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Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

gitlab.redox-os.org

221–230 of 504 posts

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#221

While I am more on the AI-hater side, I don't consider this to be a good idea: "any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed" For example: - What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task? - What about having a plugin in your IDE that rather gives sy…

>What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue/task? Firefox has direct translation built in. One can self-host libretranslate. There are many free sites to paste in language input and get a direct translation sans filler and AI "interpretation". Just write in your native language or your imperfect English.

Translation software does not solve the problem that the tone that you have to use in English is often very different from the tone in your native language. What I would write in German would sometimes not be socially acceptable for English speakers.

If the native language is very different from English, this problem gets much worse.

This is a problem that LLM claim to partially mitigate (and is one reason why non-native speakers could be tempted to use them), but hardly any classical translation tool can.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#222

If you're curious to see what everyone else is doing, I did a survey of over 100 major source available projects and four of them banned AI assisted commits (NetBSD, GIMP, Zig, and qemu). On the other hand projects with AI assisted commits you can easily find include Linux, curl, io_uring, MariaDB, DuckDB, Elasticsearch, and so on. Of the 112 projects surveyed, 70 of them had AI assisted commits already. https://thec…

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Everyone is starting to make AI a moral question one way or another. So your moral view is progress must march on unimpeded by private actors?

I find that pretty original. I think progress will march largely unimpeded. I would be wary of unhinged government intervention, but I wouldn’t begrudge private actors for not getting on with the ticket.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#223
post #9

We need LLMs that have a certificate of origin. For instance a GPL LLM trained only on GPL code where the source data is all known, and the output is all GPL. It could be done with a distributed effort.

It is not clear that copyright continues on the LLM output, that is, the output is not necessarily a derivative work.

So "copyleft" doesn't work on any of the output. Therefore no GPL applies.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts on why you have that preference?

Because human errors are, well, human. And producing code that contains those errors is a human endeavor. It bases on years, decades of learning. Mistakes were made, experience was gained, skills were improved. Reasoning by humans is relatable. Generating slop using LLMs takes seconds, has no human element, no work goes into it. Mistakes made by an LLM are excused without sincerity, without real learning, without con…

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Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#225
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but back in reality no you’re not? No more than any other contributor? If I want to use an auto-complete then I can, and I will? Restricting that is as regressive as a project trying to specify that I write code from a specific country or… standing on my head. Sure, if they want me to add a “I’m writing this standing on my head” message in the PR then I will… but I’m not.

No, you can't. See, that's where you are just wrong: when you don't respect the boundaries an open source project sets that you want to contribute to then you are a net negative. Restricting this is their right, and it is not for you to attempt to overrule that right. Besides the fact that you do not oversee the consequences it also makes you an asshole. They're not asking for you to write standing on your head, they…

I am authoring my contributions, using Clause Code as a tool. It doesn't make me an asshole.

If the maintainers don't want to accept it, fine. Someone will eventually fork and advance and we move on. The Uncles can continue to play in their no AI playground, and show each other how nice their code is.

The world is moving on from the "AI is bad" crowd.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#226
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native English speaker I read this as two parts. If it's obvious, the response is immediate and not up for debate. If it's not obvious then it falls in the second part - "any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project". A submarine submission, if discovered, will result in a ban. Using the phrase "virtual signaling" long ago became a meaningless term other than to indicate one's views in…

Somewhat off topic, but I can’t believe someone got paid to write that article, what a load of crap. It’s like saying that fallacies don’t exist because sometimes people incorrectly claim the other side is arguing fallaciously. If you go by the literal definition in the article, it’s very clear what OP meant when he said the AI policy is virtue-signaling, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the culture war.

It's not a useful phrase because a "we accept AI-generated contributions" is also virtue signalling.

You have no doubt heard claims that AI "democratizes" software development. This is an argument that AI use for that case is virtuous.

You have no doubt heard claims that AI "decreases cognition ability." This is an argument that not using AI for software development is virtuous.

Which is correct depends strongly on your cultural views. If both are correct then the term has little or no weight.

From what I've seen, the term "virtue signalling" is almost always used by someone in camp A to disparage the public views of someone in camp B as being dishonest and ulterior to the actual hidden reason, which is to improve in-group social standing.

I therefore regard it as conspiracy theory couched as a sociological observation, unless strong evidence is given to the contrary. As a strawman exaggeration meant only to clarify my point, "all right-thinking people use AI to write code, so these are really just gatekeepers fighting to see who has the longest neckbeard."

Further, I agree with the observation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling that "The concept of virtue signalling is most often used by those on the political right to denigrate the behaviour of those on the political left". I see that term as part of "culture war" framing, which makes it hard to use that term in other frames without careful clarification.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#227
post #6

I think this is a reasonable decision (although maybe increasingly insufficient). It doesn't really matter what your stance on AI is, the problem is the increased review burden on OSS maintainers. In the past, the code itself was a sort of proof of effort - you would need to invest some time and effort on your PRs, otherwise they would be easily dismissed at a glance. That is no longer the case, as LLMs can quickly g…

> Even if we assume LLMs would consistently generate good enough quality code, code submitted by someone untrusted would still need detailed review for many reasons

Wait but under that assumption - LLMs being good enough - wouldn't the maintainer also be able to leverage LLMs to speed up the review?

Often feels to me like the current stance of arguments is missing something.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#228
post #26
post #3

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

> The LLM ban is unenforceable Just require that the CLA/Certificate of Origin statement be printed out, signed, and mailed with an envelope and stamp, where besides attesting that they appropriately license their contributions ((A)GPL, BSD, MIT, or whatever) and have the authority to do so, that they also attest that they haven't used any LLMs for their contributions. This will strongly deter direct LLM usage. Indir…

Sarcasm? Nobody will be contributing with a complexe signing process like that, and it doesn't guarantee anything in the end, it's like a high tech pinky swear

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rules of thumb is much shorter: don't. The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.

Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?

> just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses.

That sounds very Usanian. In the meantime transportation in around me is done on foot, bicycle, bus, tram, metro, train and cars. There are good use cases for each method including the car. If you really want to use an automotive analogy, then sure, LLMs can be like cars. I've seen cities made for cars instead of humans, and they are a horrible place to live.

Signed, a person who totally gets good results from coding with LLMs. Sometimes, maybe even often.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#230

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I genuinely feel bad for you. At least it isnt difficult to make the transition to AI Agent coding. Even untrained people are able to do it. At some point your manager is going to force you to AI code. At best you can try to find some healthcare or finance company that is too cheap to buy a machine that can locally run 400B models.

Untrained people are producing utter garbage. I am 100% in on AI coding and haven’t typed into the IDE in months but the craft remains pretty much as challenging as ever.
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