TKnarr 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (871)

• On the post: Judge Reopens Trump’s IRS Case, Wants To Know If The Court Was Defrauded

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 01 Jun, 2026 @ 10:11pm

  Fraud is often said to be based on lies, and lying requires intentional untruth — which suggests one would have to know what’s true in the first place.

  Which is why when dealing with legal definitions usually phrase it as "knowing it was untrue, or with reckless disregard for it's truth". Trump falls under the "reckless disregard" part. What he's saying is false, he's saying it deliberately, and whether he knows it's false or just doesn't care is a difference without a difference.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 01 Jun, 2026 @ 10:12am

  Such legalities won’t matter to con artists, grifters, and other such hack frauds. But they will matter to courts and lawyers.

  Except that for the courts and lawyers to get involved means getting into court. Going through the very expensive discovery process (see "lawfare"). That's the reason a lot of people cave rather than fight copyright abuse: your average author can't afford the cost of winning.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 31 May, 2026 @ 05:05pm

  The problem with the public domain is someone can take the work, make their own version of it, claim copyright on that and use it to block anyone else from using the public-domain version. See Disney's movies. CC-BY achieves the same result as the public domain without leaving that loophole open to exploit. Also this needs to be limited to cases where there's no significant cost to keeping the work available. If there's a cost, like a minimum print run for a book, the copyright holder shouldn't have to choose between taking on that cost with no expectation of recovering it or losing their rights.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 31 May, 2026 @ 03:15pm

  Real copyright reform is needed and it should be targeted directly rather than these little culturally downstream problems.

  When dealing with digital works, where there's no issue of the cost of keeping it in publication when it's not selling well, perhaps go with automatic reversion. If it's unavailable for purchase for 10 years, rights automatically revert to the creator with no appeal allowed. If the creator leaves it unavailable for 10 years, it's automatically licensed under CC-BY.

• On the post: How AI Can Lead To False Arrests & Wrongful Convictions

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 29 May, 2026 @ 06:08pm

  Exactly. Scale matters. The 95% confidence level is right down at the bottom of what's useful for anything. In practice a 99% confidence level is the minimum for reliable predictions, and that only works where true positives are relatively common. The less common a true positive is, the higher the confidence level needed and it's not uncommon to need 99.998% confidence or higher when true positives are rare. None of this matters to the cops or the politicians, though, and that's the problem. The false positives never cause them any negative consequences, so they don't care about them.

• On the post: Super Meth Isn’t The Hero We Want, But It’s The Hero We Deserve

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 26 May, 2026 @ 10:47am

  Oddly the cartels may have done just what's described. The normal process for manufacturing ephedrin, amphetamin and so on produces a racemic mixture (equal parts) of the dextro- and levo- chiral forms, but only the dextro- form is useful as a drug. Based on analysis of seized drug shipments, the cartels had developed a process that produced mostly the dextro- form, resulting in improved yield. Pharmaceutical chemists were rather annoyed because they'd been trying to do that for years with no success.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 25 May, 2026 @ 09:05am

  I think you want to double-check the law on that. The 1st Amendment might protect your right to publish those things, but it doesn't protect you from charges of practicing medicine without a license afterwards. Especially if someone followed your advice and was injured or killed because of it, and especially if you held yourself out as someone qualified to give medical advice.

• On the post: Ken Paxton Wanted To Crack Down On Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts.

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 22 May, 2026 @ 06:37pm

  I think one change to the venue rules would make a huge difference: change the question from "Is this a proper venue?" to "Is this the most appropriate venue?". Then in cases like this an obscure district could only be considered proper if the damage occurred only in that district and nowhere else. Otherwise it'd have to be either the AG's home district or the home district of the company's headquarters. Both sides could forum-shop to a degree by deciding where they'd locate themselves, but there's a lot of downsides to making that decision based solely on how favorable the court was.

• On the post: New Trump FCC Plan To ‘Fight Robocalls’ Raises Red Flags And Major Privacy Concerns

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 19 May, 2026 @ 09:47am

  What's annoying is that solving the robocall problem is fairly straightforward: the billing system. Provide a statutory damages amount for robocalls without express consent, and allow the receiver to file a bill for that amount with their phone service provider. That provider knows exactly who to bill for the call, and that provider knows who to bill, and so on back to the originating customer. The teeth in it would be the provision that the providers are the ones responsible for the bill at each step, with the previous provider being responsible for paying them. The providers who serve the robocallers (either directly or by forwarding their incoming international calls) would overnight become persona non grata and the problem would, if not cease, certainly become much smaller. The fastest way to solve a problem is to make it the personal problem of the entity who's in a position to solve it.

• On the post: We Need A More Serious Discussion About Suicide And AI Chatbots

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 18 May, 2026 @ 07:15pm

  Just because it's protected by the 1st Amendment doesn't mean you can't be held legally liable for it. I think the "yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater" scenario is a case in point. The 1st Amendment does in fact protect your right to do that. But if you do and there isn't in fact a fire nor any reason to suppose there was one, and people are injured as a result, the 1st Amendment won't stop a court from finding you liable for those injuries.

• On the post: We Need A More Serious Discussion About Suicide And AI Chatbots

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 18 May, 2026 @ 07:10pm

  Within limits. The actions have to be reasonable to escape liability. If a human responded the way these chatbots do, by assisting the person in planning and executing a suicide attempt, I assure you they would not be exempt from liability for that.

• On the post: We Need A More Serious Discussion About Suicide And AI Chatbots

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 18 May, 2026 @ 03:02pm

  Humans treating inanimate objects as if they were people knowing full well they aren't isn't limited just to this, nor are the positive results. See "rubber-duck debugging": software engineers talking a rubber duck through the problem they're having, only to realize half-way through what the problem is and how to solve it. The object isn't important, it's the process of talking through the problem that's the important part. I'd expect the same thing to be true of a lot of mental-health and other issues. The problem seems to be in cases where you have two very similar situations, one involving someone who just needs to talk things out and the other involving someone who's planning on doing something irrevocable. In those cases the right responses for one are exactly the wrong responses for the other. Humans have enough problems with those, as one person quoted in the article pointed out. LLM chatbots? Not a snowball's chance in Gehenna of getting it right. That's benign when it only involves cases where the person just needs to talk things out, but the moment there's the possibility of both kinds of situations turning up things are guaranteed to go south in a hurry. I wouldn't make any liability exceptions for the genAI companies though. We don't for humans. If they don't like the idea of being held liable for what the chatbot does in those situations, then it's on them to figure out how to keep their chatbots out of those situations. If that puts a crimp in their business plans, too bad so sad.

• On the post: Why The US Can’t Adopt Ukraine’s Innovative Approach To Unmanned Warfare Systems

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 15 May, 2026 @ 04:39pm

  I'm not sure it really changes anything about the basics of warfare. The goals are the same, as are the things you need to do to win. You need to put your enemy's forces in the line of fire while keeping your own out of it as much as possible. You need to be able to move your forces around the battlefield to take advantage of changing conditions, ideally without your enemy noticing what you're doing. You need to be able to keep your forces supplied and reinforced while denying the enemy the ability to do the same. None of that's changed since the dawn of warfare. What's changed are the tools. Horses, motorized vehicles, aircraft and helicopters, and now unmanned vehicles, opened up new ways to do all of the above, but you're still doing all of the above. The big change we need is in selecting goals. Answer me this: you can make 5% of your enemy's forces cease to exist with a snap of your fingers. Any 5%, anywhere they are, no muss, no fuss and no way they can stop you. Which 5% do you target? How much overlap is there between that 5% and the segments of enemy forces we target today?

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 10 May, 2026 @ 09:29pm

  Outlook not so good

  NASA could've told them that...

• On the post: Kash Patel’s Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic Is Designed To Generate Headlines, Not Win In Court

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 21 Apr, 2026 @ 05:31pm

  I wish we'd see courts start dismissing cases like this sua sponte for failure to state a claim. This case would be a perfect example where even if you assumed every statement made in the claim is true it still fails as a matter of law.

• On the post: AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2026 @ 10:44pm

  Because most of the "copyright overreach" isn't on the part of the creators, it's on the part of the middlemen (publishers and distributors and the like) who take the lion's share of the profits and give the actual creators a pittance. There's no contradiction in being in favor of creator's rights and simultaneously in opposing copyright overreach.

• On the post: AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2026 @ 10:42pm

  And after all that, they don't really work that well for most of the use cases their advocates are presenting. I have to work with Github Copilot at my job, and at the best of times it's like mentoring a junior engineer: I have to hand-hold it through the entire process, explaining to it what it got wrong and what it needs to do to correct it at every step. As with mentoring another engineer, I could've just done the work myself faster. Unlike that junior engineer, I don't get a more experienced and better engineer out of it. Copilot never improves, and I take a hit to my productivity because of it. At it's worst it blows up so badly I have to just abandon the attempt (which at least saves time, which is a sad commentary on it).

• On the post: AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2026 @ 10:09pm

  Because the source material they use is all appropriated from actual people without their permission, then used to generate profits for the AI companies without giving those people any of it. Without the work the models were trained on there wouldn't be any profits for the AI companies, but they look at it as their right to use everyone's work without permission and without paying for it. On top of that, there's the prodigious environmental and economic costs of those models. They require data centers so big they can't be used for anything else, consume so much power that it destabilized the electric grid in the area and drives prices sky-high for everyone else, and consume memory (both DRAM and SSD memory) in quantities that leave nothing for the rest of us. Literally. There will be no available DDR5 nor SSDs for consumers this year, the AI companies have bought up 100% of the production for the entire year. Now, is some nice imagery worth all that?

• On the post: AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2026 @ 08:13pm

  Which all translates to Steam becoming for most people what it already is for me: a place to buy the games I already know I want from other people's recommendations or other sources outside Steam. I don't go browsing Steam looking for games. I go elsewhere to people I know or to review and recommendation sites I know and find games I'm interested in there. Steam is the cashier, nothing more. That might stem the flood of cheaply-made crap games, but I'm not optimistic. The cost of making and publishing them is so low it only takes a few suckers to make it profitable, and there's always new suckers coming along who don't know how to navigate the bog.

• On the post: Amazon Enshittifies Prime Streaming With Higher Costs To Avoid Ads

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2026 @ 07:18am

  At some point, piracy becomes the only option left.

Next >>