The issue is how do you “meassure” merit? How do you decide who has earned what they have and who hasn’t?

If you are a conservative it’s very easy, the status quo defines merit. Those who have are those who deserve because the system is working as expected. So rich people ruling is meritocracy for them.

If you are a racist/xenophobe/etc then it’s also very easy, those who are in the “good” (read white in the USA) group are the ones with merit, so they are the ones that should rule.

A few years back, when college degrees where just for rich people with connections, merit was having a college degree because that proved you where educated and hard working jajajaja. Now that a lot more people can get college degrees it no longer means that for some reason jajajaja.

Etc, etc. In general, people use meritocracy to justify their own biases and the decisions they make based on those biases. The USA is of course the current poster child of this, but by no means it’s exclusive to them.

The reality is that when you think about it there is no such thing as merit in the general sense. For example, I get paid well by working as a programmer. And I’m the first one to say that I’m very good at it and deserve my pay. Yet, if my toilet is broken I need to call a plumber and defer to them. So, who says I deserve to earn more than a plumber. I do say so because it greatly benefits me of course jajajaja. But if push come to shove I would absolutely prefer to have a society without programmers than a society without plumbers. So who has more merit?

The simple truth is that we are all valuable in our own context and we should try to build a society where we all can participate and contribute as needed. Ideas like meritocracy are used by right wing people to justify the existence of hierarchies and social classes. If there are better people (with more merit) then of course they should be in charge and everyone else must obey. But the more you dig into the idea, the less it makes sense. Meritocracy is just a very easy trap to fall into because it’s the kind of idea that sounds good to people until you really think about it, but in practice it’s just a useless idea to make rstional decisions.

I agree with your point. But the way I read this is not like “An Entrepreneur in the USA is the same as an Oligarch in Rusia”, instead more like “If we used the same standards we use to call Rusian Oligarchs Oligarchs (which they totally are), then in the USA there are Oligarchs too (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc). But instead we call them Entrepreneurs”. Same with all the other examples, there are actions that when performed by Rusia, China, etc, are called Authoritarian, but when performed by the USA and European countries are justified as upholding Law & Order or similar bullshit.

Of course the reading here can’t be the USA and europeans do the same, so we can’t complain about Rusia/China/etc. Fuck that, fuck Rusia, fuck China, fuck all of them. To me, the point is that, from the outside, is pretty obvious that Rusia and co are fucking imperialist assholes. It’s obvious that the Rusian people are being manipulated by propaganda to support the fucking invasion of Ukraine. But we must be careful that the same is happening in all our countries, maybe to a lesser degree (though IMO the USA is at least as bad as Rusia when it comes to imperialism BS, but I’m latin american so I’m biased hahaha), and maybe this way we can stop doing the same awful shit they are doing.

If you actually read the article you will see that they tested both allowing the students to ask for answers from the LLM, and then limiting the students to just ask for guidance from the LLM. In the first case the students did significantly worse than their peers that didn’t use tje LLM. In the second one they performed the same as students who didn’t use it. So, if the results of this study can be replicated, this shows that LLMs are at best useless for learning and most likely harmful. Most students are not going to limit their use of LLMs for guidance.

You AI shills are just ridiculous, you defend this technology without even bothering to read the poibts under discussion. Or maybe yoy read an LLM generated summary? Hahahaha. In any case, do better man.

Any arguments to defend your position? I’m giving you a very clear example of the awful consecuences of following that path. And the same applies to any creative work. You are just being dismissive without proposing any real solution. Do better man.

And that’s the whole point of my comment, did you even read it? To summarize, there is currently a loophole in law that allows these bullshit arguments about it being different than straight up copying shit (though this haven’t been litigated yet, so it’s not yet clear if these arguments are actually valid). This means that while a person reading my AGPl code and copying it (without following the license) is 100% illegal. Doing the same through an LLM is legal. So this means that open source licenses can be bypassed by first training an LLM with the code and then extracting the code from the LLM. This is terrible for open source, and in genral for anyone who wants to make a living from creating copyrighted work. So we should close this loophole, so I’m glad there is a push to close this through better laws. Even if these laws are comming from Disney, Sony, and all those awful companies.

So again, what’s the point you are trying to make here? That we shouldn’t make these laws stronger to prevent this bullshit? I honestly don’t understand what you are trying to argue here, nothing of what you have said has anythung to do with this conversation.

What point are you trying to make? That the fact that someone can break the law means we should not have laws? I honestly don’t get what you are trying to say.

An engineer at AWS can already just copy your code, make minor modifications, and use it.

You are 100% wrong here my man. If an engineer does this they are creating a derivative work and they have to fullfil the conditions of the license of the code. No wonder you don’t see anything wrong here, you AI people live in a fantasy world when it comes to how copyright works hahahaha. Please stop talking about shit you know nothing about.

Nah my man, you are either brainwashed or are being paid hahaha. Is copyright a mess? Of fucking course, I haven’t meet a single person (except crazy ass libertarians funnily enough hahaha) that likes copyright. Are big corporations using copyright to exploit artists, create monopolies, and generally being dicks? Again, of fucking course.

But anyone, like you, saying that we should just let AIs destroy copyright effectively is a fucking prick, that simple. And your agruments are dissingenous at best or outright lies. For example, just as big copyright holder companies are pushing to strengthen copyright law, the big tech companies are pushing for effectively destroying copyright through AI models. I have seen you pushing in multiple thread as open source models like that’s a solution. But if you were a serious person researching about the software open source community you would see that pretty much no one there agrees with your position because it would effectively destroy the copyleft open source licenses. After all, if an “AI” model, open source or not, is allowed to just “train” on my AGPL code and spit it back (with minor modifications at best) to an engineer in AWS that’s it for my project. Amazon will do the Amazon thing and steal the project. So say goodbye to any software freedom we have.

And let’s be 100% clear here, this is not being pusehd by the evil copyright holders like you seem to imply (and they are totally evil just to be clear hahahah). This is being pushed by the big tech companies and people like you spreading their propaganda. The fact that the copyright holders happen to be in the right this time is just a broken clock being right, but it’s still good that they are pushing back to big tech. I do agree we have to keep an eye on them, the objective here can’t be to make copyright bigger, just to close the “loophole” that big tech companies are exploting to steal everything.

People like you who want to destroy copyright without offering any alternatives to allow creatives to work in a market are either missinformed or just assholes. Again, of fucking course it’s not an ideal system, but going full kamikaze and just destroying any possibility for artists and creatives of making a living with their work isbthe most evil thing goung on right now, so bad that the big copyright holders happen to fall on the less bad side this time hahaha.

The guy you are replying to is in all AI posts defending AIs. He is probably heavily invested in this BS or being paid for it, don’t waste your time with him.

Jesus man, chill. Why are all AI people so sensitive? Hahahaha. My man, during this conversation I have only asked about what are the great apps that LLMs have provided. You answered with the usual ones, chatgpt and copilot. It’s nice that you find them useful, no need to insult me just because I don’t think they are useful. I was honestly hoping for something else, but that’s it. Seriously, chill dude.