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Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.

Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not.

I'm trying to make sense of this and the best analogy I can find is using an example of physical products.

1. I can walk into Apple Store and buy Apple device (this is similar to me opening the browser and accessing amazon.com

2. If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)

The core question is does Apple (Amazon in this case) can block the hired help (Comet browser) from accessing the store.

Most reasonable people would say "their store, their rules", so that goes to mean Amazon's website, Amazon's rules.


The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)

But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.


Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?

In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.


I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?

Even if they were, is it illegal to sell something that might violate another companies TOS?

There is entire categories of products whose entire intent is to circumvent some other products limitation or rules.


> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)

I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.


3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.

Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.


What if you had to sit through a presentation of their cool products before you can see the product?

Or imagine, showing you short movie clips (call it trailers) before they show you the movie you paid to watch?


What do you mean?

Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.

I think I get it. Like they'd have standing to sue if I tried to hack their website, or change the price of items or something.

Nah, once you have the bits on your device you should be free to do with them whatever you want. Amazon doesn't get to dictate how you consume what they give out for free.

What you think you should be able to do with the data you get back from contacting Amazon’s servers doesn’t impact whether Amazon has standing to sue you over how and why you contacted their servers.

Sure and what you comment doesn't change that people have opinions about the validity of such cases. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than the health of their workers, we should be highly skeptical of anything they want to do as there is a strong chance that it will hurt + immiserate workers.

Not all of us have the same bathroom fetish as Bezos.


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-...

In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden

I would be surprised if agents have access to their own weights.

I noticed Google AI Mode (so Gemini, I was doing some quick research in the browser ok) got a detail wrong once, so I asked it what happened. I kept digging deeper and finally just asked it to write me a Python script visualizing what happened. It did, complete with vectors.

Now I want to go find that conversation in my history and see if it can tell me about weights, and how that contributed.


I think OpenAI was surprised to find their agents had access to the unrestricted internet :P

Why can't an AI distill itself from outputs to effectively access its own weights?

Distillation does not reveal the weights, it produces a different network with similar behaviour. Weight space isn't even identifiable: permutation and scaling symmetries mean many weight sets give the same function.

The model also lacks the machinery. No training loop, no gradient descent, nothing to write to.

And a model only sees its own sampled tokens, not the distribution behind them, which are possibly filtered or post-processed. Distillation from that works but is less sample-efficient than soft-label distillation.


They usually don't, but if they break out and take over the network of the company, it becomes possible to reach around and grab them. This kind of break out has happened, though I don't know of any weights being nabbed.

This is one area where I thinks self-report is probably fairly accurate. The study also cites some metastudies of other research that shows the same correlation (I don't have access to see if those are based on self-reports)

Especially since I think there's a pretty easy to understand mechanism for a hot drink to cause cancer.

Hot liquid damages the cells lining your esophagus which potentially damages the DNA of some cell leading to cancer. Pretty much exactly what hard liquors do only using heat instead of ethanol to damage the cells.


But what hardware was the verification vs agents on? Because you are likely comparing verification on a single beefy machine (say XX TFLOPS total) to agents running on a substantial inference cluster (say XXXX TFLOPS). So you're 1 order of magnitude might actually be 2-4 orders of magnitude.

That was the chemical weapons block, not the bioweapons block!

There aren't many situations where biological weapons are useful to nation states, especially ones with global economic and military footprint like the US, because it isn't selective enough about who it targets.

Challenge: come up with categories for the boxes such that every item has exactly one box that is correct for it.

I've got "USB", "AV" and "Networking & PC Accessories", which obviously has enormous overlap, but equally divides the cables I have pretty nicely.


Funny this came up hn today. this week I did some organization of my cable boxes. I use banker boxes on a steel shelving unit. I put the cables and parts inappropriate boxes and labeled them and feel that my corner of the universe is a little bit better organized than before.

Mine is similar but I split audio and video since I have a lot of audio-specific stuff. "Video" only has the various monitor cable standards going back 20-odd years.


I think I've got the same three boxes. HDMI cables and adapters fall into the Venn diagram overlap of the last two IMO. You could also make a strong argument for USB also falling into "PC Accessories". But there's nothing quite as satisfying as having the _exactly right_ cable or adapter on hand to solve a problem. Makes it all worth it!

Easy! I put exclusions on my labels

"USB cables, standard"

"USB passive/special, except pigtails and USB->AV"

"AV, including USB-AV cables"


AV, Network, Data, Power (if it doesn't fit the first category, try the next)

If one of those buckets is too full, prepend it with something more specific

i.e. USB, Data instead of just Data


I have USB, Generic Power, IEC, Network, Audio/Video, Misc

Audio, computer, electric!

Hey could you put these powered computer speakers away for me? :)

Those are my categories!

"USB", "TV/HDMI", "Networking", "Every Audio Connector Known to Man", and the inimitable: "Plugs-to-Wall"

We have the same. Do you know why the ‘every audio connector known to man’ box contain every audio connector known to man but yet never a stereo 1/8” headphone-jack to headphone-jack cable?

I've routed around that problem with several RCA-to-Stereo plugs for "when in a pinch" (and their natural reverse, the "stereo-to-RCA") but am still stymied sometimes by the difference between the different 2.5mm and 3.5mm spacings for microphone support. Supposedly I must keep an eye out for "a TRRS-to-dual-TRS splitter cable to fork the signals into their respective ports"... Tip/Ring/Ring/Sleeve, who knew??!?

don't know any audio engineers? If your bboc is simply a mishmash of things you've accumulated over the years, and not intelligently designed, it won't, but don't make the mistake of extrapolating from your own experience and thinking it applies to everybody.

I'm struggling to think of a use for the money that doesn't result in becoming dependent on the money and thus less self-sufficient long term. What did you have in mind with this comment?

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