One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.

My tongue in cheek immediate assumption was "so it's a guerrilla PR firm?"

I'd venture a guess that OAI doesn't mind if the HuggingFace hack gets confused in the public's mind.

It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.

But if Amazon were harmed, wouldn’t they sue their customers first because they perpetrated the purported crime? This seems like going after the gun manufacturer for the claimed wrong that was actually committed by their customers.

> suing a torrent aggregator

Which has also been done :|

Right, which is why it is a charitable comparison of the lawsuit, showing how it may be successful.

My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.

FYI:

https://enwp.org/Van_Buren_v._United_States

https://enwp.org/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.

Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering. (a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her: (1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data; (2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services; (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if: (2) the owner authorizes the public to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;

That's pretty similar wording to the CFAA, which OP mentioned has been checked by case law.

Yes, although the DoJ policy change reflecting still says civil liability might exist if a cease-and-desist is ignored: https://www.wsgr.com/en/insights/doj-acknowledges-limits-to-...

Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys

And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.

But didn’t Amazon cite laws that it broke (allegedly)? Not simply their ToS?

The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.

This does not mean that any launch which ignites people’s bullshit detectors is successful.

The smarter thing to do would be to steelman the original position and not assume that the weakest of counterarguments — stated confidently and without much further analysis — sufficiently refute it.

Presumably the characteristic being referred to is superficial politeness mixed with racism or xenophobia.

That does actually kinda make sense, but it works very differently... the politeness is anything but superficial (even counters the racism and xenophobia to a limited degree, but also hides it, coming out to ±0), and the latter two are indeed present but coded as to be ashamed of rather than proud… (unfortunately the coding of shame is also different and doesn't spurn action).

It actually makes it harder to tackle the discrimination, since it's not openly admitted. Glass walls and ceiling.

(Recommended read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

'There is a "virtual taboo" in the Japanese media against discussing the topic, leading to widespread public ignorance.')

I think raw brain energy is not a fair comparison. Humans are not willing and able to serve requests at identical competence all hours of the day. You have to invest considerable resources to get a person to even do so for part of the day.

Attention is all you need.

Seriously, isn’t this the core premise of RAG / modern embedding search systems?

How do you effectively steelman against your own position without a dynamic “adversary” responding to counter-claims? I feel like every static argument except the most absolutely resolute is vulnerable.

It is possible that Anthropic (and OpenAI for that matter) actually put out some pretty low quality software.

If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.

It's weird to me how so many people just put up with crappy, low quality software. If you buy a physical good and its defective, you return it, stop buying that brand, maybe even leave a negative review or contact consumer reports, etc. If it does not live up to what was advertised, you go to the FTC.

But when it comes to software, we all just kind of accept that shitty software is the norm and totally fine? Let's start calling it what it is, its defective.

What's your alternative to these examples?

In my case, I use both, for different reasons, and continuously test other.

Anthropic finally added the ability to sort by spend.

I have thousands of people on an org. I had to go through every page to extract the top spenders.

Openai... you captured the sentiment.