Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

blundergoat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 382 posts

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#261

Post by api »

solumunus wrote: post #189
api wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 2026 and code reuse is still hard. Our code still has terrible modularity. Systems have terrible to nonexistent composability. Attempts to fix this like pure OOP and pure FP have never caught on. To some extent AI is an entirely different approach. Screw elegance. Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway. So just automate the process of generating spaghetti. The modularity and reuse is emergent fro…

> Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway It’s much easier to get an LLM to adhere, especially when you throw tooling into the loop to enforce constraints and style. Even better when you use Rust with its amazing type system, and compilation serves as proof.

Rust as a good language for LLMs. That’s interesting.

I wonder if you could design a language that is even more precise and designed specifically around use by LLMs. We will probably see this.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#262

Post by direwolf20 »

20k wrote: post #181
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

It's not about following the law — it's about avoiding penalties in practice.

Did they get penalised? Is anyone getting penalised? No? Then there's no reason for legal to block it.

And remember when you put the GPL license on a project, that's only worth your willingness to sue anyone who violates, otherwise your project is public domain.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#263

Post by direwolf20 »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

It's not about copyright or anti–copyright — it's about how you will get fined 500 million dollars and go to prison for life for downloading a song, but a big company can download all the songs and get away with it for about tree fiddy. It's about the double standard.

And then Anna's Archive downloads all the songs, with the intent to share them with the companies that were allowed to download them anyway, and gets the USA to shut down all aspects it can reach.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#264

Post by graemep »

rjsw wrote: post #257
20k wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

If the LLM was trained on any GPL licenced code then there is an argument that all output is GPL too, legal departments should be worried.

I am not aware of any argument for that. Even if the output is a derivative work (which is very doubtful) that would make it a breach of copyright to distribute it under another license, not automatically apply the GPL.

If the output is a derivative work of the input then you would be in breach of copyright if the training data is GPL, MIT, proprietary - anything other than public domain or equivalent.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#265

Post by direwolf20 »

Guvante wrote: post #164
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license. Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing. So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license. Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if…

A great many companies publish proprietary code to GitHub private repos. That is how GitHub makes money.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#266

Post by danielray324 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #262
20k wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

It's not about following the law — it's about avoiding penalties in practice. Did they get penalised? Is anyone getting penalised? No? Then there's no reason for legal to block it. And remember when you put the GPL license on a project, that's only worth your willingness to sue anyone who violates, otherwise your project is public domain.

[dead]

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#268

Post by Draiken »

lijok wrote: post #237
nirui wrote: post #230

I'm feeling people are using AI in the wrong way. Current LLM is best used to generate a string of text that's most statically likely to form a sentence together, so from user's perspective, it's most useful as an alternative to manual search engine to allow user to find quick answers to a simple question, such as "how much soda is needed for baking X unit of Y bread", or "how to print 'Hello World' in a 10 times in…

I think you severely overestimate your understanding of how these systems work. We’ve been beating the dead horse of “next character approximation” for the last 5 years in these comments. Global maxima would have been reached long ago if that’s all there was to it. Play around with some frontier models, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Did I miss a fundamental shift in how LLMs work?

Until they change that fundamental piece, they are literally that: programs that use math to determine the most likely next token.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#269

Post by graemep »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #195
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). The main arguments against the current patent system are these: 1) The patent office issues obvious or excessively broad patents when it shouldn't and then you can end up being sued fo…

There are much better (worse!) examples of ridiculously long copyrights.

Take Shaw's play Arms and the Man, written in 1894. In most life +70 countries it only went out of copyright in 2020. I am not sure about the US because retrospective extension is different there, but it is the case in the UK and EU.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#270

Post by phpnode »

r-w wrote: post #253
fsmv wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to give them some kind of attribution in the readme or something since you know which projects you referenced

Exactly. If you have the decency to ask, you probably have the capacity to be courteous beyond the minimum required by law.

I'm more interested in the general question rather than the specifics of this situation, which I'm sure is now incredibly common. I know it looked at those implementations because I asked it to, and therefore I will credit those projects when I release this library. In general though, people do not know what other material the agents looked at in order to derive their results, therefore they can't give credit, or even be sure that they are technically complying with the relevant licenses.
Post reply on HN