231–240 of 397 posts
I know this is me coming from my spoiled perspective of Linux and macOS, but the advice of running a VM that manages the WiFi hardware and passing it back to the OS seems insane to me
The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software
very neat, setting codex on the task of building a mac-compatible app for my Pharos Microsoft GPS-360 Receiver... we'll see how it goes!
cool result from this otherwise defunct hardware!
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
I feel like the jury is still out on whether this is acceptable for GPL code. Suppose you get agent 1 to make a clear and detailed specification from reading copyrighted code (or from reverse engineering). Then get agent 2 to implement a new driver using the specification. Is there anything wrong with that?
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No I don't mean that. I mean the LLM parameter scaling laws. More importantly, it doesn't matter if I mean that or Moore's law or anything else, because I'm not making a forward looking prediction. Read what I wrote. I'm saying is if you bet AGAINST [LLM] scaling laws--meaning you bet that the output would peter out naturally somehow--you've lost 100% so far. 100% Tomorrow could be your lucky day. Or not.
This weekend I had 100% success at the blackjack table, until I didn't and lost. I guess we'll see :)
What I’m saying is that we act as though claims about these scaling laws have never been tested. People feel free to just assert that any minute now the train will stop. They have been saying that since the Stochastic parrots.
It has not come true yet.
Tomorrow could be it. Maybe the day after. But it would then be the first victory.
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From the file headers: SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver. I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.
That headers looks pretty reasonable to me. I don't see anything misleading or ambiguous about it. Whenever I am heavily modifying some licensed code, I always make sure to include a similar header. > I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here. I am confused. My first thought was maybe the original Linux driver was GPL'd, but it is not. It is ISC'd. Look here: https://github.com/torvald…
To add a contributor, you need "significant" _human_ input. The output of models has so far not been deemed copyrightable.
As it acknowledges the original source, it needs to show the human effort that allows it to be bound to the new contributors.
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You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data. Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.
> The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Yes, and? Isn't Stallmans first freedom the "freedom to study the source code" (FSF Freedom I)? Where does it say I have to be a human to study it? If you argue "oh but you may only read / train on the source code if you are intending to write / generate GPL code", then you're admitting that the GPL effectively is only meant for "libre" programmers in their "libre" universe and it might as well be closed-source. If a human may study the code to extract the logic (the "idea") without infringing on the expression, why is it called "laundering" if a machine does it?
Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extreme: If I read some GPL code and a year later I implement a program that roughly resembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".
In German copyright law, there is a concept of a "fading formula": if the creative features of the original work "fade away" behind the independent content of the new work to the point of being unrecognizable, it constitutes a new work, not a derivative, so the input license doesn't matter. So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
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I know people have done truly amazing things with AI lately, but I feel this in my bones. Almost every demo I see is like, uh, I don't need these extremely simple things in my life automated. I can just go to Delta and buy a plane ticket. I actually want to write my own email to my mom or wife. Of course a demo is just a demo, but also come on
It's easy to buy one plane ticket when a person has a specific plan -- to attend a meeting or a conference, or to match up with an airbnb timeslot or something. It's harder to buy one plane ticket for the lowest cost amongst all the different ways that plane tickets can be bought, and harder yet to do so with a lack of specificity. So, for instance: Maybe I don't have a firm plan. Maybe I'm very flexible. Maybe all I…
What you describe will just end up a feature on Expedia. The highly technical builders of stuff that love to tinker vastly overestimate how much BS the general public will put up with
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You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data. Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.
We also so far have yet to see anyone successfully sue over software copyright with LLMs—-this is a bit redundant, but we’ve also not seen a user of one of these models be sued for output.
Maybe we converge on the view of the US copyright office which is that none of this can be protected.
I kind of like that one as a future for software engineers, because it forces them all at long last to become rules lawyers. If we disallow all copyright protection for machine generated code, there might be a cottage industry of folks who provide a reliably human layer that is copyrightable. Like Boeing, they will have to write to the regulator and not to the spec. I feel that’s a suitable destination for a discipline. That’s had it too good for too long.
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Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?
I don't see open source as having "competitors". If someone wants to make a fork and use AI to write code (which I also think wouldn't be very useful, as there's no public documentation and everything needs to traced and RE-ed), they are welcome to. We're interested in upstreaming though, which means we need to make sure the origin of code and licence is all compatible and acceptable for mainline, and don't want to i…