I'm surprised in general that Linux Mint is ahead of Debian (testing / unstable)

Mint user here. I think that's because for gaming, Mint is a great compromise. Debian's ultimate focus is stability, which makes it a fantastic choice for servers, but in gaming, you often want components that aren't quite that old. It still doesn't randomly break your stuff, unlike rolling release distros.

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I think the question is more "When you ask a Large Language Model to 'write' you some code, where did that code come from and whose copyrights is it infringing?"

Well, from a purely technical point of view, the question is easy to answer: It made the code up, based on knowledge it gained from looking at other people's code. That's really all there is to it.

The legality of doing that is murky, as of today. Mostly because traditional copyright law wasn't designed with AI training in mind. Keep in in mind that no trace of source material is left in the trained model, which puts the model weights outside of copyright law's reach. Several lawsuits have been filed, arguing AI training with copyrighted material to be illegal. Every single one of them so far has been tossed out by courts. In case you wonder, yes, Meta was found guilty of copyright infringement, but that wasn't about the training, it was about them torrenting books they used for the training.

Unless copyright law is getting updated (I am not seeing anything in the pipes in any relevant jurisdiction), that leaves ethical considerations. And as we know, these are very much subjective.

Same applies to the actual output. To be copyrightable, a work needs to be human created (anyone remember the famous case about the monkey selfie?). AI output is clearly not human made, so the output is not copyrightable - and thus cannot be affected or bound by any kind of license. It's legally public domain.
The one issue is if the model accidentally or on purpose produces full replicas of copyrighted/trademarked material. Queen Elsa doesn't stop being copyrighted just because an AI model drew her. Which is behind the case of Disney vs Midjourney - their model is trained on Disney's work and can reproduce it on prompt. Which - since the outputs are technically distributed when the customer downloads them - could be a copyright violation. I do actually expect Disney to win this case, but let's see. In the end, it looks like a bigger issue than it is. People could make a replica of Disney IP by copy/pasting it, without the AI detour. The result will probably be API model providers having to block people from generating copyrighted/trademarked material. Most newer models I am aware of already aren't trained on specific artists to prevent these issues.

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to advance new and free technologies around LLMs and generative AI that actually respects these ideals

I am honestly not sure what about MIT-licensed (Deepseek) or Apache 2.0 (Qwen) isn't free enough. Even OpenAI has a OSS model now, if you absolutely insist it being Western-made (it's garbage, though).

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Ok, I didn't expect this to happen.

As this was the one thing that made me boycott the game so far, I wonder if what's left of Civ VII is worth buying, considering I already got Civ VI. Is there anything that's both new and exciting in VII?

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I am starting to develop a serious contempt for devs not releasing the server files when they shut down a game. There is really zero reason not to. You're commercially done with that game, so no harm done.

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What a disappointment...

I couldn't name you a single developer not using AI tools at least in some capacity these days. It's just them accepting reality of software development these days.

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I'm disappointed, I thought they started by replacing the CEO with AI.

AI is less full of crap than pretty much any CEO. It would have been an improvement, really.

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It does to some people. Whether they have a choice or not ? Well, being informed about the inclusion of Ai at least for now will help people make their own ethical choices.

Fair enough. Everyone has their own standards of what they accept and don't. Some people think I am strange, because I boycott games forcing a male character on me, and will continue to do so until the day when there is a halfway equal amount of games with female protagonists out there. I guess there are not a lot of people like me around, because these game still seem to sell very well. :D

that cost of generating those will suddenly be REALLY high

I skimmed that article quick, and while the numbers seem correct, that's because US/Western-made AI models all seemed to have been developed as if resources don't matter at all. Chinese-made models are taking over, among things because they can be trained and run for a fraction of that cost. The top 5 LLMs are all Chinese-made these days and most of them use a fraction of the parameters the Western models use (to the degree you can run them on machines easily within reach even for smaller companies, no AWS needed). Open AI and Anthropic are basically dead in the water, and unless they pull something really amazing out of the hat near year, they will be out of business.
In the end, there is absolutely nothing about that article that made me agree with the "haha, it's going to blow up!" prediction. People will realize that just throwing more computing power at the problem isn't sustainable and develop models cheaper to train and operate. Like China already did.

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The problem isn't just the lack of oversight, it's the ethics of it. People losing jobs due to AI, all the AI generation being trained on the works of others without their consent.

Pretty much every transformative technology destroys jobs and businesses. That's normal. People who feel threatened by said new technology typically turn into haters, thinking they can stop or at least delay it. That has never worked.

Some of the same artists now throwing spite at AI and anyone using it or being even mildly in favor of it, said the exact same thing about Photoshop and why it will kill all art. They're all using it now. And it hasn't killed art. It just made it different.

I wrote a lengthy post a while back why I really don't think that AI will ever replace human art. Or writing. Or coding. But if you guys insist on not buying anything remotely touched by "AI slop", as some of you refer to it, you will soon find yourself unable to buy any games at all anymore. AI will become a tool like Photoshop or a calculator. Everyone will use it at least in some capacity, because the alternative is losing your job or business. You think you can avoid games using AI even now? Think again. I am not aware of any professional software developer not using AI at least for some mundane tasks already. Maybe some are still out there, who knows. But fewer every day. Chances are that the vast majority of games already have at least some AI generated code in them. Just because you can't see it and its less obvious than art doesn't mean it isn't there. And soon you will be unable to identify AI art assets by counting fingers of characters on the images, too. It's hard to enforce "have to declare AI" rules, if not even experts will be able to tell the difference. And we're about 2-3 years away from that.

Technologies always had that tendency of not letting people stop them by hating them or people using them. The more constructive approach would be to talk about how to compensate creators for their works being used for training (just put a tax on the providers of commercial/non-open source models, really). Because in the end it doesn't matter what made a game as long as it's fun to play.

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Caution is always advised when downloading anything from the internet.

While true, this won't help most users one bit. Verifying each and every package in a supply chain is prohibitive for most users, either because they don't possess the necessary tech literacy levels, or simply don't have the time to check fingerprints for each and every package. Not that even that would mean 100% safety, because attackers could also place fingerprints matching their compromised packages while they're in control of the site anyway.

In the end the operators of major, otherwise trustworthy sites really need to treat their resources as what they are: Critical infrastructure.

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