Luis Villa

Luis Villa

San Francisco
CS degree, failed programmer, now lawyer. Tidelift, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Ximian, many others along the way.
Mar
19
Pile of giant easter eggs in an Italian town square, generated by Midjourney

it’s a lot / 2023-03-19

Two mini-essays on the Open Data Definition and why OpenAI’s non-profit/for-profit split can be legal (but might not be), and many news bytes from a busy week.
11 min read
Mar
12
Foreground: a pile of lumber, vaguely structured in the shape of a house. Background: blue skies, trees.

structure is good / 2023-03-12

Focusing on some key themes, via deployment on laptops, government algorithms, a blog post from Anthropic, an intro to foundation models, and more.
5 min read
Mar
05
A body of water with a single person holding an umbrella and cloudy skies above. Mostly grey.

getting serious / 2023-03-05

An observation from the Linux Foundation Legal Summit; Apache grapples with ML; adversarial data; memes explained; and muuuch more.
8 min read
Feb
06
Flock of birds over large pieces of paper that look like contracts (AI-generated image)

layers and lawyers, oh my / 2023-02-06

Long pondering on when the giants of the space might fight for fair use, or compromise; an observation on the state of open data governance; news on attribution; memorization of (some images); and two weeks of miscellany.
9 min read
Jan
20
A drawing of windblown trees along an ocean coast, in muted grey and green colors, as generated by Midjourney.

Power, accountability, speed: pick (one?) / 2023-01-20

Updates, including data from Hugging Face, new litigation, and thoughts on power.
5 min read
Jan
10
A cartoonish cupcake, with a speech bubble saying “2022”, generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1

2023, and welcome new subscribers

What I’m *not* doing in 2023 (predicting the future), a few examples of this tech getting simpler and faster, and an extensive discussion of Wikipedia.
6 min read
Dec
19
Two impressionistic Santas dancing under palm trees, generated by machine learning

all through the house / 2022-12-19

I've been under the weather and busy at work, so things have been sporadic. I look forward to doing this
4 min read
Dec
06
A robot with many visible wheels, rolling through a field. It is made of broccoli.

no chats / 2022-12-06

Avoiding ChatGPT; updates on economics (trends going in good directions), law (it’s messy), explainability (nothing good).
3 min read
Nov
22
Colorful turkeys in a vaguely anime-inspired style.

Transparency and other rules / 2022-11-21

RAIL adoption; observations on “release early, release often” in ML; and a micro-essay on transparency.
8 min read
Nov
14
Two attorneys in the snow, in the style of a rough oil painting.

busy weeks / 2022-11-14

The newsletter has been quiet, but the world has not. Some thoughts after a couple of very busy weeks.
4 min read