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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#221

Post by FeepingCreature »

cowl wrote: post #163
FeepingCreature wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe they just disagree with you?

Who? See: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 A 2021 research paper warning (among other things) precisly about this confusion. > The ersatz fluency and coherence of LMs raises several risks, precisely because humans are prepared to interpret strings belonging to languages they speak as meaningful and corresponding to the communicative intent of some individual or group of individuals who have accounta…

How is that different from "This evidence for X raises the risk that people falsely believe that X"? That's an argument for X, not against. And nothing in that paper, even if I discard the dross (ie. everything except one section on page 7), seems to actually make an argument against X of any strength beyond "it is wrong because it is wrong".

My point is this: I disagree with you. This is not because I have "misunderstood" something; it is because I understand the stochastic-parrot argument and think it is erroneous. And the more you talk about "the risk that people will come to falsely believe" rather than actual arguments, the less convincing you sound. This paternalistic tendency is a curse on science and debate in general.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#222

Post by Mizoguchi »

Github was always private and their founders had already sold other companies to Microsoft, so it's hard to understand how anyone could be shocked and disappointed when they sold Github as well.

Copilot is great IMO, so good it feels almost like cheating, but if you are so broke that you cannot come up with $10 a month then don't use it, you can still use Github though.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#223

Post by mech422 »

uuuguaii wrote: post #113
tlocke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MIT No Attribution licence https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ doesn't require an attribution. It's the licence I choose for new projects.

That's very generous of you. Don't get angry though if I go ahead and re-publish all your code with your name replaced by mine. That's exactly what you are allowing me to do with such a license.

That would be a copyright violation, not a licensing issue. GP is giving you a _license_ to use his code without having to say "GP wrote this", he is NOT giving up his rights to the code..

edit: to clarify, he's allowing you to _use_ it however you like, including making a derivative work, including it wholesale, etc. However, claiming authorship of the original code would still run afoul of the original copyright.

edit2: oh - if you mean relicensing the code - that is allowed.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#224

Post by jacquesm »

dolmen wrote: post #187
jacquesm wrote: post #96

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'.

> Copyright isn't 'opt in'. Before 1989, copyright protection was opt-in in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice

It's 2023.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#225

Post by lofaszvanitt »

elric wrote: post #181
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard w…

Yikes. You sound very bitter. Is there a story behind that bitterness? There's a wide variety of people in the open source community at large. And a wide variety of motivations for contributing. I for one am happy that open source software is a thing. It's been a net good for mankind. Sure, there are abuses, and I'm sure many things could be improved. But I'm glad it's there all the same.

Nah, not at all, just don't like power structures that feed on benevolent naivety. Of course it's good, but compensating those people should be the norm. Where is the payments side of github for example? So it's open source but in order to clone the rep you should spend 1 bucks on it, or if you want a bug/feature addressed you could name a price or the dev can set the price on it?

Because the holy sacred cow must not be agitated... suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

And people rationalizing the all devouring machine, hell, it is just bonkers.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#226

Post by lofaszvanitt »

azangru wrote: post #173
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard w…

This is such a misrepresentation of the open-source landscape. Yes, there are people working on open-source projects who beg for donations; but there also are open-source projects maintained by full-time employees (Eleventy, paid by Netlify; React, paid by Facebook; Angular, paid by Google; Next.js, paid by Vercel; Linux, paid by various companies; etc.). If a person thinks that his efforts will be better compensated…

People should not beg for their work for a start. If you use it, you should pay for it. A small fee, or a fee that is set by the dev.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#227

Post by mxmlnkn »

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.

Since ChatGPT I've become much more aware of my own thoughts and written text. I'm now often wondering whether I'm just regurgitating the most frequently used next word or phrase or whether it could actually be described as original. Especially, for things like reacting with short answers to chat messages, I am confident that these are only reactionary answers without alternatives, which could have come from ChatGPT trained on my chat log. I feel like knowing and seeing how ChatGPT works can elevate our own thinking process. Or maybe it only is similar to awareness meditation.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#228

Post by bostik »

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 would say that open source as a movement sprung up from the principles of early netiquette[0]. Which themselves were built on the foundations of sharing your knowledge with your peers.

Whether you were trawling Usenet or just a presence in your local BBS scene, "teach it forward" was always a core concept. Still is. It's difficult to pay back to the person who taught you something valuable, so you can instead pay it forward by teaching the lessons - along with your own additions - to the later newcomers.

Of course the Eternal September changed the landscape. And now we can't have nice things.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology#Netiqu...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#229

Post by pcthrowaway »

jacquesm wrote: post #144
techdragon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure thats a narrower interpretation than GitHub are aiming for. I'm just paraphrasing the parts of GitHub's ToS that I can remember since current debate on the topic has lead to me remembering a few important parts reasonably well but I've certainly not memorised them. So this is a good opportunity for me to go re-read them and quote them directly... (also in case anyone is about to mention it ... I am aw…

But... we're all aware - as is GitHub - that plenty of the content there is not posted by the original copyright holders, who are the only parties that are able to enter into such a contract. That was the reason for GitHub coming into existence in the first place. You can't turn around a couple of years later and start arguing that the use of GitHub allows for a blanket exemption on copyright law, which is effectivel…

It shouldn't matter if the copyright holder agreed to it directly, if they've published the original code under an open source license. Since open source licenses all allow people to use the code for "whatever"

Even GPL doesn't (yet) include a clause saying the code can't be used to train AI unless the AI itself is open source

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#230

Post by runald »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #48
autophagian wrote: post #39

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.

A more apt term would be delusional parrot, applies both to the LLM and to everyone else who thinks GPT is the second coming of Jesus.
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