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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

361–370 of 450 posts

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politeness laws don't. They calcify and oppress.

Could you link to a politeness law on the books that you feel is oppressive?

On the books? I mean laws like "you shouldn't make money from OSS made by someone else". The context of this chat.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#362

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'…

IMHO, just like there was a robots.txt file made for the web, there needs to be a NOAI.txt for git repos. Sorry, this repo does not permit you to ingest the code for a learning model. Seems completely reasonable.

That wouldn't work. robots.txt is not enforceable.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#363
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.

I like that idea a lot. "General reasoning engine" sounds much more sensible than "AGI", especially given that the "I" in AGI is so poorly defined.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never know if a snippet it created came from another project verbatim or not… unless you claim you know all of the code that exists?

That's a bit extreme. In theory, an LLM's proclivity for plagiarism could be studied by testing it with various prompts and searching its training data for its responses (maybe with some edit distance tolerance).

Except the training data is secret…

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People who train AI models claim that anything they can find on the internet is fair use.

It's the whole point of the discussion… is it really?

And if it's not fair use to train on windows source code because of copyright… doesn't that same copyright law cover everything else as well?

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People who train AI models claim that anything they can find on the internet is fair use. It's the whole point of the discussion… is it really? And if it's not fair use to train on windows source code because of copyright… doesn't that same copyright law cover everything else as well?

I think there's a reasonable distinction to make between "you can train AI models on any code that you are legally allowed to have and read" and "you can train AI models on any code that you are able to feed into it, regardless of whether you have permission to possess/read it".

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#367
post #353
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very distinctive difference. GPL software is a box that must be kept open, so that everybody would be able to take from it. If you pick the box and build an altered version of it, you must keep it open, you are legally prohibited from attaching a lid to it. There's nothing about any expectations, let alone obligations, to put anything back into the original box. Usually it's not very easy (you must follow strict st…

If you leave the box open, the original author is free to take your modification and put it into their box.

Good for them! As long as all the resulting boxes remain open, it's fine and in accordance with the (spirit of the) license.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ToS doesn't supercede copyright though, does it? But in what way does reading a copyrighted work and then producing a mass of numbers as a result infringe copyright?

The copyright infringement comes about later, when that mass of numbers is used to produce a topically related work. The same rules apply for humans -- see the concept of "clean room implementation".

It really doesn't. Prose isn't source code. Learning something, then later writing something else isn't copying.
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