« Porter atteinte au copyleft est un acte grave. Refuser d'accorder à autrui les droits que l'on a soi-même acquis […] est profondément antisocial, quelle que soit la méthode employée. [...] Le logiciel libre repose sur des communautés d'utilisateurs et de développeurs qui soutiennent fermement le copyleft. »

L’IA générative se base sur des techniques prédatrices et néocolonialistes, nouvel exemple.

https://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lireamp-pourquoi-l-ia-menace-les-licences-logicielles-99614.html

#opensource #GenAi #Chardet #enshitification #copyleft

“Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens”
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/06/ai_kills_software_licensing/

#Chardet #GenAI #opensource #FLOSS

Let me tell you a parable.

There was a student who was given as assignment of writing an essay. The student found 10 similar essays online. He copied selected bits of different essays. He tediously reworded the result, removed some sentences, added some adjectives and adverbs, shifted some more sentences, added some glue — all with the single-minded goal of covering up the tracks. Eventually, a voluminous essay was complete.

The student has put a lot of effort into this; possibly even more that if he had written it himself. He did learn a bit about essays, though he didn't really practice writing one. He did practice some skills that would be useful in a future bullshit job, though. The essay passes all #plagiarism checks, even though it immediately raises red flags to any human reading it: the sudden style changes, contradictory statements, sentences that don't make much sense in their context. And if he was asked to defend it, he might be in trouble.

So, the student put an effort (though not the right kind of effort), produced a mediocre essay and learned something (though bullshit skills rather than creative skills). Now let's consider a different situation: rather than doing all that himself, the student paid somebody else to do it; and not to *write* an original essay, but to do all the shenanigans described above.

That's precisely what using LLMs is. You tell them to write an essay, so they find and mix random stuff, and produce a mediocre essay. You don't put an effort, you don't learn anything, perhaps you don't even read "your" essay. And it passes all the plagiarism checks.

#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #chardet

“Two esoteric programming events bubbled up this past week. If you’re not into #computerScience, they may appear irrelevant to you. They’re not. The arcane managed to bring to life our pressing questions about whether #AI can create or is a regurgitation machine.” https://reviews.ofb.biz/sa1401

#DonaldKnuth #Claude #Chardet #Python #Creativity #PromptEngineering #Philosophy

Two #AI-related events over the past week — the #Chardet licensing controversy and legendary computer scientist #DonKnuth's shock over AI helping discover a theorem for a problem he'd not yet solved — demand a reckoning: precisely how creative is AI? https://reviews.ofb.biz/sa1401

#Creativity #Licensing #OpenSource #Python #DonaldKnuth #TAOCP #Claude

The key takeaways from the early part of the #chardet thread (I didn't read beyond the ~30 first comments, I have my limits).

1. People there love cosplaying lawyers. Except when the other side also starts cosplaying lawyers, in which case they suddenly divert to suggesting asking professional lawyers.
2. Almost nobody there is concerned with ethics or morality.
3. There's a lot of GPL haters there. Like, they seem the kind of people who don't really care about licensing at all, just used MIT in their projects because it was cool and they heard something about license incompatibility and now bash at everything that's (L)GPL.
4. People don't get that LLMs are statistical models and can't build anything from the ground up. All they can do is remix, which implies they use existing code for inspiration.
5. The maintainer who did the rewrite is a total asshole, and is perfectly aware of it.

Honestly, I'm truly waiting for the subsidizing to end and companies start charging obscene amounts for the use of LLMs. Of course, the reality is that we're totally fucked. We have a lot of projects that adapted a lot of #slop, and people who are being increasingly addicted to this shit. The moment they can't afford it, we'd be left with lots of broken code nobody wants to maintain.

And I definitely don't want to put my effort into packaging crap if its maintainers don't even bother trying.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

I missed the absurd chardet license change story. 🫠

BTW I would pin chardet <7 and avoid using the relicensed version if you want to avoid issues. ⚠️

Quoting Madison Taylor from Nvidia:
"Given the existence of issue #327 chardet v7.0.0 is absolutely toxic." https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331

#Python #Chardet #License #Version

When you drop the dependency on #chardet over the #AI #slop release… and replace it with your own slop.

https://github.com/binaryornot/binaryornot/blob/main/CHANGELOG/v0.5.0.md

#Python #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

One thing in the entire #chardet debacle I haven't really seen addressed:

How could this slop code ever count as a "cleanroom" implementation if the chardet codebase is *part of the fucking training data*?

Like, are people really thinking the Claude training data doesn't contain literally *all* public github repos?