Even the LLM part might be considered Plagiarism.

Basically, unlike humans it cannot assemble an output based on logical principles (i.e. assembled a logical model of the flows in a piece of code and then translate it to code), it can only produce text based on an N-space of probabilities derived from the works of others it has “read” (i.e. fed to it during training).

That text assembling could be the machine equivalent of Inspiration (such as how most programmers will include elements they’ve seen from others in their code) but it could also be Plagiarism.

Ultimately it boils down to were the boundary between Inspiration and Plagiarism stands.

As I see it, if for specific tasks there is overwhelming dominance of trained weights from a handful of works (which, one would expect, would probably be the case for a C-compiler coded in Rust), then that’s a lot more towards the Plagiarism side than the Inspiration side.

Granted, it’s not the verbatim copying of an entire codebase that would legally been deemed Plagiarism, but if it’s almost entirely a montage made up of pieces from a handful of codebases, could it not be considered a variant of Plagiarism that is incredibly hard for humans to pull off but not so for an automated system?

Note that obviously the LLM has no “intention to copy”, since it has no will or cognition at all, what I’m saying is that the people who made it have intentionally made an automated system that copies elements of existing works, which normally assembles the results from very small textual elements (same as a person who has learned how letters and words work can create a unique work from letters and words) but with the awareness that in some situations that automated system they created can produce output based on an amount of sources which is very low to the point that even though it’s assembling the output token by token, it’s pretty much just copying whole blocks from those sources same as a human manually copying a text from a document to a different document would.

In summary, IMHO LLMs don’t always plagiarize, but can sometimes do it when the number of sources that ended up creating the volume of the N-dimensional probabilistic space the LLM is following for that output is very low.

Yeah, anybody with eyes and a working brain back during the Leave Referendum saw this coming.

I lived in Britain as an EU immigrant until the actual Brexit and saw the whole shitshow from the inside.

I say NO to EU membership for Britain - we don’t need another Fascist country in the EU with voting and even veto rights on things that affect all 470 million of non-Britons in it, especially when 1/3 of the population there were very clear about how much they detest the rest of Europeans (the Racism against other Europeans became very overt there when the Leave Referendum started).

Britain should never have the rights of an EU member until that country has a serious cultural, political and social revolution.

Britain becoming a member of the European Free Trade Area in some way might be alright (though they’re highly likely to try and abuse such a position, as they already did abuse free trade access as EU members, for example by de facto being an uncontrolled gateway for importing non-compliant products into the EU market).

British elites having a saying on how the EU is run by using their country’s votes and veto would not be alright, especially in light of all the authoritarian shit coming out over there - from insane civil society surveillance, mandatory online ID and even treating those implementing end-to-end encryption as anti-state actors to anti-Demonstration legislation and imprisonment of people demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide as “Terrorist Supporters” - which manages to beat even Hungary.

It’s bad enough to have EU countries turning Fascist, but bringing into the EU the country in Europe which after Russia and Belarus is the most de facto authoritarian and most similar to present day MAGA America (though their Fascism is painted in “posh” rather than in “strongman”) would be insane.

It’s even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can “solve” simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

The problem is that LLMs don’t generate “an answer” as a whole, they just generate tokens (generally word-sized, but not always) for the next text element given the context of all the text elements (the whole conversation) so far and the confidence level is per-token.

Further, the confidence level is not about logical correctness, it’s about “how likely is this token to appear in this context”.

So even if you try using token confidence you still end up stuck due to the underlying problem that the LLMs architecture is that of a “realistic text generator” and hence that confidence level is all about “what text comes next” and not at all about the logical elements conveyed via text such as questions and answers.

• How do you know when Trump is lying?
• His mouth is open.

Democrats: Hard Neoliberalism at home, Fascism abroad.

Republicans: Fascism everywhere.

In case you haven’t notice the kinds of shit the Techbros are loudly pushing, the US most definitelly does things at the behest of its own fatcats first and foremost.

Granted, their interestest seem to be aligned in the most with mainly Israel and also partly Russia.

If you want a low power, cheap x86 mini-PC to run a Linux box for low demand uses (personal TV Box, PC for a family member that only ever does light web browsing and e-mail) they do have some nice processors.

I mean, you can also use an ARM SBC for some of those things, but it’s handy to have an x86 processor because of easier availability of binaries, plus even the low power ones are actually more powerful than the ARM stuff.

That’s about the only thing, really.

In the UK there’s quite the tradition of using the Justice System to merelly whitewash the crimes of the Aristocracy, so better wait until the trial is over before one starts celebrating this.

They’re not going after him for Pedophilia.

Apparently as per the rationale of some very pro-Royal British newspapers, the police doesn’t have the resources to properly investigate and prosecute him for Pedophilia, even though according to the news just the other day they arrest 1000 people a year for that very crime.

Go check out the fawning coverage of The Royals by The Guardian over the years.

It surprises me not at all that “on such an unfortunate occasion” The Guardian would be busy spinning a “reasonable” rationally for not taking to court a member of the Royal Family for those crimes which would result in a lot of dirty linen being washed in public.

“The policy have limited resources, nothing we can do about it, best let it go”

(Curiously, the police have the resources to, for example, go after people against the Genocide in Gaza as Terrorist Supporters or Demonstrators for “Disturbing Public Order”)

Note that he didn’t got arrested for the pedophilia part.

Also, this being Britain, best wait until the end of the trial to see if he gets convicted and if the sentence is in line with that for similar situations

When comes to nobles over there using the Justice System as a form of whitewash is pretty standard: there’s this story of some Peer getting convicted for a second time for Fraud and the high court judge letting him go without any penalty saying that “the shame of a conviction is enough”.

Yeah, that does make sense.

However I suspect that what’s charged in Portugal for that cost is way beyond a fair value, with rent-seeking “administrative costs” of the power provider which far exceed actual real costs in the era of smart-meters and computing (plus which are already included in the price for power itself, which is why retail power prices are much higher than bulk market prices, thus there’s double-dipping going on there) as well as “taxes” to pay for subsidies for renewables which were often de facto politicians needlessly shoving money to their mates so that they had higher profits - the big power company in Portugal is very well connected politically and is involved in at least on major Corruption case - rather than actually needed to incentivise provision of things which would otherwise not be provided.

The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.

And this is just State surveillance.

When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.

That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.

The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.

Yes, several dams in Portugal do have the capability of pumping water up to the top reservoir when there is excess power from other sources to latter use it for power production when conditions change.

However most don’t and for those, given that the long term trend is that hydro-generation is going to be a lot less effective in Portugal and in the meanwhile it’s already become less reliable, they’ll become a lot less effective, hence why Renewables in Portugal was just 45% a years ago when the country wasn’t having an unusually high-precipitation period like now and instead was at in its second year of draught conditions (a situation which has become much more common in the last couple of decades).

Further, solar is hugelly underdeveloped in what is one of the countries of Europe with the most sunshine, no doubt due to amongst other things policies that de facto reduce incentives for home solar all in the service of keeping the profits of politically well-connected local Power Companies high.

The country needs more solar generation, especially home generation as well as the kind of solar technologies - like molten salt solar concentrators - that are capable of keeping generating power at night.

In light of Global Warming trends there’s still a long way to go for Renewables in Portugal, IMHO, and local policies are still quite disjointed and poluted by politicians putting the interests of a handful of private companies above all else.

Actually the Iberian peninsula countries - Spain and Portugal - want to sell their excess of Renewable to the rest of Europe, but France keeps blocking creating a connection for that throught their territory as it would negativelly impact the price they get selling their Nucleal power.

It would make a lot of sense to have an Europe-wide high capacity grid across large enough distances that it averaged out a lot of the local weather factors, but some countries are blocking it to maintain the profits of their own private electric power businesses.

The fixed part of an electric bill in Portugal is insane, both because of a good chunk of it are taxes charged via it and because the “fixed network connection costs” are very high.

This means that if one invests in saving power the returns of that are pretty bad because there’s still this huge immovable cost chunk from merelly having a grid connection: I’ve been an early adopter of things like LED lights and tend to take power consumption in account for my computing equipment and nowadays outside Winter (when I spend a lot of power in warming as over 70% of houses in Portugal have very bad insulation and mine is one of those >70%) my bill is literally only half actual electricity costs and the other half is that fixed componen - my incentive for saving power is mainly one of principle because the actual financial incentive only goes so far before you start seeing diminishing returns from investing into more efficient electric devices.

Meanwhile policies in Portugal are such that they almost try and stop people from having home solar - for example if you try and sell excess power to the grid you’ll get at best 1/4 the price that it costs when you buy power from the grid, so it’s simply not worth it to have an installation which produces excess power, all this in one of the countries with the highest number of sunshine hours in Europe were it would make a lot of sense for people to have home solar.

And then, of course, there’s the French problem: specifically France keeps refusing the creation a proper connection for the Iberian countries to sell its excess of power due to Renewables to the rest of Europe (because France wants to sell their own from their large number of Nuclear Power Plants at a higher price), so there are actually plans to do it with cables in the middle of the Med going around France and enter the rest of the continent via Italy.

Most of Renewables in Portugal is hydro-generation so it’s highly dependent on amount of rain, in a country which the Global Warming models say it’s going to turn into pretty much a desert except in the coastal areas.

This is why just a year ago only 45% of electricity came from Renewables since, after 2 years of draught, most dams were pretty much empty, whilst right now the country has had so much rain in the last couple of months that dams are full to the brim and even have had to release excess water, and there are even floods around most major rivers.

Given the way things are going, Portugal needs to invest more in Solar since the very high capacity in terms of hidro-generation (a policy that dates all the way back to Fascist days, possibly the only good thing those types ever did for the country) will turn far less usefull with Global Warming.