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If you don't want to be responsible for it, another way is to just publish it anonymously: make a GitHub that isn't attached to your real name etc, perhaps using a one-off disposable email address, and put it there. Then you don't have to think about what the lawyers think. Worst case it'll get taken down, but by that point it'll likely be popular enough that there'll be plenty of copies.

[Pirate flag emoji here]


> Worst case it'll get taken down,

Eeh, worst case scenario you'll get sued as Microsoft will have no problem with handing over everything they have from your Windows installation information, GitHub accounts, NPM authentication and everything else they own today if the courts tell them to.

You can't just commit crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not, and expect that to not come back to haunt you eventually. Kind of poor form to suggest otherwise too.


"You can't just commit crimes on the open internet "

Who said it is a crime, are you a lawyer?


Allegedly commit potential crimes*

I'm not saying yay/nay if this is a crime or not, but if you think it might be, and you create a new account on GitHub to "be anonymous", you're not taking opsec seriously enough for something you believe might be a crime.

By the way, generally judges or juries would be the ones to decide if something was illegal or not, it's not the lawyers who decide this, in any country I'm familiar with.


Tbf "is it a crime" is hard for even a single lawyer to answer because it depends on: who you are, your skin colour, how rich you are, your sex, whether it's a white collar crime or not, did you commit the crime on behalf of a corpo, etc.

But we like to pretend that the justice system delivers justice evenhandedly I suppose.


No it does not. The law defines what a crime is. That you are bummed out about how it is applied, does not change the question, whether it is a crime. One thing is the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor, another thing is the application and the punishment meted out.

That's not quite the case in common law countries. In countries like the UK and the US, the interpretation of the law as written is ultimately decided by the court, meaning that the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor is subjective. The more courts that attempt to interpret that specific law, the more 'jurisprudence' builds up, meaning that the interpretation applied in a previous decision can certainly have an impact on a future decision.

If there are predictable patterns w/r to the implementation that is something a good lawyer would tell you, albeit in couched terms.

I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure there is a crime somewhere there.

Please note: This is America where potential civil immigration charges can result in summary execution because poorly-trained wannabe-cop racists with guns make needless escalations. If law enforcement thinks it’s a crime, it’s a crime until the courts say otherwise.

99% of American law enforcement does not care about a piano disc encoder.

> You can't just commit crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not, and expect that to not come back to haunt you eventually.

Not sure what you're talking about, the current AI boom is entirely based on committing crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not.

So is much of big tech in general.


Keyword being "you". "They" can commit crimes, because they're big tech companies who give gifts to the right people. But "you" are not "they".

Sure, on github it will (still) get the most attention, but perhaps another repository outside the US is a better fit.

You could also create a text document instead of a software that details the mechanism used to fool other MIDI decoders and publish only that (for now).

Finally, familiarize yourself with the Art. 6 Software Directive (2009/24/EC) / §69e UrhG — decompilation for interoperability. It may be your ticket for a legal status in Germany/EU.


Why bother publishing the code? Anyone with LLM access can recreate it. Instead write up your findings on how it works. Publish that in a blog, submit it to Wikipedia and Reddit. Player piano did security through obscurity. Now make it less obscure.

code with compilation instructions can be understood and used by much more people than a long conversation between a human and 2 top tier LLM only accessible through costly agreements and providing nondeterministic output. Going from a prompt to working code you have to traverse a pretty steep paywall...(yes 20 to 200 dollars per month is steep if you compare it with the rest of the software stack like compilers/interpreters and text editors, which is usually free)

What if the companies start auto subpoenaing the AI companies to try and tie the code to an account?

Let them do it. It will end up really well. I know the system has been protecting these companies, but that has been an economic concern as much as other motives. Now that AI is the crown jewel of economy and global dominance, let the entertainment industry have a go at it. Let them.

Wait until we all get popcorn though, and find a comfy place to watch from that's just outside the splash zone.

Do companies in the US really have the right to do that? I would think that kind of investigation is reserved for law enforcement only. If the design was made over email, would the piano company be able to subpoena Google for someone's private gmail messages?

> Do companies in the US really have the right to do that?

Does it matter? What's important is if it can happen or not, and how if so. We already know that MPAA is willing to basically do whatever, even contribute themselves to piracy, if it means they can put people in jail for copying stuff eventually. They themselves also gotten in trouble for copyright violations themselves in the past, so doesn't seem like they're hiding away from breaking a little bit of laws to hunt pirates.


Attorneys can subpoena if the court approves, as part of ongoing litigation, AFAIU (IANAL).

Consider previous cases where companies like Reddit have unmasked their users at the behest of court order.

Maybe then using an open weights model is a good way to hide your tracks...

Or at least use an obscurer model from an obscure company, so they don't know who to subpoena.

Everyone is aware that multiple services offer zero data retention, right?

Their neutral harness is not very good though, if I read it right, it doesn't preserve the reasoning state between turns. No real harness discards reasoning state like that.

Yeah that must be it. OpenAI doesn't want to disclose internal reasoning, that's why thats typically encrypted_content in OpenAI codex session ledgers etc.; leveraging responses API preserves reasoning server side all the way till a final answer is made; so that's very impressive and to me the score that matters.

It's quite common in Europe. Usually you get 15 minutes which seems fairly generous.

"Quite common"? I've spent more than 3 decades here, visited most of the countries on the western side, both north and south (although embarrassingly little eastern parts), and have not seen this once in my life. Thinking about it, I haven't seen this anywhere in the world.

You will usually see these in public places that have no other access controls - think in a park, rather than in a restaurant. It's for places that have a high risk of people sleeping in them.

Yeah, I do visit public bathrooms from time to time, especially in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, and never seen that once anywhere, although I've seen much worse things on single occasions than a timer for the door to open.

I've seen them in some of the shadier parks in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. Yppenplatz, Vienna, has a particularly nasty (smelling) one which the countdown clock does very little to obviate.

A really nasty smell would get me out fast. Can't imagine any use for the timer, unless you're trying to estimate the remaining oxygen.

The timer is to let the junkie know how much privacy they have left before they can be discovered in the act of shooting up.

> people sleeping

Junkies' heroin-induced stupor.


The fact that you haven’t been in central or Eastern Europe might be the key.

I haven’t seen an actual countdown timer, but many of the public toilets in Poland have time limits that are displayed on a sign, and announced by the computer voice loudspeaker. Usually it’s 30 minutes though IIRC.


I'm not going to pile on since there is already a handful of comments stating the same, but I think we can all be guilty of "This thing exists/happens specifically where I and most people I interact with live, so it must be common (in [superset])". It's very good to be mindful of when making assumptions/imprinting generalizations.

I've been all over Europe and I have never seen this....

What, where? Never saw this.

I have seen a couple of them in Cologne.

... et voilà, we now know where the GP is from :)

"quite common in Europe" oh please. I live there, traveled quite a bit, and have never seen one or heard of one.

As I understand it, Kosovo and Montenegro adopted the Euro unilaterally, without agreement from the EU. I don't think that'd be (politically) possible for Iceland (?). So the EU would need to agree to this, which also doesn't seem politically possible (?)

There are a whole host of microstates and more or less autonomous overseas territories that use the euro. If Mayotte can use the euro even though the island is on the brink of collapse, I don’t see why that would be a problem for Iceland.

I don’t think this is a problem for the EU – quite the opposite, in fact. It strengthens the euro’s position in international trade, increases the number of users and boosts the volume of trade. More customers for the EU’s financial services sector.

There are a number of countries that unofficially use the US dollar as their currency for major transactions without asking anyone’s permission (Cambodia come to mind).


> If Mayotte can use the euro even though the island is on the brink of collapse

Isn't Mayotte part of France and been for quite some time? I'd guess they switched to the Euro together with France and all the other French territories, but maybe I'm wrong?


Yes, Mayotte is very much part of France.

Monaco, Vatican and San Marino are however sovereign micro-states that switched to the euros because they already had a monetary agreement with France or Italy.


Also Andorra, which has an agreement since 2006 to mint their own Euros.

There’s also Ecuador who officially uses the USD as their currency.

And Panama!

Well, it doesn't require EU's approval by definition. Because it means just unilaterally handing out EU a lot of cash.

Why would they need permission to use a currency?

Yes, that's sort of our strategy as well: for us accuracy (and following a style guide, and extracting on-screen text from video) is important. So we do a first pass with whisper to get the word timestamps, and the pass the same audio (chunked in case of longer ones) to Gemini (pro, not this model), to transcribe without timestamps. After that you can transfer the timestamps from whisper to the timestamp-less Gemini text, by looking for runs of identical words in both and fudging timestamps for the other words I'm between a bit. Works quite well, and I'll be tesing this model to see if it can replace Whisper.

It seems like it has come to mean "fast, small, cheap" models these days, and seems well enough understood as such that different AI labs are adopting it.

As I understand it, the drive can thus be seized, and a potential loss of a cheap flash drive is a lower inconvenience than loss of the phone.


Not forever though, and if you're an iPhone user, already current iPhones sold in the US are eSIM only. So in some number of years (depenfing on your device oldness tolerance), they will become obsolete eventually.


Why would you use an iPhone?


Gemini "flash" models have an option for media resolution, including a high resolution option for screenshots.


At what price point?


It's not great if you don't want to use the Grok models though (and I don't, because it's now an Elon product), and if using Claude models via Cursor, the usage I get is way less, I was sometimes spending $60/month with Cursor and I get more with CC $18/month "Pro".

But CC took some getting used to, I also prefer the Cursor interface (the legacy "chat" pane).


Well yes, obviously it's not a good deal if you don't want to use its main product that they subsidize. If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike.


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