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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#231
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "misunder…

Well what you are saying is that the argument of the creators of the model is erroneous and you know better. More power to you.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ma…

Would I be able to train an AI only using microsoft's leaked windows code to write a windows clone with no copyright (since it comes from an AI) and be safe from legal repercussions because it was trained on fair use code I just happened to find online? If they rule that it's ok to do that, I might be ok with AI being ruled as fair use.

Is it even fair use under the law to consume that Windows source code?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#233
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.

Only if you give those users your modified version.

If I host GPL software on a webserver and my users use that webserver, I don’t have to give them the source code for modified GPL programs. This is fairly common.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. You're right. It's a politeness law some people have invented. It's also a value people have, but that's for themselves. I like contributing to OSS projects. But, as soon as it's imposed on others, and there are punishments for disobeying, it's a politeness law.

Politeness keeps society civil and sane.

Politeness laws don't. They calcify and oppress.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view. Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim >> The original authors tend to be the users There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them. Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that re…

Most people don't actually want to maintain a fork. They would prefer that their patches are mainlined. Consider Linux. It's huge and most vendors really don't want to maintain a fully independent fork. One reason they might do it anyway, is if they could keep their patches private. But the GPL means they can't, so most just choose to upstream patches.

[dead]

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#236

While I agree with the general observation of the article, the tone and wording feels needlessly harsh and subjective. Sentences like „I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX.“ really diminish the article and by association, also the author.

I don't understand why GitLab (as in gitlab.com) doesn't focus more on the discovery part in order to make people feel more welcome. I was using github.com/explore almost daily while it lasted. The trending repositories by language were an amazing tool to discover new tools and ideas. I really wish GitLab had something equivalent to this!

Gitlab is a bit weird in that regard. Their standalone self-hosted use of it is great, but overall discovery is extremely poor on both self hosted and cloud editions.

They seem to have based the whole thing on the way Bitbucket works and completely ignored that being able to find a repo you've not been directly added to would be slightly useful.

If someone from gitlab is reading this and thinking "But you can find things" - you're blinded by the issue being an internal user. There might be ways of doing it, but its a convoluted mess and doesn't come close to github in that regard.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#237
I recently rolled out my first full software product. Some of my code is OK to be open-sourced, and some isn't. I considered GitHub, but it's just too Microsoft-y now. I ended up rolling out a Gitea instance. It doesn't have feature parity but at least my code is on my server and there aren't any AI's / MS employees reading it (I hope!)

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#238
I'm not sure people need to announce their departure from GitHub. You may not like their use of AI but legally speaking its entirely within their right to update their TOS for this. Is it sketchy? Absolutely. But given over the years they've provided billions of dollars of hosting and compute services to the opensource community for free I'm not sure there can be much of an argument that they don't have a right to create a sustainable income source.

They undoubtely should have handled it better, perhaps even offering an option for individual repos to opt out entirely. But if they didn't do it, someone else would have.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#239
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now that is a thought that could not possibly have come from GPT. Thanks, this has given me something to think about.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use a lot of open source software and directly pay for approximately none of it.

Do you behave differently and pay for it today? What do you use to accomplish (track and manage) that?

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