Mastodawn

This case shows how Open Source will die. With anyone just being able to pipe existing code and tests through an LLM and claiming that to be "clean room" (which is hogwash) no licensing can protect your work from being accumulated and monetized by anyone. The commons are actively being shredded in front of our eyes.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/pull/322

chardet 7.0: ground-up MIT-licensed rewrite by dan-blanchard · Pull Request #322 · chardet/chardet

Summary This PR is for a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. It maintains API compatibility with chardet 5.x and 6.x, but with 27x improvements to detection speed, and highly accurate suppo...

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David Mar 5

@tante Ugh. It's taken me awhile to identify my feelings about AI and I think it's essentially the 5 facets of grief. Often anger and denial, always depression, and even occasionally bargaining (with my manager) or acceptance (resignation, really).

AI feels like such a loss and the nonstop barrage of breathless enthusiasm from the media and folks at work feels truly bewildering and *isolating*. It's heartbreaking to see my industry (software dev) blithely ignoring the (environmental, human, social, economic) cost of their new toy.

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Ozzelot

Mar 5

@leathekd
I thought devs would be the first to reject this (as they too should take pride in their skill as humans.) I couldn't have been more wrong.
@tante

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Fénix Mar 5

@ozzelot @leathekd @tante I think a disconnect for those of us who enjoy tinkering with computers at whatever level is that a lot of people are interested mostly in the money that historically computer jobs have brought in. Now, are they also systematically undermining their own future wages? Yes. Do they realize or think about this? Doubtful.

Now, I don't have an answer for why the fuck they're doing it in the context of open source codebases. Résumé padding?

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David

@spacelogic @ozzelot @tante That may be right. I think there are those, like me, who enjoy the act of solving issues with code and there are those who are motivated differently. Some by money, for sure. Some might see solving the problem with AI to be more rewarding than solving it "by hand" ("look how productive I am, I wrote 10,000 lines of code today!"). I just happen to be someone who will program and tinker all through life because I find it enjoyable. Even if I wasn't, I would like to think that I would look at the rest of the consequences of AI and still turn away.

I feel lucky and grateful that my one talent in life happened to be in a field that was in demand and paid well. I hope my career doesn't go away (I have a family to feed) but I worry that it has been forever changed for the worse. Maybe when the bubble pops we'll find less AI stuffed into every aspect of life, but I would bet that software companies will still pay to keep AI around to "enhance productivity" or "democratize coding" or reduce headcount.