Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
It legit got me. An actual "whaaaaaatttt?" out loud and then I had to figure out why it was the top of HN haha.
Malus – Clean Room as a Service
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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#92Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
I don't know - if you upload a package.json with any dependencies that map to real npmjs.com packages, it does lead you to a Stripe payment page which appears to be real... and it appears you'd be sending real money.
Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I view this as an unmitigated good. Then I don't think you've thought it through. This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do. If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a who…
I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board. We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, t…
It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it")
The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.
But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#94There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#95Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
W.r.t. intent, yes. But w.r.t. content, we are long past a situation where it is unrealistic enough to function as satire. While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
It would also entirely obviate the need for those very same OSS licenses, if LLMs can simply do a clean-room reimplementation of any copywritten software whatsoever.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#96So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was trained in the open source project's source code.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#97>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends t…
> observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#98An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…
I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition.
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#99The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going. EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect
Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service
#100An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...