“Forced to do bad things… by circumstances.”

Dude’s severely broken by his past and upbringing. I don’t have much more than passing familiarity with the circumstances of his particular upbringing, but just the Wikipedia page on his early life describes his upbringing as “strict” and says of Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump:

Fred… held profound sway over his children, repeatedly telling Trump that he was a “king” and a “killer”.

Which is… you know… kinda fucked up.

From a PBS article:

“I strongly suspect that he had a relationship with his father that accounts for a lot of what he became,” Tony Schwartz, who co-authored The Art of the Deal with Trump, tells FRONTLINE. “And his father was a very brutal guy. He was a tough, hard-driving guy who had very, very little emotional intelligence, to use today’s terms.”

And later in the same article:

“All of us were part of this culture of you beat on kids when they didn’t do the right thing,” says Trump’s former military school classmate Sandy McIntosh.

If anything can fuck someone up, that’s probably it.

Mind you, a similar upbringing in a different individual with different genes and epigenetic factors and depending on the specifics of the context could well produce wildly different results. But traumatic events, in one way or another, fuck people up. Often for life. And sometimes fucked up people make their fucked-up-ness everybody else’s problem.

Let me put a few qualifiers on the claim that “everyone is good”, though:

• If I use terms like “bad” or “evil”, I’m being a little more loose with my language than I probably ought to be. I’d generally prefer to say “antisocial and/or maladaptive” over something like “evil”. Specifically because “antisocial” and “maladaptive” sound more clinical and less condemnatory.
• What I mean by “everyone is good” is that people don’t need an excuse to do good. Humans are a social species that capitalizes on cooperation and community. When a person does something antisocial (or maladaptive), that requires a cause in a way that doing good does not.
• To an extent, my definition of “good” is a bit circular. What humans do when most optimally healthy, fulfilled, and otherwise “well” is kindof good “by definition”. Yet, there’s a certain extent to which that definition of “good” may not fully line up with what a lay person may consider “good” behavior. I haven’t got the quote right at hand, but I remember reading Maslow’s “Toward a Psychology of Being” in which he said that the “growth-need-motivated”/“self-actualized”/“fulfilled” individuals can exhibit a cold, calculating, perhaps ruthless sort of logic that might be disconcerting to some. And by his estimation, “growth-need-motivated”/“self-actualized”/“fulfilled” sort of situation is the most healthy and fulfilled sort of state that a person can be in.
• I do believe it’s most likely possible for the sort of “brokenness” that can result in antisocial and/or maladaptive behavior due to circumstances (as opposed to innate traits) to span generations. I’ve read in a Robert Sapolsky book (again, I don’t have the book at hand at the moment) that there’s a statistically significant negative effect on IQ in the great grandchildren of smokers. (And if I recall, the experiment in question showed causation pretty convincingly, not just correlation.) If some environmental factor can have a negative effect on IQ that many generations downstream, it seems plausible that one’s propensity for or againt antisocial and/or maladaptive behaviors could also be affected by events many years before their birth. However, I still believe that the vast majority of antisocial and/or maladaptive behavior probably traces back to a cause.
• I also don’t believe in “free will”. Everything everyone does ultimately traces back solely to factors over which they have no control. Your brain works the way your brain works because of your genes, epigenetic factors, upbringing, and similar circumstances you had no input into. No matter what you do, if you ask “why” enough times, you’ll find youself back at a cause/reason that had nothing to do with your own “will”.

One of the main social implications of the idea that people are inherently “good” and that free will doesn’t exist, at least in my estimation, is that the whole idea of a punitive criminal justice system is a wrong-headed way of going about it to say the least. A “bad” person (or, again, better said “a person who exhibits a pattern of antisocial behavior”) is a “sick” or “injured” person. The process of making them able to contribute constructively to whatever social system they may find themselves in in the future should be one of treatment. Making them more miserable is just giving them more of what caused them to exhibit antisocial behavior in the first place. To try to “fix” such a person with punishment is like treating morbid obesity by force-feeding chocolate cake.

My unpopular opinion is that /c/unpopularopinion is fine the way it is.

Not so supermassive any more.

I’d love a stick that has Hoopla support, but of course that’s going to be hard to come by because Big Entertainment doesn’t make billions of dollars off of it.

Cure the disease by killing the patient.

Ha! Wasn’t ordering anything by that point, but maybe it’s a sign that my mother wants a tea pot for her birthday.

I’m covinced that there are no bad people, only people I don’t understand or people who are forced to do bad things against their will by circumstances

💯

No thank you.

I’m not sure there’s any official word yet on what caused this delay. (That said, there might have been an announcement at FOSSY, a FOSS convention coordinated by the SFC. I hadn’t noticed it had started until just now. If I run across an official reason, I’ll update this comment and maybe the OP here.) But one of the recent times it got delayed was the court’s fault. (The previous trial on the docket ended up running longer than expected. “Into overtime” if you will.)

That said, I think Vizio’s motion to remove the case to federal court was probably somewhere between a hail mary and a delay tactic. (The chances that the courts would agree with them were pretty slim. Here’s one of the lawyers on the case on the SFC side saying that the motion to remove based on the preemption theory was a long shot. That whole video is a panel at a convention that served as a Q&A regarding the SFC v. Vizio suit.)

In general, the court system moves a the speed of glue and Vizio’s got no reason to hurry because they have a lot more money to burn than the SFC does and because the longer it takes to get a ruling, the longer Vizio can keep selling its TVs and ignoring the requirements of the GPL.

OpenAI and Anthropic and Alphabet etc try their best to preventing it from doing so, so the act of getting it to do so anyway is “jailbreaking”, but yes. LLMs can reproduce works it was trained on. (At least chunk-by-chunk each limited to the token limit.) And I’d imagine the same is true of things like Stable Diffusion, though it might be much easier to get Stable Diffusion to produce something similar enough to qualify as a “derivative work” than it would be to get it to produce exactly the original.

Just wait until next week when we find out that Taylor Farms was selling pangolins and bats to Chinese food markets in 2019.

Yes! The filings have definitely been interesting. And there have been a lot of them and they lay out the arguments pretty well. The page the original post links to has all the gritty details if you really want to read it all (as I did.)

I think this trial is kindof the “final stretch” before an official ruling would be issued. And of course, there’s potential for appeals.

(And, as I’ve just now discovered, this trial did get delayed again. :( )

Just to give the backstory, though, the legal theory at work here is pretty interesting. The SFC has been involved in other suits around the GPL. Those other suits have been brought on the theory that the GPL is a copyright license and so the case to be brought is a copyright infringement suit. But the thing about a copyright infringement suit is that the only ones who have standing to bring such a suit are the copyright holders. This has certainly worked out for other cases in the past like Christoph Hellwig’s lawsuit against VMware in Germany (which the SFC partially funded and helped out Christoph Hellwig with things.) That suit is basically why we have OpenWRT today.

But this suit is different. The SFC bought a Vizio smart TV, analyzed it, and found that it contains a bunch of GPL’d code in binary form only. (The Linux kernel, FFMPEG, a bunch of libraries and such. You get the idea.) The SFC contacted Vizio and demanded the source code of all that GPL’d code and Vizio gave back… something, but not what the GPL requires. The SFC isn’t the copyright holders on any of that software. The GPL, I think it’s fair to argue (and the court seems to agree so far), intends that the SFC be able to get the source code of all GPL’d software on the TV in question, but if the SFC brings a copyright suit, they’ll almost certainly be found not to have standing to bring the suit since they’re not the copyright holders and the suit will be thrown out of court.

So, instead, the SFC is arguing that the GPL is not just a copyright license. In an unprecedented move, they’re arguing that the GPL contains both copyright and contract terms. There is precedent for this with other licenses. Probably most notably MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment Inc. (2010). Both parties in the Vizio suit have been quoting extensively from the MDY decision claiming it supports their side. Lol. Mostly because it’s kindof the major precedent on the topic of the intersection of copyright and contract law. The MDY case picked apart which parts of a license document were under copyright and which portions were under contract. “Conditions vs covenants” as the MDY case called the different elements.

One thing about contract law. If a contract between two individuals would also benefit a third individual who is not a party to the contract, that third individual is considered a “third-party beneficiary” to the contract, and has standing to bring a breach-of-contract suit. (Like, if you and I had a contract that said “I’ll sell you one ton of tinned sardines and in return you have to pay me $10,000 and pay Steve over there an additional $10,000”, then Steve would be a third-party beneficiary with standing to bring a suit against you if you received my sardines and paid me $10,000 but didn’t pay Steve.) (One other thing I’ll say is that I’m not sure whether the third-party beneficiary having standing to bring a breach-of-contract suit is a U.S. federal law thing or specific to California law.)

So the legal theory under which the SFC is bringing the suit goes like this:

• The GPL is not only a copyright license, but also contains contractual terms. If a party breaks the contractual terms, those should constitute grounds for a breach-of-contract finding.
• SFC bought a TV from Vizio which contained various GPL’d and LGPL’d code in object form.
• Vizio has a valid contract with the copyright holders of all of the GPL’d code on the TV in question.
• The “source code provision” in the GPL (from the text of the GPL, “You may convey a covered work in object code form… provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License.” Reading further, one way in which you’re allowed to convey the source code is to include only a “written offer” for the source code. So I think a lot of the filings in this Vizio case will refer to the “source code or written offer” and the claim that neither has been provided satisfactorily by Vizio.) is a contractual provision.
• Vizio provided no source code nor written offer with the TV, nor have following dialog between the SFC and Vizio produced the full source code.
• And the SFC qualifies as an intended “third-party beneficiary” of the contract between the copyright holders and Vizio, and thus has standing to bring a breach-of-contract suit against Vizio.
• So SFC is asking the court to compel Vizio to uphold their contractual obligations under the GPL – most importantly the source code provision.

That’s what the suit is about in short, and the SFC brought the breach-of-contract suit against Vizio in California courts. (For matters of federal law, suits have to be brought in federal court, but this contract claim is a matter of state law, and thus it’s up to the complaintant (SFC) to decide whether it’ll be brought in state or federal court.)

Vizio first tried to claim that the SFC’s claim shouldn’t validly have been a contract case at all and in fact is most properly a copyright case. Again, issues of federal law must be brought in federal court, so Vizio under a “preemption” argument got the courts to “remove” the case (from state court) to federal court. Federal court, upon hearing SFC’s arguments (“it’s not a copyright claim, it’s a contract claim, and therefore SFC gets to decide whether this is brought in California court or federal court, and we chose California court, so send the case back to California court, please”) immediately sent it back to California court.

Vizio has been oddly insistent about the preemption thing and has continued to try to convince the California courts to throw the case out because what SFC is really arguing (at least by Vizio’s estimation) is a copyright claim. And they’ve been slapped down a couple of times.

(I’m definitely forgetting and leaving out some things. SFC hasn’t only asked for one thing, but multiple things in their filing. But yeah.)

In the most exciting development so far, the court issued a “tentative ruling.” Basically “here’s a ‘draft’ sort of ruling that if neither of the parties objects will become the official ruling”. And that “tentative ruling” mostly agreed with SFC. So it really seems like the court is leaning pretty heavily in the direction of the SFC’s arguments.

Of course, Vizio objected and demanded a proper trial. And Vizio has been stalling as much as they can to try to starve SFC of funds and will to continue. But unless SFC pulls out, it really seems like Vizio has a very uphill battle if they have to try to change the court’s mind on the matter.

And if the court finds in SFC’s favor and Vizio produces the source code, the SFC is going to release it to everybody in a way that enables the creation of a completely FOSS OS distribution for Vizio TVs. And just as is the case with OpenWRT, I think if Vizio TVs get such a FOSS distributoin, other brands of TV won’t be terribly far behind.

But also, if this sets a precedent, any request that any old regular person makes of a consumer electronics manufacturer for the source code of any GPL’d code on consumer electronics devices will have a lot more “teeth”. This could affect smart phones, smart speakers, robot vacuum cleaners, cars, smart toasters, you name it.

So, yeah. Super exciting in general. Except maybe a little less so now that it’s been delayed again. But still exciting!

Applying liberally to the orifice.

Not that orifice. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I meant a camera lens. uwu

To hide the wheels on the rig of your sci-fi hovering speeder, of course.

In that movie where that guy kisses his sister. 👉👈

Generative AI will not stop until it has ruined everything good and beautiful.

Lemmy admins right now: “why are so many people f5-ing this one thread…?”

Baller move. Anon should have just owned it.

Medical science by fiat. Why didn’t I think of that?