I have an email forwarder on my personal domain that forwards to my gmail address, and gmail lets me send email as if it were coming from that address. Seems like it's the same result, and they're not blocking that.
They've been gradually making it more difficult (you now have to use a backdoor route with a machine access token if you want to register a new sending address).
Almost all workplaces I have worked in insisted on having a sick certificate even for a single day. Several times I was asked to come to work for a few hours even when quite visibly ill.
Just counter this with a little more anecdata, I'm a regular GP visitor in Australia and have found them to be great. The only antibiotics I've been prescribed in the past decade were for a particularly persistent parasite infection.
Out of curiosity, what sort of parasite? I did not know there were parasitic infections that could be treated with antibiotics as opposed to an anti-parasitic drug like mebendazole.
Woodworking can be a good hobby for an engineer as there's a lot of problem solving - both design problems or construction problems (like how to set up a particular cut to make it more accurate or efficient).
Combining those worlds is even more fun. I had a simple project involving an Arduino board and built a nice housing for it out of wood that managed to combine my interest in software, electronics and woodworking all in one!
4. is underrated and mysterious. I've dealt with periods of anxiety by playing an online competitive card game, something that "should" be stressful, but having played it hundreds of times before, the steady stream of familiar choices that ultimately don't matter, is soothing.
I'm a long term employee of a large software company. When I had kids I asked to go down to 4 days so they wouldn't be in childcare for the whole week. Now the kids are all in school but I've kept the 4 day week as I'm much happier this way. A few years ago a colleague asked to go to 4 days (with no kids) and was rejected, so I doubt I'll ever give it up, otherwise I'll never get it back, and I don't know how I'd ever find another job that would support this style of work, so I guess it has worked in my employer's favour.
At one point does AI recreating patterns it has seen from reading source code count as a derived work? What if a human learns to code by reading only GPLed code, does all the code they write fall under GPL as a derived work now?
> “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.”
This has some interesting implications – for example, it means I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.
> > “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.”
So any code uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder renders someone liable to be sued for copyright infringement, AFAICS. The only question is whom it makes liable -- the uploader, GitHub (=Microsoft!), or both?
I can see arguments either way: The uploader is clearly infringing by giving away a right that isn't theirs to give. But so is GitHub / Microsoft, for using a "right" they haven't been properly given. So I'm provisionally leaning towards "both".
> I can't mirror somebody else's (open source) code on GitHub without their explicit agreement.
Who is doing the "mirroring" -- you, in uploading the code, or GitHub / Microsoft in actually hosting it, keeping it available for download from their "mirror"[1] site?
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[1]: Is that even the correct terminology nowadays, when AIUI for lots of projects GitHub is their primary code repository?
So GitHub should immediately take down (and remove from their Copilot learning model!) all *GPL code uploaded by anyone but the ("primary"?) copyright holder.
There's one thing I'm missing from all these discussions and posts: is the generated code even copyrightable? IANAL, but code snippets often fall under the "scènes à faire" doctrine (everybody would do it in a similar way), in which case it's not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire
GitHub seems to think it is copyrightable, personally I doubt it is, simply because a human didn't create it and the process it was created by was automatic with no creativity.
Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entirely written by an AI, so any real program would have quite a lot of user input (I regularly will take what copilot suggests and then tweak it to what I specifically want). And then, yeah, it's copyrightable.
Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.
Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here's the kicker: your modified code snippet may still not be copyrightable if it's generic enough that everyone would do it in a similar manner.
Just as much as a hero riding off into the sunset is not copyrightable in a movie script. However, a hero riding off into the sunset with bananas in the pistol holsters would be.
This is what I would want to hear more about when discussing if Copilot violates copyright.
Got roasted for "I deleted my coworker's unit test because I thought it was a bad test." The blue AI ranted at me about never ever deleting tests, and the green AI failed to absolve me because of an error. I'm sure it's a legitimate error but it looked like the green AI managed to find a passive aggressive way to express disapproval!
The game Twenty that I posted on here many years ago as a ShowHN[0] post took off from that very post and is still earning in that ballpark. I keep trying to find more time to work on it and other projects too, but somehow as my kids have gotten older and my spare time in the evenings gets shorter, I haven't managed it.
As a kid I always wanted the 8860 set: http://www.technicopedia.com/8860.html. It was well beyond the means of my family at time, and I had almost forgotten it existed until I discovered my wife's family had it in their Lego stash and thus I had a chance to live out my childhood again.
Building the 8860 made me realise how much Lego instructions have improved, as every step is basically a game of spot-the-difference trying to work out what pieces have been added. Not so bad for a small build, but in these complex builds it's a long process, especially when all the parts have been mixed into a larger collection of bits.
I prefer the older type of instructions. They make you think - you need to plan out more of the build yourself, instead of just becoming a mindless brick assembly robot.
I wonder if there is literature about improvement in Lego instructions. Current instructions still don't highlight specific changes, although they do list out the parts to be used. As I've watched my kids grow to work it out for themselves it is interesting to see how much tacit Lego knowledge is needed to complete a particular step.
Some of them actually do highlight specific changes, but Lego Group isn't consistent about it, even in sets of similar scale released around the same time.
For example, the instructions in the Lego UCS A-Wing from 2020 don't highlight changes; the Space Shuttle Discovery (released 2021) instructions do (with a red outline around the pieces added). The Shuttle set's a bit bigger, but the two sets are fairly similar in terms of scale and build complexity; it seems that it's really up to the designer to decide how explicit the instructions are (whether or not things are highlighted, how many things happen in each step, when specific parts are called out with arrows, etc.).
Tangentially, I own a LEGO fanmade book with a detailed guide on how to create instructions for your own creations. I don't have it on hand, but I recall POV-Ray was involved.
It's sad that they don't keep these sets going. Somehow my parents bought me a Technik set when I was a kid. I say somehow, because it's expensive to me now, and I grew up in the economic climate of the 90s in the USSR. I am almost 100% sure this set is the reason I am comfortable working on technical stuff ranging from code to mechanics to building computers, etc. The set in the OP actually teaches you how a transmission works - that's something few adults understand from tutorials, but its hard not to understand it when you build it.
