281–290 of 351 posts
The point this article makes, that suddenly agents can do the work of customizing free software, completely makes sense. But, the reality is that the Free Software movement is opposed to the way Lemons are built today, and would not accept a world like this. (Rightfully!) My belief is that Lemons effectively kill open source in the long run, and generally speaking, people forget that Free Software is even a thing. Th…
wtf is lemon? can't you just write normally
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claiming LLMs are fair use is ridiculous bordering on ignorant or disingenuous. Here’s the 4 part test from 17 U.S.C. § 107: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; Fail. The use is to make trillions of dollars and be maximally disruptive. 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; Fail. In many cases at least, the copy writte…
This comment highlights a basic dilemma about how and where to spend your time. Here's a basic rule of thumb I recommend people apply when it comes to these sorts of long, contentious threads where you know that not every person showing up to the conversation is limiting themselves to commenting about things they understand and that involve some of the most tortured motivated reasoning about legal topics: If the topi…
I was making an argument based on quotes from the actual legal code and you’re saying pions who don’t use the exact correct terminology shouldn’t even consider what should or shouldn’t be legal? What a load of junk. This is a democracy. We’re supposed to be engaging with it.
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work. His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone els…
BAM, the LLM just strips all that out, basically pretending it just conjured an elegant solution from the thin air.
No wonder some people started calling the current generation of "AI" plagiarism machines - it really seems more fitting by the day.
The point this article makes, that suddenly agents can do the work of customizing free software, completely makes sense. But, the reality is that the Free Software movement is opposed to the way Lemons are built today, and would not accept a world like this. (Rightfully!) My belief is that Lemons effectively kill open source in the long run, and generally speaking, people forget that Free Software is even a thing. Th…
wtf is lemon? can't you just write normally
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claiming LLMs are fair use is ridiculous bordering on ignorant or disingenuous. Here’s the 4 part test from 17 U.S.C. § 107: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; Fail. The use is to make trillions of dollars and be maximally disruptive. 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; Fail. In many cases at least, the copy writte…
This comment highlights a basic dilemma about how and where to spend your time. Here's a basic rule of thumb I recommend people apply when it comes to these sorts of long, contentious threads where you know that not every person showing up to the conversation is limiting themselves to commenting about things they understand and that involve some of the most tortured motivated reasoning about legal topics: If the topi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, the selling point of LLMs is that you no longer need to think about problems, you can skip directly to results. Anything that you have to think about while using them today is somewhere on the product roadmap, or will be. Many people think this is a form of utopia.
Just like computer is no longer a job description, yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. No, no we are not. > the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago. I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong informat…
> literacy implies understanding Agree. Do we not understand how LLMs work? Some of us understand better than others, just like literacy is also not guaranteed just because you learned the alphabet. Accepting the output of an LLM is really materially not different from accepting books, newspapers, opinion makers, academics at face value. Maybe different only in speed of access? > LLM generated code in the hands of so…
> just like literacy is also not guaranteed just because you learned the alphabet.
I didn’t claim learning the alphabet equals literacy, you did. Your argument comes down to “you’re not literate if you’re not literate”. Which, yes, of course.
> Accepting the output of an LLM is really materially not different from (…)
Multiple things can be true at once. If someone says “angry stupid people with machine guns are dangerous”, responding “angry stupid people with explosives are dangerous” does nothing to the original point. The angry stupid people are part of the problem, sure, but so are the tool which are enabling them to be dangerous. If poison is being dumped in a river and slowly killing the ecosystem, then someone else comes along wanting to dump even more of a different poison, the correct response is to stop both, not shrug it off and stop none.
Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…
And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits.
So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.
Free software has never mattered more. All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source. Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
Why isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer
It's either illegal or extremely expensive to source quality training material.