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Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

kefir.protopopov.lv

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Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#31

Post by rgoulter »

irdc wrote: post #17
rgoulter wrote: post #9

Seems to me LLMs have changed some things. I'm not sure how it's best put, but it used to be: - Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to. - There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into. With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where though…

But LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative. So what happens in 10 years? Are we headed for a great stagnation?

> But LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative.

I think the key part is how much thought goes into something.

Optimistically, LLMs are good at taking unstructured input, and (probably) producing the intended output from that. -- This allows for an interesting new way of coding: a set of instructions don't need to be as rigorous as a shell script, but can be natural language.

That part surely extends creativity. An LLM will be familiar with domain ideas I'm not, even if an LLM is completely disinterested in doing things.

Pessimistically, I think it's still not clear what the right way of interacting online with all of this is (other than clear expectations of "no AI")... in some sense LLM output is worthless to share, in the sense that I'm just as capable of asking the LLM to output something as anyone else is.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#32

Post by egypturnash »

irdc wrote: post #15
malwrar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.

Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all .

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#33

Post by snarfy »

altmanaltman wrote: post #10

What a well-rounded nicely written announcement that touches on all parts of the argument without any rage baiting or flex etc. It would be easy to just ramble against AI and how its the end of the world etc but the author focused on a point that's not even related to use or misue of AI in software but rather how we have made it acceptable that large corporate companies can skirt copyright without any issue and make…

Instead of a derivative work we have a machine that creates derivative works. I fail to see how this is fair use.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#35

Post by kator »

malwrar wrote: post #11
kator wrote: post #3

> Yet, this shift made me re-evaluate the open source code publishing. Prior to that, I have been positive about free and open software, and considered this to be the default mode for work such as kefir. I did not require any justifications from myself to publish something. Now, however, I feel more and more that the main beneficiaries of my unpaid work are companies scraping the internet to train large language mode…

Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.

The sad thing is I feel trapped on all sides of the debate, I wrote a book about LLMs and human creativity (spoiler Humans win for a long time) but I was going to do it as a blog series, instead I published https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXCSY4W8 because I felt at least I might get a bit back for literally 100’s of hours of my life I poured into the book and my editor and friends who read and provided reviews.

And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#36

Post by paufernandez »

rurban wrote: post #26

One of the very few small compilers which passes the full gcc torture tests. But for me kefir is good enough as the reference small compiler. Not as fast as tcc, but more correct

I've been taking a look at the source and it's a work of art :O

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#37

Post by Gormo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #14
bjourne wrote: post #13

People taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".

There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP. I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet. And the AI IP that make…

> There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP.

Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly?

Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#38

Post by kator »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #7
kator wrote: post #3

> Yet, this shift made me re-evaluate the open source code publishing. Prior to that, I have been positive about free and open software, and considered this to be the default mode for work such as kefir. I did not require any justifications from myself to publish something. Now, however, I feel more and more that the main beneficiaries of my unpaid work are companies scraping the internet to train large language mode…

> The sender pays, not the receiver. You have a hole here. Your web server is sending the response and the bot is receiving . Fix that and … profit? :-)

oh good point got that backwards… OMG my fax brain didn’t even think about it.

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#39

Post by irdc »

egypturnash wrote: post #32
irdc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all .

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

Without any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?

Re: Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

#40

Post by Gormo »

bjourne wrote: post #13

People taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".

Yeah, I really can't comprehend these sentiments as anything other than an "I don't like AI" argument. FOSS has always been about just writing code and putting it out into the world where others can do as they please with it.

I see a lot of risks involved in people surrendering their own decision-making to LLMs, but that's a question of how they're used, not how they're trained. The idea that using FOSS software to train LLMs is somehow a violation of FOSS norms just doesn't seem valid.

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