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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Alsup? Is this the same judge who also presided over Oracle v. Google over the use of Java in Android? That guy really does his homework over cases he presides on, he learned how to code to see if APIs are copyrightable.

    As for the ruling, I’m not in favour of AI training on copyrighted material, but I can see where the judgement is coming from. I think it’s a matter of what’s really copyrightable: the actual text or images or the abstract knowledge in the material. In other words, if you were to read a book and then write a summary of a section of it in your own words or orally described what you learned from the book to someone else, does that mean copyright infringement? Or if you watch a movie and then describe your favourite scenes to your friends?

    Perhaps a case could be made that AI training on copyrighted materials is not the same as humans consuming the copyrighted material and therefore it should have a different provision in copyright law. I’m no lawyer, but I’d assume that current copyright law works on the basis that humans do not generally have perfect recall of the copyrighted material they consume. But then again a counter argument could be that neither does the AI due to its tendency to hallucinate sometimes. However, it still has superior recall compared to humans and perhaps could be the grounds for amending copyright law about AI training?




  • I think I need to clear a common misconception people seem to have here: Oracle has very little to do with Java.

    At most, Oracle has the following connection to Java:

    • Own the trademark
    • Have a build of the JDK/JRE with commercial support.

    However, Java as a language’s baseline comes from OpenJDK, an open source (GPL 2.0) community project which is upstream to several builds including Oracle’s JVM. It follows a “bazaar” like development model similar to the Linux kernel where you can see their mailing lists and track what’s being worked on. Anyone can contribute and the code is on Github: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk.

    That being said, you don’t even need to use Oracle’s JDK (it sucks IMO) and use one of the community provided builds of OpenJDK. OpenJDK builds are provided by Eclipse, Amazon, Azul, Bellsoft and even Microsoft provides JDK/JRE builds. These are free of cost and have longer term support than Oracle’s offering.












  • You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.

    Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.

    You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.