Almost everyone's asking the same question regardless of what they think's going on inside Trump's head. The two most coherent answers I've seen are "to soothe his narcissistic injury from being told he can't" and "feels entitled to it because NATO", you will note neither of these was his stated reason, and all of this is still catastrophically poor judgment on his part.
After she suffered third degree burns requiring skin grafts, and her attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 11 °C lower than McDonald's coffee plus evidence this could have given her enough time to prevent those burns, plus showing evidence McDonald's had received more than 700 reports of people burned by its coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000 so they had no excuse for not knowing this was a problem.
A role-play bot saying "I'm a doctor!" may well also be illegal, but it's much less clear to me if it should be.
What if I'm a role playing bot(tom) saying I'm a doctor?
What if I don't disclose that I'm playing a role?
What if I did originally disclose that I was roleplaying but that was thousands of incredibly convincing highly detailed comments ago and only the one time?
What if I'm literally just WebMD but presented in such a fashion as "because you are experiencing X there is a high likelihood that you have $disease and should implement $cure immediately" without the traditional hedging and qualifying?
What if most of the audience seeing an advertisment for a medical intervention hearing "symptoms include x, y, z, death, godhood, and the ability to commune with the devil" truly believe that they themselves are very likely or certain to experience not just one but all of the listed symptoms every single time they are exposed to said intervention?
Should the rule of law protect the vulnerable (those susceptible to influence), or not?
I'm really just playing the devil's advocate here. I'd rather software didn't have superficial culturally influenced laws attached to them, but it is easy to see the harm even if I am rather comfortable with darwinian selection. My being okay with people selecting themselves out of the pool does not preclude me from being able to see that they might want some outside protection from doing so.
To me, the mentioned McDonald's case is pure nonsense. There is no world in which I pay anyone for damages resulting from their interaction with coffee I served them. I do not believe that there are any people who are going to ask me for a coffee, receive it, spill it upon themselves by tampering with the vessel I provided it in, and then be mad to find out that it was indeed quite hot and that there was a reason I put a lid on it. But it is also instructive in the relevant mechanism. My understanding that hot liquids are dangerous is apparently not enough in that context. There is a reality in which I was supposed to somehow prevent the user from harming themselves with the dangerous item they asked for. As if I could be blamed for someone who died from shooting themselves when I sold them a gun, or cutting themselves when I sold them a knife.
We learn from the case that laws, the "court of public opinion", and genuine morality, bear only passing resemblance. See the recent ongoing case in which an LLM provider is being sued for providing advice on how to carry out a shooting as if the same information is not available on countless websites. See the relatively recent outrage over video games causing an increase in violence.
> I'm really just playing the devil's advocate here.
Indeed. But all your questions are why I'm, as I said, unclear if it should be illegal.
> My understanding that hot liquids are dangerous is apparently not enough in that context. There is a reality in which I was supposed to somehow prevent the user from harming themselves with the dangerous item they asked for. As if I could be blamed for someone who died from shooting themselves when I sold them a gun, or cutting themselves when I sold them a knife.
Hotter than expected, because it was hotter than anyone else provided it. As I showed, you were in error to claim '"I was burned by your hot coffee that's illegal" was the entire argument'. The jury even determined the fault was 20% hers, 80% McDonald's. Also the final settlement in her case was undisclosed, so you can't tell if it was or wasn't close to a million; the jury decided on $2.8m between actual damages (harm to her) and punitive damages (to deter McDonald's), the judge reduced it $640k, both sides appealed before settling confidentially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...
I'm from a culture where even the cops don't have guns, so I don't know what the gun analogy of this would look like. Handing someone a fully automatic pistol when all other gun providers only supply manual? So everyone knows it's dangerous, but the people who buy one are wildly wrong about how dangerous?
The phrase "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" comes to mind. Not only but also because of Tesla's P/E and Musk's long history of promising things that don't get delivered.
A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
What's frustrating is all those kids who got criminal charges for running MP3 sites back in the day [1], and this guy rips off every piece of media in existence and will walk away literally because he's too rich to be charged.
It was his decision and he conspired with his employees to do it for profit. The statutory maximum IIRC is around $250k per work, on the criminal enforcement side. If the rights holders can show actual damages greater than that they can sue civilly for those damages plus some fixed amount per work.
Definitely what pisses me off the most. All these "pirates"? Arrested. Why isn't the copyright industry raiding the homes of these tech billionaires then? Why isn't SWAT pointing guns at their faces while the squad seizes all of their computers and equipment? Why aren't these CEOs in cuffs?
I just don't see why everyone seems to not be cheering that perhaps we are not going to go back to the days where all those kids are going to be re charged. It almost feels like everyone wants to go back to labels carpet bombing students with lawsuits[0]
As someone who’s engaged in private piracy basically my entire life I’ve never even considered venturing into gray areas of licensing when procuring for my company. In fact I’ve done the opposite and rooted it out wherever I’ve found it.
It just seems obvious to me that a profit seeking venture should be held to a higher standard when it comes to infringing on the property rights of other companies and individuals, especially if they seek to enforce their own.
Those kids weren’t hypocritically enforcing their own property rights and making employees sign ndas while downloading shit from tpb.
> I just don't see why everyone seems to not be cheering that perhaps we are not going to go back to the days where all those kids are going to be re charged. It almost feels like everyone wants to go back to labels carpet bombing students with lawsuits
It’s currently just as bad but in a different way, imho.
The ability for labels (or whoever owns the rights) to wantonly invoke automated DMCA copyright strikes and demonetization on social media channels like YouTube is borderline criminal to me.
Their lobby did a great job getting them more than they deserved (specifically with regards to the facilitation of capricious invoking of DMCA), but the abuse of the rules limits the growth of the creator economy in very unhealthy ways.
False dichotomy. We can obviously have both. We can destroy corporations that rely on copyright to exist and then abuse that system to profit. We can also ignore college students and minor contributory copyright infringement.
The difference in scope here should be obvious.
We can similarly punish drug dealers while not punishing drug users. In fact it's already policy in large parts of the USA.
"Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use"."
Because the 'perhaps' there is a load-bearing word that is doing a lot of work and it's going to be come crashing down sooner or later.
Of course some kids are going to be charged for this kind of shit, it's still a rules for thee but not for me world, the 'not for me' folks are just a hell of a lot more brazen about it.
Because there is no reasonable expectation that we are not going back to those days. In fact, we are more likely to go back to those days then not.
Those students are not Zuckenberg. They will not be treated as Zuckenberg. The legal theories that apply to them dont apply to Zuckenberg and vice versa. They do not have money to mount defense and if they do, they will be in debt till the end of their lives.
I'm a copyright abolitionist. I don't care at all that they're training AIs on copyrighted works. I care a lot that they're not getting relentlessly hunted down by the copyright industry for it like all the "pirates" that came before them. The copyright industry has actually ruined lives by litigating their "infringement" nonsense. It's only fair that they go after this guy as well.
His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.
"X shouldn't be illegal at all" and "I want this person or company I hate to be ruined for having done X" aren't mutually reasonable positions. Even less so when the person or company you hate has committed real crimes. Grow up.
They are perfectly reasonable positions. "X shouldn't be illegal" implies that it is, in fact, currently illegal. Therefore Facebook and its executives and especially its CEO should absolutely suffer the full consequences of violating those laws, just like all of those people the copyright industry ruthlessly prosecuted.
Anything less than this means it's rules for thee and not for me. Laws cease to have meaning when people realize and internalize the idea that they are just tools of the elite to keep the poors in line instead of proper instruments of justice that apply to everyone equally. That's an extremely dangerous thing for the public to realize and internalize, for obvious reasons.
>They are perfectly reasonable positions. "X shouldn't be illegal" implies that it is, in fact, currently illegal.
"We were just following the rules" got people justifiably hanged not so many years ago. There must be principle behind what it is you would enforce, or you're not one of the good guys. If you give a shit about "currently illegal", I won't spend any more time listening to or worrying about what you think should be legal.
Right but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.
The US justice system doesn't start from fair. It starts from what you can prove to the letter of the law.
And when you're targeting someone / something with unlimited lawyers, you'd better have ironclad evidence that exactly that happened in exactly the way the claim is written.
Okay, sure, but I'm talking about being satisfied. I understand reality and that I may not get the satisfaction I would like. And specifically the example of Al Capone who was, yeah, got for tax evasion, but at least was treated ultimately like the criminal he was.
I mean, he was sentenced to 11 years and served 7 1/2.
But untreated (at the time, no penicillin) syphilis turned him into a mental pre-teen after his release, so I guess the universe serves some justice where the laws of the land do not.
I'm kinda being upset because on top of his ridiculously amoral and sometimes illegal behavior there are people which lives were ruined because they shared few mp3 files. Now this person once again — have absolutely no responsibility for his actions even for something so idiotic like copyright infringement when others were severely punished.
Since when has Meta profited off of this shit? I don't know why their stock price hasn't cratered yet, but it's not because they're raking in the big cash training LLMs on 40 yr old cookbooks.
We could have a conversation about that. Or rather, I could have a conversation about it with someone intelligent, who can actually appreciate nuance and detail. You've got some sort of mental caricature of mustache-twirling billionaires, where everything is "profit".
It's pretty clear that Meta wasn't about profit, given that no amount of "sunk cost" could explain what happened. That had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his belief that he was some sort of digital messiah that would get to usher humanity into another world.
It's the increase in emotionality, principles loosely held, it allows a particular goal they get tossed, Tbc this extends far beyond the current topic and commenters.
Okay but... I am very unimpressed by this. How is it that he then gets to still be an AI monopolist/hegemonist? How's that fair? He basically force-acquired all this stuff without asking, now he's haggling for it later. Where are the criminal charges? Where is the deprivement of, if not freedom, then equity assets.
A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
Yes it is a different kind of worth, but it is not worth less because of it.
This common argument to not take market cap valuations seriously doesn't hold.
True, Meta as an entire entity is not liquid. A forced sale in entirety would produce a massive reduction in compensation. But that is a highly unlikely and contingent reduction.
It is also true that if you have Meta's equivalent in cash, the value of the cash is likely to drop, while the value of Meta likely to grow, over any appreciable time. In that sense, $X cash is worth much "less" than the $X market cap.
These seeming contradictions are the result of different practical tradeoffs in structures of wealth. Not because market caps reflect misleading or overstated accounting.
Having a market cap? You mean a non-zero market cap?
Or do you mean a greater vs. lesser market cap? As compared to what?
If market cap was intrinsic value underlying itself, the business would be irrelevant. That is a circular “origin” of value that even novice investors would want to sell out of. That doesn’t work.
Success that matters for investors isn’t evidenced by a high market cap. But by a market cap not keeping up with business growth. I.e. shares becoming undervalued. By actual/predicted growth increasing faster than cap, or cap falling faster than actual/predicted downturns.
No, market cap is a representation of the expected future success, but share cost depends on this expectation. Higher expected future success, higher share cost. So, the only reason to buy shares is if you expect the market cap to increase.
(I think, someone please correct me of I'm wrong?)
Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.
The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
I’ve never seen it explained as to how it’s different in kind from a home equity loan - you still need income from something to pay the loan back (and if you say you pay it from the loan proceeds you’re just donating to a bank with extra steps).
It's very simple: if the terms are satisfactory and against an agreed upon collateral (e.g. shares) banks will give you a loan that does not require periodic payments. The interest on the loan does accumulate of course, and is just added to the principal that the borrower owes. The bank is happy as long as the value of the collateral is higher than the current outstanding loan. If the loan is in danger of going "under water" the bank can either liquidate the collateral to pay itself, or the borrower can renegotiate the loan and deposit additional shares.
It's similar to a reverse mortgage. Say Fred and Wilma own a house worth $4MM with no mortgage on it. With a reverse mortgage a bank will lend them $2MM. Fred and Wilma make no payments and continue to live in their house, spending the $2MM while the interest on that loan just increases the amount they owe the bank. After both Fred and Wilma have passed away the house is sold and the proceeds are used to pay back the outstanding loan. If there's still money left over, it goes to their heirs. If the sale comes up short, the bank loses money, which is why these reverse mortgages are typically less than 50% of the value of the house and they typically have higher interest rates than conventional mortgages. From Fred and Wilma's point of view, they can use the value of their house now, while continuing to live in it. They essentially spend their children's inheritance.
At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???
Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
I would be very pleased if Zuckerberg got away with it. I don't copyright or infringe, but honestly, he was the one guy of the big guys who released everything as open source.
If he did the right thing, then we should all support his choice to use it under fair use.
Freedom means that the state shouldn't punish a public benefactor.
It makes me furious to see programmers fighting against an open source hero.
If it was closed source for Meta profit, I understand.
But they gave it away free, so it infuriates me that people support damages for a public benefactor.
Churches and schools get free money from the government. We need a rule that open AI (not the company, I mean the actuality), can torrent whatever they want because it's for the public good.
Otherwise the rich companies win and can pay their sources and the small guys are screwed.
If Meta has to pay for their training data, they will need to profit from it and won't be able to offer it free.
Nobody in their right mind would ever support the publishers here.
> Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?
Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?
I don't buy into any strong claim about consciousness at the present time, because humanity doesn't seem to have any test that an outside observer can apply; this means that at the moment only a consciousness itself can know that it is conscious, while everyone else has to assume or not based on mere correspondences such as "alive" (which excludes computers) or "talks to me" (which recorded messages have done since the wax cylinder), leaving us to argue about if PETA are liberators or nuts well before "Attention Is All You Need" was a sparkle in Google's eye.
> Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?
Ah, I suppose I don't. My comment was poorly worded. However I feel confident that consciousness does not exist anywhere near the current level of fancy linear algebra and statistics that make LLMs work.
> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point.
2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so.
Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer).
(As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).
This is the same guy who said that Claude Code was spyware because it makes a few Windows Registry keys [0]. I find it really hard to take him seriously.
Oh, one of those people. Gotcha. Back in the early days of my career (can't remember exactly, possibly 2010?) I tried making screensavers and gave them away on my website, someone followed me directly on twitter then tweeted to everyone that my screensavers were some kind of malware because… I'd named the main class as per the tutorial and somehow this looked scary.
It would also imply that it costs Google ~7¢ in only energy cost to deliver that file to you (using average EU energy costs), which is clearly non-sensical given the rates hyperscalers charge for network egress.
Additionally, the cited number also conflates wired internet (low power consumption) with mobile internet (higher), even though this model is only being downloaded to Chrome Desktop AFAICT.
When looking at the power consumption across the whole network path and not just a single link, most of the power draw is probably baseline static power costs of keeping all the routers and switches running. Which means that judging the impact of a download in terms of Watts per MB/s is a pretty bad way of analyzing this.
Long term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it.
EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.
I can see a reduction of maybe 10% over 10 years on a per byte basis. My actual bet is that it's even. For every proposed reduction there's a new load balancing layer, a higher energy wireless standard…
Seems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.
Eight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.
Agreed. Also, complaining about the climate impact of an AI model download while opening your post with an ai generated image is peak hypocrisy. Did not bother to read the rest.
> The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over.
Zwei Punkte: erstens, nein, such times are never over. Only thing that changes is who is outraged and by what.
Zweitens, you're a demonstration of this right now by caring. To be clear, I'm not criticising you for this, you're allowed to care about stuff, but you're literally promoting an extension that rewrites someone else's word choice because you don't like it. Es ist dasselbe, und ist gründlich no different to how English Sprachbewahrer complain about the split infinitive in Star Trek's "to boldly go" or common use of the phrase "very unique" (unique means one-of-a-kind, how can you be "very" that?)
> The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
Die deutsche Sprache ist keine constructed language like Esperanto, whose rules come from a book, it's a natural language whose rules are discovered by observing those using it. As people change what they say and how they say it, so too does language change over time.
The German language is what those using it, do. On the basis of the political adverts I see around here, this includes the conservative CDU borrowing die englische Phrase „Made in Germany“: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
> Now pick the best (least costly / swiftest build) new power reactor build in the last ten years anywhere in the world.
Unless you can pay the workers the same rates, and it's politically acceptable to the electorate to use the same standards, this is as irrelevant as the fact (yes, I have done the maths on this) that it's *technically* possible for China to divert an affordable percentage of its aluminium output over a decade to build a genuine planet-spanning power grid with 1Ω electrical resistance so you can have your mid-winter midnight electricity supplied by the mid-summer midday on the opposite side of the planet.
> and that nuclear power reactors can provide district heating and that
I have a heat pump. It works both ways, which means that unlike district heating, it also cools down the building in summer.
> that heat pumps sometimes fail in ways that the ozone depleting refrigerant to escape.
"Can" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting even if such things hadn't been banned.
> A mix of nuclear / hydroelectric / combined cycle gas turbine power plants provided ample electricity for end-users to make use of cheap to manufacture heating technology (resistive), low maintenance, low replacement costs.
Hydro is cheap, but nuclear isn't. Hydro also works as a buffer (and pumped hydro as storage), so if you're combining it with stuff anyway, may as well combine with PV. Even small-scale domestic rooftop PV (which is the most expensive PV) is cheaper than nuclear at this point, so cheap that it makes sense to use as a fencing material even if you never get around to using it for power generation.
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