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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#121
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. W…

I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nucle…

The problems are attribution and licensing. Not use.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..."

At this point, anyone using the term "stochastic parrot" is just giving credence to my personal belief that humans are also stochastic parrots.

I mean, its probably a component (or an approximation of a component) of what we do, at some level. Christ knows I've felt like a stochastic parrot when I'm zoning out 3 hours into a meeting and someone asks me a question out of the blue. I probably have a smaller context window at those points than GPT3 does...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Thank you!

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#124

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.

This. It shouldn't matter whether copyright violation was generated by a human brain or via an instrument (AI). ReactOS developers also rely on clean room approach: https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_FAQ#Is_ReactOS_based_on_Mic...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If code with a license, say GPL, goes out somewhere else, by someone else (and therefore I don't have the right to change the license) and then I fork it, as per the license I keep the license and put it on github, and Github violates that license, aren't they violating the law? Don't they then have to remove that code? If that's the case then in that scenario the license supersedes the ToS right? Now imagine this: I…

> If code with a license, say GPL, goes out somewhere else, by someone else If the code is GPL licensed, you can't relicense it under a non-FOSS license like you're talking about > Don't they then have to remove that code? Yes, if code gets uploaded whose license is incompatible with Microsoft's terms, they probably do have to remove it. > Now imagine this: I write some code, license it, but don't publish it yet. It'…

Not re-license. I upload with the same license I got it with, as per the license.

So then Github is breaking the law a significant portion of the time then at the very least?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, but that's a different discussion. In this case the person does have the rights under the GPL to do what they do, but GitHub does not have an automatic right to assume that that gives them the right to enforce their ToS on the original copyright holder, which they effectively do.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#127
post #98
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modifications you distribute have to be given back. You don't have to distribute the modifications though.

Not given back to the original authors, but given to the users.

Issue is that many large corporations use FLOSS internally with heavy extensions/modifications and never give back to the community. They don't have to, since all users are in-housr, and those tend to have access to the source code.

But that's ok. If upstream is somewhat active then it's just a pain to keep maintaining your in-house patches, compared to sending them upstream. So that's automatically a motivator. If upstream is not active, then it does not matter anyway.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#128
post #42

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'…

If we are being honest as a community, open source developer are pretty far down the list of groups with valid grievances against this current wave of AI for how they are trained. There is at least a debatable case that these systems are operating in the spirit if not the exact letter of general open source licenses. It is a much harder argument to make for the AI trained on writing and art that is clearly copyrighte…

What I agree with is the typical open source dev, who goes "I MIT license all my things, because I have seen it elsewhere and I don't want to think about licenses a lot." being pretty far down the list of groups of people to complain.

What I disagree with is the idea, that they should therefore not complain, or that there could not be an AI system, that does not code laundering, but keeps licenses in place and does this ethically and in an honest way. Adding "ethically" and "honest way", because I am sure that companies will try to find a way around being honest, if they ever are forced to add back the licenses.

In fact, artists might not be the group, that grasps the impact of training on that corpus as quickly as the dev communities. Perhaps it is exactly the devs, who need to complain loudest and first, to have a signal effect.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#129
post #37

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.

Logical reasoning is the one thing LLMs are really bad at.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#130
post #37

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 cannot be considered as general reasoning engines because they do not make any kind of reasoning though.
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