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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#231

Post by K0balt »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #163
sensanaty wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were extremely anti-porn getting caught watching porn in parliament is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive drug smuggling rings.

You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 196…

I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the person in charge.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#232

Post by mlyle »

jerf wrote: post #75

An 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…

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.

Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.

We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.

But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.

Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.

(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#234

Post by schoen »

jerf wrote: post #75

An 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…

There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer

https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf

which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.

I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#235

Post by sdwr »

imiric wrote: post #208
tavavex wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?

Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of which is open source.

And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and type definitions"?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#236

Post by tekne »

mlyle wrote: post #232
jerf wrote: post #75

An 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…

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public sp…

I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#237

Post by Ethee »

eru wrote: post #120
zozbot234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save…

No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)

The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#238

Post by fuddle »

> MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services.

I think they should take some responsibility!

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#239

Post by comboy »

hmokiguess wrote: post #26

The 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

Under this name or not I think it's happening regardless..

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#240

Post by tekne »

ahtihn wrote: post #222
seethishat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc. If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it. Stop and think about what it means…

> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences. Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an a…

E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting)

Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?

Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.

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