Early games were designed to delight, slightly more modern games are designed to both delight and advertise.

It’s the difference between “I can’t beat this boss so I’d better go level up for 20 mins, ooh I unlocked a new spell” and “I can’t beat this boss I had better prep for a 10 hour grind, this is so I can find the X to craft the Y so I can begin to make the Z which offers me a 1 in 10 chance to unlock the option to craft a new spell… Or I could just pay $5 to skip that bit by buying the spell…”

DROP TABLE Musk

"A trader or third party can upgrade and improve the features of digital content so long as it continues to match any description given by the trader and conforms with any pre-contract information provided by the trader, unless varied by express agreement. "

That’s an odd paragraph to include.

For every mod you add, complexity usually increases exponentially.

Depending on the game, difficulty also varies: modding stardew valley is joy (117 mods in a pack, easy afternoon sipping tea), modding skyrim less so (oh god,these two amazing mods tweak the same tree, time to go patch hunting, 2 weeks later you play it only to spot obscure graphical glitches, all hail wabbajack automation!), trying to make a working multiplayer mod pack for rimworld is pure suffering (why do you hate me, why do two compatible mods generate mass instability?!? 4 months of bug hunting and unsalvageable runs due to strange mod interactions, gave up for now).

Repolarise the electron microscope’s phase inverter!

Of course we do, you just need to keep on zooming!

A devastating blow!

Darkness closes in, haunting the hearts of men.

Keep going! It’s almost visible!

-> <-

If you zoom in on the line above, and I mean really zoom in you will see a violin small enough to express my level of sympathy.

One feels there is an allegory for “too stupid to be afraid” buried in here.

As a mathematician who has worked in tech, this I am very much aware of XD

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

What you’re likely seeing here is innovation similar to the early tech sector. The hardware limitation (no Nvidia chips) means different (usually more complex) solutions are needed.

These solutions usually require a deep understanding of a specific area of mathematics, and expertise in coding. The person making it normally has to be heavily invested, since it still eats a lot of hours.

I often joke, the mathematician who finds a faster algorithm for matrix operations is sitting on a billion dollar idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74

Moon Channel has a really good breakdown of how bad things are in terms of gender equality in South Korea.

It works and is a pile of jank - Python

It doesn’t work and is a pile of jank - C++

You violated gods laws with how bad your code is and it still runs (right through the wall) - C

“Points at the smaller thing”

Every time I watch a student stall out on inequalities I ask “it’s the crocodile isn’t it?”. Without fail, they’ve got confused by it and as soon as they hear “points at the smaller thing” they have no issues.

Ehh no, you genuinely can’t patent any form of mathematics.

Mathematics falls under “exists in nature” (if you are a Platonist) or “abstract ideas” (gets even clear thinking Constructivists). So they’re excluded from parents and copyrights no matter how complex the system

Textbooks usually belong to the publisher (academics commonly have to pirate their own papers), so that’s usually a bust.

You might be able to patent an algorithm associated with a branch of mathematics, but that’s trickier than you think. Blank slate development can, and does, happen (see Compaq’s reimplementation of IBM’s bios). You’re banking on it not being reversed engineer able (spoiler, don’t take that bet if you’ve published your proofs!).

I mean, the point was definitely stated as protecting creators. We’ve seen some solid David Vs Goliath stories of artists taking people who steal their work down.

However, this isn’t the reality for the majority of copyright. A lot of it just ties up works to companies owned by speculative shareholders (think of the lord of the rings).

Limits to duration would definitely help this, and we’d be on the same page there. However, I do still wonder if it shouldn’t be shorter for certain things (e.g. medical treatments or manufacturing), with the option of a public domain buyout to cover (reasonable, non-inflated) research costs.

My view is that of a scholar - one who does devote a large part of their life to freely creating and disseminating knowledge. I do indeed hold a strong bias here, one I’m happy to admit.

Much of the time, when I’ve run across copyright, it is rarely (if ever come to think of it) in the name of the author (a common requirement of journals being the giving up of ownership of one’s work). It normally falls to a company; one usually driven by shareholder value with little (if no) concern for the author’s rights. This tends to be the rule rather than the exception, and I’d argue that copyright in it’s current incarnation merely provides a legal avenue to steal the work of another, or hold to ransom their works from future generations. This contradicts the first point, and also the second (paywalled papers); indeed the lack of availability of academic works (created for free, or with public funding) is, I believe, a key driver of inequality in this world.

One can withold or even selectively share knowledge, and history will never know what that has cost us.

In terms of AI training, I wouldn’t say it is copyright infringement even in spirit, and I say this as one whose works are vomited out verbatim by LLMs when questioned about the field. The comparison with speaking is an interesting one, for we generally do try and attribute ideas if we hold the speaker in esteem, or feel their name will enhance our point. An AI, however, is not speaking of their own volition, but is instead acting in the interest of the company hosting them (and so would fall under the professional label rather than the personal). This might contradict your final point, if one assumes AI progresses as a subscription product (which looks likely).

I think your framework has merit, mostly because it is built on ideals (and we need more such thinking in the world); however, it does not quite match the observed data. Though, it does suggest the rules a better incarnation of copyright could adhere to.

More so, I think no-one has an issue with training publicly available models - it’s the ones under copyright themselves people are leery of.

Oh, that copyright is bollocks. If you follow its intent, you should be including academics, and that state of affairs would be abhorrent (we’d stagnate).

That’s rather the irony - mathematics takes a great deal of work and creativity. You can’t copyright mathematical work; but, put a set of lines together and shade in the polygons created and suddenly it becomes copyrightable. Somehow one is a creative work whose author requires protection, and the other is volunteered for involuntary public service.

The reason mathematics cannot be copyrighted: because it’s a “discovery”, rather than a “creation” (very much a point of view, and far from irrefutable fact). In mathematics, one should be aware, that the concept and it’s explanation (proof) are much the same thing.

All in all, the argument is either mathematical work should fall under copyright (an abhorrent idea), or copyright should be abolished as it rarely (if ever) does much good.