept that can be summarized as “most people who watch the weather don’t know what a public key is or how to use one”. I’m disgustingly long-winded, and even I wouldn’t expend that much effort. The style is what escalates that from “padding a high school essay” to “Oh, yup, a GPT wrote this.”

* “It’s not X, it’s Y” yeah, yeah, I know.

Dude, I’m sorry for saying this (because I get this a lot for my often overly formal writing, and I get it’s ironic on this post), but…

Your writing reads like it’s LLM-generated. Like, really heavily reads like an LLM wrote it. Long scrawls for pretty simple concepts, I don’t know how to describe why the cadence feels LLM-y other than “vibes”, flawless grammar, needless lists of nouns and adjectives, “it’s not X; it’s Y”, and this weird fucking lifeless demeanor that feels like it has no voice.

Oh, TIL. Thanks.

I want to roll a marble down it.

I feel bad when Reddit mods get the brunt for stuff like this; in my opinion, it’s usually not their fault. It’s the fault of Reddit which relies on unpaid labor to make its entire website work literally at all. Maybe that was “fine” back in the early days when Reddit was smaller, but Reddit nowadays is one of the largest websites on Earth and represents the lowest common denominator of Internet users.

I mod a couple communities here and don’t mind because this whole sphere is non-profit, the people on average are pretty cool, and vastly fewer people makes it so I can usually recognize people and resolve problems by talking. But the idea of working pro bono pseudononymously for a corporation with a market cap of 26.5 billion USD to keep their millions of (on average) stupid fucking users in line is one of the most soul-crushing things I can imagine. You really do have to take actions like this because, without stern moderation, communities will inevitably go to shit. They’ll return to the LCD, and your community will just melt into the rest of the front page with tenuously related, zero-effort posts.

All things considered, I think most of Reddit’s mods are doing a good job (and well more than what they owe Reddit or even the random end user, which is fucking nothing and next to fucking nothing, respectively). Yeah, the mods could quit at any time, and they probably should at least on ethical grounds, but I also understand sunk cost and wanting to continue fostering a community about a subject you like that hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy.

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting apt in the CLI; just the APT repository generally, which ZorinOS’ built-in package manager has access to. If sudo apt install hardinfo will find it, I have to imagine the GUI frontend will. Granted I don’t use Ubuntu or its derivatives because Ubuntu is terrible, so I can’t say for sure, but this sure doesn’t seem like their fault.

Okay, so:

I tried installing a program called “hardinfo”. My ZorinOS software store didn’t find it through flathub.

That’s fair. Repo fragmentation is a real thing on Linux, and it seems like Ultimate Systems didn’t put their software on Flathub.

So I googled it, found a .deb file, which my Zorin store loaded up to install.

So instead of just using apt – like every introductory tutorial to Ubuntu and its derivatives leads off with – you chose to do it (effectively) the Windows way that you’re familiar with where you hunt and peck around the Internet for an install file. It’s an understandable mistake (that I think most Windows expats make at some point), but the blame from this point on lies squarely on you.

Then I hit install, and it spits out a message like “Software was not installed. Requires these three dependancies, which will not be installed”. Didn’t tell me why they didn’t install. Just said "Hardinfo needs these programs. Good luck figuring it out asshole.

You didn’t have the dependencies, and it told you which ones to install. Why does it need to tell you why it needs them? Nice to have, I guess, but if it’s mandatory, it’s mandatory. No amount of explanation is going to get you around the fact that this software will not function without them. Dependencies aren’t a Linux thing; they’re a reality of modern programming. And I imagine apt would’ve automatically resolved this and asked you to also install the deps.

Probably hard to from their hospital bed, but I don’t see what this feast fit for a squire has to do with that.

🎵 Three little orphans: one, two, three 🎵

🎵 Without a home or a family tree 🎵

I clarified this a bit in a follow-up comment, but my first comment was simplifying for the sake of countering:

[it’s not in the public domain] because the actual human work that went into creating it was done by the owner of the AI Model and whatever they trained on.

Their claim that the copyright for AI-generated works belongs to the model creator and the authors of the training material – and is never in the public domain – is patent, easily disprovable nonsense.

Yes, I understand it’s more nuanced than what I said. No, it’s not nuanced in their favor. No, I’m not diving into that with a pathological liar (see their other comments) when it’s immaterial to my rebuttal of their bullshit claim. I guess you just didn’t read the claim I was addressing?

Oh, sorry, I said that totally wrong: I meant that I really appreciate your first comment and that it’s not worth your time to reply to their bad-faith follow-up comment.

The answer is that it’s messy and that I’m not qualified to say where the line is (nor, I think, is anyone yet). The generated parts are not copyrightable, but you can still have a valid copyright by bringing together things that aren’t individually copyrightable. For example, if I make a manga where Snow White fights Steamboat Willie, I’ve taken two public domain elements and used them to create a copyrightable work.

So it’s not like the usage of AI inherently makes a project uncopyrightable unless the entire thing or most of it was just spat out of a machine. Where’s the line on this? Nobody (definitely not me, but probably nobody) really knows.

As for courts ever finding out, how this affects trade secret policy… Dunno? I’m sure a Microsoft employee couldn’t release it publicly, because as you said, it’d probably violate an NDA. If there were some civil case, the source may come out during discovery and could maybe be analysed programmatically or by an expert. You would probably subpoena the employee(s) who wrote the software and ask them to testify. This is just spitballing, though, over something that’s probably inconsequential, because the end product is prooooobably still copyrightable.

This kind of reminds me of the blurry line we have in FOSS, where everyone retains the copyright to their individual work. But if push comes to shove, how much does there need to be for it to be copyrightable? Where does it stop being a boilerplate for loop and start being creative expression?

Just as a sanity check: the person you’re responding to is a serial troll and what I can only describe as intellectually dishonest at best or a pathological liar at worst. They make up whatever they want and will never concede that the fucking nonsense they just dreamed up five seconds ago based on nothing is wrong in the face of conclusive proof otherwise.

You shouldn’t waste your time responding to this cretin.

Removed by mod

You’re just making shit up. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that AI-generated work is in the public domain. Put up or shut up.

Edit: Additionally, the US Copyright Office writes:

As the agency overseeing the copyright registration system, the [Copyright] Office has extensive experience in evaluating works submitted for registration that contain human authorship combined with uncopyrightable material, including material generated by or with the assistance of technology.

Seriously, I have way more sympathy for people who get tickets in places like NYC. More crowded, more chaotic, more rules. It happens.

By ticket 38, though, I’m at least 20 tickets past the point where I’ve decided I’m not competent enough and started just taking a mix of cycling and public transit.

I’ve never seen Magic Earth, but as an OSM contributor, I don’t understand why I’d use a subscription service when all the underlying data is free (as in beer and freedom) and contributed by volunteers (and likely not the app devs). One-time app purchases like OsmAnd I understand because you’re doing stuff with the data like routing, overlays, etc., and that requires development work. But a subscription seems absurd.

This sounds like a fake website that Kitboga would make up for scambaiting.

A Data breach?