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Coding agents could make free software matter again

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#301

Post by yason »

Coding agents and LLMs basically tivoize open source.

When AI will eventually become the primary means to write code (because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before) then that means AI becomes your new compiler that comes with a price tag, a subscription.

Programmers were held hostage to commercial compilers until free compilers reached sufficient level of quality, but now it doesn't matter if your disk is full of free/open toolchains if it's not you who is commanding them but commercial AI agents.

Undoubtedly there will be open-source LLMs eventually, of various levels of quality. But to write a free compiler you need a laptop while to train a free programming LLM you need a lot of money. And you also need money to run it.

Programming has been one of the rare arts that even a poor, lower class kid can learn on his own with an old, cheap computer salvaged from a scrap bin and he can raise himself enough intellectual capital to become a well-paid programmer later. I wonder what the equivalent path will be in the future.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#302

Post by not_paid_by_yt »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #182
not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the trendlines continue on atmospheric greenhouse gases we will all be dead from climate change so I really do hope the world is a little bit more complicated than trendlines just extrapolating out. Interestingly enough that might actually be bad for OpenAI since it will be difficult to sell their product if their customers are dying from heat stroke.

You hope. But you need to think realistically. Not hopefully. Trendlines will continue. Even the one for greenhouse gases. That is the most realistic scenario. In fact the trendline for greenhouse gases is even stronger than AI. I am far more confident about greenhouse gases continuing to rise than I am for AI. Telling me how another trendline points to a shitty reality doesn't change the fact that the shitty reality…

we are probably not going to keep pumping CO2 out at the rate of the worst case scenario of business because believe it or not companies are aware there is little profit to be made from dead consumers.

The realistic scenarios are still pretty bad but less so.

Just assuming LLMs will scale to the point of being more useful as all these companies are banking on is not unfounded but it's also just an educated guess because of their own optimistic prediction they will be able to bring about a new fascist world they are in charge of before they run out of money. It's very likely we are all screwed but it's also very likely LLMs will not scale up fast enough so they can replace the majority of human labor.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#303

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

yason wrote: post #301

Coding agents and LLMs basically tivoize open source. When AI will eventually become the primary means to write code (because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before) then that means AI becomes your new compiler that comes with a price tag, a subscription. Programmers were held hostage to commercial compilers until free compilers reached sufficient level of quality, but no…

> because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before

LLMs don't make programming faster, they just accelerate the technical debt process.

On agregate they slow everything down because you there's more technical debt at the end of the tunnel.

(OpenClaw is already unmaintainable today - for example, nobody has any clue what configuration options it supports, not even LLMs. Game over.)

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#304

Post by not_paid_by_yt »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #187
627467 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour. My 2c: - AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all…

> It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. Remains to be seen. Hardware prices are increasing. Manufacturers are abandoning the consumer sector to serve the all consuming AI demands. Not to mention the constant attempts to lock down the computers so that we don't own them. What does the future hold for us? Unknown. It's not looking too good though. What good is hardware if we're priced…

welcome to late capital, please enjoy the ride while people are trying to tell you that LLMs are the only future (you have no future) while SOTA models can barely do shit on their own consistently outside of carefully designed benchmarks, and have to be made available at a loss otherwise no-one would use them.

On your right you can see the CEOs justifying longer hours and lower pay because AI will replace your job one day anyways, and then asking you why you aren't 10x more productive with Claude. On the left you can see the AI companies deciding who will be in charge of the fascist regime once they no-longer need workers other than for the coal mines. They reckon they can get 120 good years before they biosphere is uninhabitable, which they are worried about because what if the next LLM figures out immortally for them, maybe they will have to close the coal mines too after all.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#305

Post by LegionMammal978 »

sigbottle wrote: post #126
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the users would have to maintain their own forks then. I suppose the idea would be, they don't have to maintain it: if it ever starts to rot from whatever environmental changes, then they can just get the LLM to patch it, or at worst, generate it again from scratch. (And personally, I prefer writing code so that it isn't coupled so tightly to the environment or other people's fast-moving libraries to begin with…

The LLM can a priori test on all possible software and hardware environments, test all possible edge cases for deployment, get feedback from millions of eyes on the project explicitly or implicitly via bug reports and usage, find good general case use features given the massive amounts of data gathered through the community of where the project needs to go next, etc? Even in a world with pure LLM coding, it's more li…

> The LLM can a priori test on all possible software and hardware environments, test all possible edge cases for deployment, get feedback from millions of eyes on the project explicitly or implicitly via bug reports and usage, find good general case use features given the massive amounts of data gathered through the community of where the project needs to go next, etc?

Even if that's the ideal (and a very expensive one in terms of time and resources), I really don't think it accurately describes the maintainers of the very long tail of small open-source projects, especially those simple enough for the relevant features to be copied into a few files' worth of code.

Like, sure, projects like Linux, LLVM, Git, or the popular databases may fit that description, but people aren't trying to vendor those via LLMs (or so I hope). And in any case, if the project presently fulfills a user's specific use case, then it "going somewhere next" may well be viewed as a persistent risk.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#306

Post by not_paid_by_yt »

achierius wrote: post #65
jonahss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

I'm sure you'll feel that way so long as you have an income.

tokens will stop being given away for free at some point, writing software was always a pretty simple white collar job, so it makes sense it's one of the earlier ones to be automated, but really the axis of evil has it's shot now at ruling the world or whatever now, but if they miss it they will eventually be subject to the market and you really will need to automate a lot more than just software developers for models this large to be worth the cost.

Of course we should really be talking about using the state or otherwise to make training larger and larger models impossible. It's not in the public good if LLMs actually get good enough to replace a lot of human labor, only a small handful of billionaires and their cronies will ever benefit from that. The Luddites were not wrong after all.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#307

Post by matheusmoreira »

not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #304
matheusmoreira wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. Remains to be seen. Hardware prices are increasing. Manufacturers are abandoning the consumer sector to serve the all consuming AI demands. Not to mention the constant attempts to lock down the computers so that we don't own them. What does the future hold for us? Unknown. It's not looking too good though. What good is hardware if we're priced…

welcome to late capital, please enjoy the ride while people are trying to tell you that LLMs are the only future (you have no future) while SOTA models can barely do shit on their own consistently outside of carefully designed benchmarks, and have to be made available at a loss otherwise no-one would use them. On your right you can see the CEOs justifying longer hours and lower pay because AI will replace your job on…

Can't say I disagree with you. I do recognize that we seem to be heading towards a technofeudalist cyberpunk dystopia. The only way out for humanity is to automate everything to the point we transcend capitalism into a post-scarcity society where the very concept of an economy has been abolished. If we can't do that, we'll become soylent.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#308

Post by archagon »

63stack wrote: post #205
archagon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, large corporations have taken very conservative legal stances with regard to integrating e.g. A/GPL code, even when there's almost no risk. If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in th…

Github has posted that they will now train on everyone's data (even private) unless you opt out (until they change their mind on that). Anthropic has been training on your data on certain tiers already. Meta bittorrented books to train their models. Surely if your license says "LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted", it is going to dissuade them.

No, it won’t dissuade them. But when we finally get the chance to legally beat the shit out of these companies, I want to reserve my place in line.

Alternatively, they can learn to trust me on this and simply exclude/evict my code from the training corpus.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#309

Post by pjmlp »

mghackerlady wrote: post #299
mike_hearn wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, a lot of open source caused other people to lose their jobs too, all pre AI. So what goes around comes around. The Free Software movement was from day one built on cloning proprietary programs - UNIX was a commercial OS that AT&T sold, the early Linux desktop environments all looked exactly like a mashup of Windows 95 and commercial DEs, etc. Every commercial UNIX got wiped out except Apple, do you think that d…

Fwiw, AIX and to a far lesser extent Solaris still exist. I'm not exactly sure why people are using them (AIX I can maybe understand because "no one got fired for buying IBM" or whatever but there really isn't any excuse to be running Solaris nowadays since ZFS runs on Linux and and 2 of the BSD based systems and oracle seems desperate to let it die)

Solaris in SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging.

Something that some security conscious folks care about.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#310

Post by shakna »

derektank wrote: post #279
shakna wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartz v Anthropic explicitly held ruling on fair use. It is not precedent, here.

I’m not a lawyer, but I read the decision, and how is this section not a ruling on fair use? “To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as appl…

There's two parts here.

The first:

> it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library

It is only fair use where Anthropic had already purchased a license to the work. Which has zero to do with scraping - a purchase was made, an exchange of value, and that comes with rights.

The second, which involves a section of the judgement a little before your quote:

> And, as for any copies made from central library copies but not used for training, this order does not grant summary judgment for Anthropic.

This is where the court refused to make any ruling. There was no exchange of value here, such as would happen with scraping. The court made no ruling.

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