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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#101

Post by shrimpx »

LASR wrote: post #37
ianbutler wrote: post #7

I tend to disregard articles that default to the "Stochastic Parrot" argument. These tools are useful now, I don't personally care about achieving actual intelligence. I want additional utility for myself and other humans, which these provide now, at scale. By a lot of measures many humans perform at just about the same level, including confidently making up bullshit. This post reads like one of the "Goodbye X online…

It’s pretty ironic that the argument that LLMs are stochastic parrots actually sounds like the actual parrot. I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.

LLMs suck at deduction and factual reasoning. How are they reasoning engines?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#102

Post by lionkor »

rdiddly wrote: post #85
bruce511 wrote: post #11

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

Yeah on the one hand, isn't opening your source all about not really minding what happens to it after that? It's intended to be copied and used. On the other hand something about the term "laundering" kind of resonated for me. It's kind of like automated plagiarism where you spread your copying out over millions of people. But plagiarism only has meaning as an offense when the thing being copied isn't intended to be…

no, open source isn't about practically giving up your rights, its about restricting use of your code and software in exactly such a way that it gives every user as much freedom as possible.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#103

Post by pcthrowaway »

jacquesm wrote: post #96
pcthrowaway wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well upthread the discussion changed to using a non-open license that prevents people from training AI on it. If you released software under such a license, someone re-uploading to Github would probably be violating their terms or yours. Regardless, Microsoft would probably remove the repo if you contacted them to let them know you're the copyright holder, and the software license is incompatible with their terms. It…

You shouldn't have to though, they have a responsibility all their own to check that they have the rights regarding someone else's copyright before they do what they want to do, rather than to do it anyway and then to wait for the rights holder to come to them. Copyright isn't 'opt in'.

I mean, if someone uploads a repo that contains proprietary code that also contains CI actions from the proprietary codebase, formatted the same as github actions, they're going to run those actions under the assumption that they are allowed to (even though they aren't, because it means they're running proprietary code). It's all automated. The person uploading the proprietary code would be the one infringing in that case.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#104

Post by saurik »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #82

I abandoned github the day that they (and others, including people here) started arguing that their ToS trumps your code's license. That's absurd. It's authoritarian, it's hostile, it's an act of enmity. Fuck all that bullshit. I do business with no entity, period, that treats me with that level of disdain.

Yeah and it's like, nonsensical for the service: if you are working in open source, the reality is that a lot of the time you are working with software you don't own. I develop a lot of software, and the vast majority of it was open source... but I've only ever put two projects of mine on GitHub (and one only because I was working with some other people and I essentially got outvoted ;P). And yet, if you search for my code, I'm sure you can find almost all of it on GitHub, because it was open source and other people wanted to be able to edit it or even merely redistribute it... which I'd have said is there right, but I guess not if supposedly that overrides the license on the software? Or like, if this were the case, how would one expect some large/old open source project with a ton of prior contributions--which is normally fine as everyone has the same rights under the license and so you just all mix your code together and are happy: you don't actually need some central organization with ownership until you want to change the license (which is something many people explicitly don't want to ever happen)--to be hosted on GitHub? Even simpler: most of Google's code is open source--such as the Android Open Source Project, or Chromium--but they don't host it officially on GitHub... I guess it isn't OK for anyone to work on this stuff on GitHub either, right?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#105

Post by midasuni »

If someone were to break Microsoft licensing terms and give me a copy of windows code

Then if I read that and built my own understanding

Then if I used that knowledge to implement my own version of windows that was compatible with Microsoft’s and distributed it under my own license

Would that be legal?

WINE etc are built in clean room environments for good reasons.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#106

Post by cornel_io »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #73
happymellon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. They don't impact the current legality of a licence, but it will affect future ones. GPL/BSD/Apache/proprietary, they are all picked for ideological concerns which all stem from feelings. It is good to discuss these things, and it is good to recognise that these are emotionally driven.

> They don't impact the current legality of a license, but it will affect future ones. Don't they? Even the most liberal licenses require that you at least keep the license and attributions. Which are exactly the parts that AI systems remove. I would have no problem with an AI system trained on GPL code if the output was still covered by the GPL.

Whether or not copyright applies at all to model training is an entirely open question, and where rulings have come down, it's likely closer to these situations being fair use (e.g. the Google Book's case, which was ruled transformative and not a direct replacement for the works in question).

The reality is, these models don't copy or distribute anything directly, which makes applying copyright a bit of a stretch. Many people feel like it is a use that should have some sort of IP law applying to it, which is why I think there's some chance that courts or legislators will decide to screw the letter of existing law and just wedge new interpretations in, but it's not super simple: they'd have to thread the needle and not make things like search illegal, and that's tricky. Besides that, these models are out there, they're useful, and if they're ruled infringing they'll just be distributed illegally anyways.

I don't envy the people who will have to decide these cases, I suspect what's better for the world overall is to leave the law as-is and clarify that fair use holds (nobody will stop publishing content or code just because AI is slurping it up, a few weirdos like the article author excepted), but there are going to be a lot of pissed off people either way...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#107

Post by uuuguaii »

bruce511 wrote: post #11

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors.

In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well.

This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me. Obviously as long as you only use them privately you are not obliged to anything, the copyleft author gives you that option, but once you publish any of this, we all share the results.

That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous. That's what Copilot does since it ignores this deal.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#108

Post by probably_wrong »

autophagian wrote: post #39
kookamamie wrote: post #34

> It's a stochastic parrot Stopped reading right there. The author clearly has no clue of how neural networks work or what makes them tick.

Do you have any resources you'd recommend to form a better understanding of how NNs tick? I'd like to get a better intuitive grasp on whats going on - I've mostly just been responding to that with "Well, if stochastic parrotism can do all this..."

In case you haven't seen it yet, the term "stochastic parrot" got introduced by this paper [1] titled "On the danger of stochastic parrots". A related paper [2] titled "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data" got awarded Best Paper by the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics and it's also easier to read.

Those two papers are critical of LLMs and discuss what researchers believe that they can and cannot do. I don't say that you need to agree with them but I think reading them should give you a good primer on why some researchers are not as excited as HN users are.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

[2] https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#109

Post by UberFly »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #46
aetherspawn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL either, but the license still applies to the end-user (the person who trained the AI) so it would seem like it would add at least 1 non-trivial license violation for that user? Edit: I googled "fair use copyright US" and have now decided that US copyright law is stupid.

> Edit: I googled "fair use copyright US" and have now decided that US copyright law is stupid. Don't be like that. Fair use is what allowed VCRs to continue existing, what allows Google Images and Books to exist, what allows the development of emulators... I could go on.

"I googled "fair use copyright US" and have now decided that US copyright law is stupid"

How long exactly did you study the issue? It is very complex.

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