PDF is a sad replacement for PS. As far as I can tell, it was an attempt to obscure PS, because alternative vendors were getting better as Postscript than the originators.
(There was some justification in terms of 'Oh, a binary format like PDF is more space efficient.' But PDF never really was more efficient than compressed PS.)
It's not that PS has vanished, but PS isn't nearly as 'everywhere' as HTML came to be.
From the perspective of someone who worked in printing and publishing starting in the 1980s, there's more to it than that. PostScript was and is terrific as a page description language and as a printer control language. It absolutely revolutionized the printing business. For the first time, you could get complete pages (as opposed to unpaginated galleys) out of high-end imagesetters.
But it was not all that good as a way to send documents to be printed elsewhere. Postscript files were in some ways too dependent on the printer they targeted, so the person creating the PS file had to know too much about the printer that would be used to print it: its resolution and optimal halftone screen frequencies, media sizes, etc. With high-resolution output on photographic film costing around $10 per foot, mistakes could be expensive as well as time-wasting.
Fonts could also be a problem. Ideally, the PS file would contain all the fonts it required but this did not fit very well with the terms of most font licenses. And some applications would include a copy of every font used once on each page on which it was used. This was in line with Adobe's recommended Document Structuring Conventions and had the advantage of making pages within the file independent of one another, but for documents with hundreds of pages, this could add up fast and make the PS file literally hundreds of times larger than if all the fonts were included just once. With small storage media and slow network links, this was a real problem.
The "P" in PDF is for portable, and these are the problems it solved. Unlike a PS file, a PDF file is not targeted for a specific printer model, and most font licenses allowed the licensee to include subsetted fonts in PDF files. I personally prepared PS files for a few thousand books to be printed at various places around the US and later, PDF files for thousands more. There is no comparison: PDF was and is better in every way for this purpose.
PDF is also a lot less powerful, purposefully so. You can start an infinite loop just by double-clicking a PS file, for instance.
It is extremely useful to have a full programing language as a file format, though.
I miss macOS’s Preview.app auto-converting PS to PDF when double-clicked. It was a way to easily distribute a document that could randomize question orders each time it opened, print multiple bingo cards from a single file, etc.
The stack-based and reverse Polish notation thing was also fun.
There is no builtin setting in iOS to disable it. However most 3rd party keyboards don't have it, as implementing it without OS support is a huge pain.
Why is it hard? In principle you render an image instead of discrete buttons, and do your hit testing manually. Sure, it’s more annoying than just having your OS tell you what key got hit, but keyboard makers are doing way fancier stuff just fine (e.g. Swype).
Apple's keyboard receives more information, to put it simply. It doesn't get told that a touch was at a particular point, but the entire fuzzy area. Allowing you to use circular occlusion and other things to choose between side-by-side buttons and override the predictive behaviour when it is the wrong choice.
A third-party maker gets a single point - usually several in short succession, but still it requires more math to work out where the edges of the finger are pressing, to help determine which direction you're moving. So most just... Don't.
The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain. As automated process output are public domain, and the companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input unencumbered, too.
It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.
That would be considered a derivative work of the C code, therefore copyright protected, I believe.
Can you replay all of your prompts exactly the way you wrote them and get the same behaviour out of the LLM generated code? In that case, the situation might be similar. If you're prodding an LLM to give you a variety of resu
But significantly editing LLM generated code _should_ make it your copyright again, I believe. Hard to say when this hasn't really been tested in the courts yet, to my knowledge.
The most interesting question, to me, is who cares? If we reach a point where highly valuable software is largely vibe coded, what do I get out of a lack of copyright protection? I could likely write down the behaviour of the system and generate a fairly similar one. And how would I even be able to tell, without insider knowledge, what percentage of a code base is generated?
There are some interesting abuses of copyright law that would become more vulnerable. I was once involved in a case where the court decided that hiding a website's "disable your ad blocker or leave" popup was actually a case of "circumventing effective copyright protection". In this day and age, they might have had to produce proof that it was, indeed, copyright protected.
"Can you replay all of your prompts exactly the way you wrote them and get the same behaviour out of the LLM generated code? In that case, the situation might be similar. If that's not the case, probably not." Yes and no. It's possible in theory, but in practice it requires control over the seed, which you typically don't have in the AI coding tools. At least if you're using local models, you can control the seed and have it be deterministic.
That said, you don't necessarily always have 100% deterministic build when compiling code either.
That would be interesting. I don't believe getting 100% the same bytes every time a derivative work is created in the same way is legally relevant. Take filters applied to copyright protected photos - might not be the exact same bytes every time you run it, but it looks the same, it's clearly a derivative work.
So in my understanding (not as a lawyer, but someone who's had to deal with legal issues around software a lot), if you _save_ all the inputs that will lead to the LLM creating pretty much the same system with the same behaviour, you could probably argue that it's a derivative work of your input (which is creative work done by a human), and therefore copyright protected.
If you don't keep your input, it's harder to argue because you can't prove your authorship.
It probably comes down to the details. Is your prompt "make me some kind of blog", that's probably too trivial and unspecific to benefit from copyright protection. If you specify requirements to the degree where they resemble code in natural language (minus boilerplate), different story, I think.
(I meant to include more concrete logic in my post above, but it appears I'm not too good with the edit function, I garbled it :P)
Copyright'd in, copyright out. Your compiled code is subject to your copyright.
You need "significant" changes to PD to make it yours again. Because LLMs are predicated on massive public data use, they require the output to PD. Otherwise you'd be violating the copyright of the learning data - hundreds of thousands of individuals.
No, and your comment is ridiculously bad faith. Courts ruled that outputs of LLMs are not copyrightable. They did not rule that outputs of compilers are not copyrightable.
I think that lawsuit was BS because it went on the assumption that the LLM was acting 100% autonomously with zero human input, which is not how the vast majority of them work. Same for compilers... a human has to give it instructions on what to generate, and I think that should be considered a derivative work that is copyrightable.
I would say all art is derivative, basically a sum of our influences, whether human or machine. And it's complicated, but derivative works can be copyrighted, at least in part, without inherently violating any laws related to the original work, depending on how much has changed/how obvious it is, and depending on each individual judge's subjective opinion.
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