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This was a very common thing media companies dealt with and still deal with. There are too many legal risks in even reading the idea. SOP is to send back the envelope sealed and with a canned response explaining that they don't accept pitches from the public.

I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember hearing a story about a company that was soliciting ideas from the public for maybe a joke book or maybe tv show plots. They got into a lot of legal hot water once they found out that the ideas weren't original and people were actually just taking them from other sources.

If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.


How do they know what they are not reading if the envelope is still sealed?

they have to open the envelope to see what's inside - they get mail that is not ideas and they have to open it.

But I assume the people who get the mail are trained to see if the envelope contains ideas to stop reading and return the mail with the canned lawyer response.


I often think about how Ask Jeeves had the last laugh in the age of LLM-powered search.

I feel like "game engine" is a misnomer for what we're actually dealing with here. It's more like an "ECS-based scene rendering engine, which can be used for games or for advanced UI". But that doesn't have a succinct label yet.


I think "game engine" is a pretty succinct label for that. :)


This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.


Activist judges?

The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?


In the case of Citizens United, it's actually a pretty straightforward case. Without a constitutional amendment, it would take a very unorthodox reading of the first amendment.

The "problem" with Citizens United is that it's a very clear case.


Corporations are amoral immortals who cannot be placed behind bars. Therefore they should never be given the rights of human beings.


They don't have the rights of human beings. Humans don't lose their rights because they are in a corporation, that is the outcome of Citizens United.

"A corporation is people" is the singular of "corporations are people". Anyone saying anything different is lying or misinformed.

Think about all the times someone who definitely knew better implied that it meant a corporation is a person and trust them less.


Better question: What if we actually punished perpetrators of threats and doxing with the existing laws we have against terroristic threats? Why do we treat this as some unstoppable force of nature when the vast majority of them come through traceable methods like mail or phone?


Why not both?


I'm guessing this "humanizer" actually does two things:

* grep to remove em dashes and emojis

* re-run through another llm with a prompt to remove excessive sycophantry and invalid url citations


You’re absolutely right!

Ha. Every time an AI passionately agrees with me, after I’ve given it criticism, I’m always 10x more skeptical of the quality of the work.


Why? The AI is just regurgitating tokens (including the sycophancy). Don't anthropomorphise it.


Because I was only 55% sure my comment was correct and the AI made it sound like it was the revelation of the century


Because of the way regurgitation works. "You're absolutely right" primes the next tokens to treat whatever preceded that as gospel truth, leaving no room for critical approaches.


For student assignment cheating, only really the em dashes would still be in the output. But there are specific words and turns of phrases, specific constructions (e.g., 'it's not just x, but y'), and commonly used word choices. Really it's just a prim and proper corporate press release style voice -- this is not a usual university student's writing voice. I'm actually quite sure that you'd be able to easily pick out a first pass AI generated student assignment with em dashes removed from a set of legitimate assignments, especially if you are a native English speaker. You may not be able to systematically explain it, but your native speaker intuition can do it surprisingly well.

What AI detectors have largely done is try to formalize that intuition. They do work pretty well on simple adversaries (so basically, the most lazy student), but a more sophisticated user will do first, second, third passes to change the voice.


No. No one is looking for em-dashes, except for some bozos on the internet. The "default voice" of all mainstream LLMs can be easily detected by looking at the statistical distribution of word / token sequences. AI detector tools work and have very low false negatives. They have some small percentage of false positives because a small percentage of humans pick up the same writing habits, but that's not relevant here.

The "humanizer" filters will typically just use an LLM prompted to rewrite the text in another voice (which can be as simple as "you're a person in <profession X> from <region Y> who prefers to write tersely"), or specifically flag the problematic word sequences and ask an LLM to rephrase.

They most certainly don't improve the "correctness" and don't verify references, though.


providers are also adding hidden characters and attempting to watermark if memory serves.


It's more complex than that. It's called SynthID-text and biases the probabilities of token generation in a way that can be recovered down the line.


Curious what the rules were.


probably mostly "stay well away from people and stay away from these areas"


This is a EULA I'd love to read.


It appears ChromeOS is being killed and they're porting much of its feature set into Android. This may be marketed as "ChromeOS", with identical functionality, and consumers won't be none the wiser.


How will this succeed where the Motorola Atrix failed way back in 2011?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/the-motorola-atrix-4...


My Moto Edge 2024 has "Ready For" which is basically this still today. I plug in the USB-C cable normally connected to my work MacBook and I instantly get a full desktop experience; mouse, keyboard and sound included.

It's how I play Minecraft with my kids when they get the itch. Sometimes if I know I'm only gonna be zoning out on Youtube at night I'll use to to save a few watts too.

It can do 1440p at 120hz, all on a really affordable phone. It's nice.


ChromeOS has a bigger influence on the market than a random phone model from CES when Android was still establishing itself.


Phones were way less powerful 15 years ago and native software was much more important. A modern phone CPU running a browser on a larger screen takes care of a lot of what you need these days.


How as adoption been for Samsung's DEX?


I've only used it when I'm in a pinch but it's handy. Blowing up mobile apps to a larger screen and multitasking isn't ideal certainly but I've been able to handle "email job" type activities while out of pocket. That said I've never heard of anyone else who's actually used it.


Internet censorship is more of a reality and a problem than it felt at the dawn of the age of cheap wireless broadband. I can certainly see the value in local wikipedia copies if internet blocks, age gates, etc need to be contended with.


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