Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

This whole presidency has just been one big grift. Being a US senator has been widely understood to be a very profitable position, but this is really the first time we've seen the oval office get turned into a money-printing machine for the sitting president.

Other presidents have suspended control of their businesses while in office to eliminate even the appearance of conflict of interest. But this one, every decision he make seems to revolve around figuring out how to funnel more money into his family and businesses.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any good to try to "expose" him on it, he has NO shame and doesn't care what anyone sees since his appointed buddies aren't going to hinder him. He's just going to keep doing it and throw a tantrum anytime he gets blocked. And that isn't happening nearly as much as it should, since in the past even the congress-critters maintain very relaxed laws to give themselves a wide berth to grab some money. But he's just going all-in on those weak laws (and lack of willingness to enforce them) and is going to wring every penny he can out of the country and its taxpayers.

On the bright side, he's made American History class a lot more interesting. And I'm taking bets that we get a whole rack of new laws on limiting presidential abuse as soon as he gets done robbing the bank.

Given the way so many people vastly over-estimate ChatGPT as an actual intelligence, I thing it's quite fair to put it up against an old and tiny chess engine on easy level. This is basically "Are you Smarter than a5th Grader" for AIs. And it is NOT.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

No. An AI that "knows" the entire book actually has the book stored in digital form. It does not matter if the storage is indirect. And that happens to be an unauthorized copy, because an AI is a machine and what it has stored is a copy of that data.

Obviously, that is untrue. You very likely can get an LLM to claim that you authored something with quotes of the work. Then quoting that is plagiarism.

Ah, sure. But who in their right mind commits commercial plagiarism? Oh, my bad, LLMs are involved. Of course, then all bets are off.

Humans with photographic memopry are for sure copyright violators as soon as they perform those memories publicly. And that is legally what this is about. LLAMA may privately hallucinate as much as it likes, but this is about ther version offered publicly.

Indeed. The fascinating thing about all these AI fanboi idiots is that they do not seem to ask AI these questions. They would get told the same thing.

The law is already in place, you are just too ignorant to know it. Humans get an exception for memorization as that does legally not count as data processing. But as soon as a human publicly performs a copyrighted work from memory, they must have a license. Look up "Happy Birthday" ...

No. If it is unintentional, you may escape punishment, but you still must stop doing it.

Completely immaterial. If you build a machine that then plagiarizes, you are plagiarizing. Seriously, why do you AI moron fanbois do not ask your fake God? ChatGPT will readily tell you that.

Wrong. I get that you are uneducated, but look up "fair use". For quoting a book to _not_ be plagiarism, the quote must fall under fair use. Quoting 42% of a book is certainly plagiarism and doing so commercially without a license is a crime.