I generally prefer the MIT license for my personal projects. But I do stupid retro shit with no commercial value or any real tangible way to fundamentally alter how people work or communicate or do business.
I just want to put code out into the world without restriction - but that is a luxury I don't feel very conflicted about since the commercial applications of putting cat photos on floppy disks is quantifiably zero.
To be fair I've seen the opposite happen as well, where people will take code released into the public domain and write Rust bindings for it and release those as GPL or some other more restrictive license, and I think that sucks too.
How hard is it to just - keep the same license? Just preserve the author's intent. They had a vision in mind and made a choice when they put their creative energies out into the world. Pass that forward.
The idea that you can cleanroom a codebase with an LLM to safely pivot licensing is really not anything I need to waste words arguing is the thought process of the worst sort of dipshit tech bro.
If you're on the fediverse you know this already.
At least this latest indignity to human creativity doesn't seem to involve Rust, a language I deeply love but one that also has a serious Bro problem and is being wielded in similar sorts of license-washing.
My worry is that the MIT license itself will become something like a scarlet letter. I am really not a proponent of GPL-by-default.
If someone wants to take my code and use it in an indie game or something I want them to be able to do that and not feel like they need to release their source code or pay me or do anything other than have my name in a readme somewhere.
It just makes me happy every time I get even the slightest hint that something I put effort in could be used in some way by someone else.
These are different kinds of liberties. I respect that the GPL prevented wholesale looting of volunteer efforts by corporations and the world would be a worse place without it.
But there is a space I think for unencumbered code, just ideas that float freely in the intellectual aether anyone is free to pluck down and use as they please.
Well, there was, anyway. Now that everything has been hoovered up by LLMs and smeared into a legally incomprehensible, fractal mélange of tokens there will be no convincing anyone that unencumbered ideas can't just be had wholesale and on demand on an industrial scale instead of being deliberately intentioned gifts from one human mind to another.
I'm just tired of this timeline. I'm tired of everything being awful i'm tired that every week it gets awful-er.
This may shock and appall some of my followers, but I don't even really hate AI. I think it is kind of cool, on a purely technical level. I cannot help but stay abreast of the advancements and test the SOTA-of-the-month models on previous failures to try to get a feeling for how fast our collective irrelevancy is approaching.
I think LLMs have a lot of potentially useful applications, were they not hopelessly mired in the ethical bog born of their own problematic creation, almost as if Atreyu's horse were standing in for our childhood dreams about how cool AI would be.
I see a lot of derisive dismissal of AI on grounds other than ethical ones and I somehow feel it is a mistaken approach, almost like a Vegan trying to convince you that all steak tastes bad.
I feel it is a dangerous underestimation of the immense resources in both talent and money being brought to bear on the problem.
Too many people focus on where AI currently is, forgetting where it was just scant years ago, and ignoring its current velocity.
I feel like anyone actually paying attention and testing each model that comes out knows that laughing it off as "slop" is not going to remain particularly amusing for long.
Only a year ago ChatGPT couldn't write Hello World in x86 assembly, and now it will emit a complete, working, 32-bit MS-DOS Mandelbrot generator in a single prompt.
The slop is starting to not look so very sloppy.
The only argument that I predict will not age extremely poorly is the ethical one.
After all, it is not like if ChatGPT stopped hallucinating and glazing and regurgitating its inputs tomorrow, you'd suddenly be okay with it - so why use any other argument other than that it is a leviathan in the hands of the oligarchy?
Slop or Shakespeare, that doesn't change.
Maybe there's an unfortunate complication to all that, in that ethical arguments are the weakest whenever they are in tension with potential personal benefits.
Vegans will always be a small minority despite having (in my opinion) a completely correct ethical argument - it just doesn't matter to most people and never will because meat tastes good and the benefit of that pleasing sensory experience is unbeatable with rhetoric.
Kids don't give a shit about Sam Altman, they will keep pulling the lever on the homework machine because it saves them time and effort in the short term.
I guess the ultimate product is sort of an intellectual opiate - with apologies to Philip K Dick, something like We Can Think It For You Wholesale.
We risk being the ineffective DARE officers wagging our fingers at grade-schoolers while inadvertently guaranteeing they'll all immediately try marijuana the very second they get into college.
This was a lot of words to just come full circle and end up with no fundamental point.
To drag out an overused cliche, thanks for coming to my TED talk, I guess.
@crazyc You'd think @bagder 's well documented bug bounty water torture experience would have gotten enough traction that anyone would feel a certain amount of personal shame submitting an AI-generated PR but I suppose ignorance is the cup that runneth over.
Since I'm abusing analogies this evening, my feelings on AI kind of match my feelings on firearms. Would I trust you with a gun? Probably, you're a smart person. Do I trust myself? Well yeah, I'm certainly not going to blow my own foot off by accident. Probably.
Do I trust John Q. Fucking Public? Absolutely fucking not, please stop waving your Claude .45 around until you have taken a safety class.
Also thank you for reminding me I still need to refactor my 765 emulation.
Without just stealing it wholesale from MAME it has been somewhat baffling at times so I feel for lil' ol Claude.
My favorite thing is when I find some copy protected title that seems to want a result flag one way but that breaks another title that seems to want it the other way, and then I'm stuck trying to find whatever I'm missing that makes the paradox make sense.
These are all good points, although from the perspective of a consumer of medicine I may not appreciate any personal philosophies beyond a successful diagnosis.
Let me share a window into my personal temptations - I have more projects rattling around in my brain than I will ever be able to make real the the remaining time I have on this earth. The devil on my shoulder says, you know that Gemini could write that Python script to convert that 9 GB of JSON your Arduino just dumped on your hard drive, right?
And I can hem and haw about whether writing the miscellaneous glue and tooling and ephemera of my trade, for what it is, is my real passion or not, or if I lose anything by outsourcing it, in the way that many talented scientists with more ideas than time (which I am well aware I have no business comparing myself to) employed various assistants.
That's the hook - just a little Python, it couldn't hurt. That's how it will start, and then next year I'm going to have a 6' rack of Mac Minis running OpenClaw all vibe coding a MartyPC MMO while I occasionally stop stuffing Cheetos into my grass hole long enough to give a suggestion regarding the exact shade of purple to use in the UI
The first thing I did of course is try to find if it had copied something - there were not a lot of examples of ASM mandlebrots to go through on GitHub - many were 16-bit, most that were 32-bit used the FPU, or instructions not available on the 386, or some other disqualifier from direct plagiarism.
After coming up empty on Github I spent a fair bit of time pulling down mandelbrot demos from pouet, as they sometimes include source code.
there were clear and apparent differences in every example I looked at - i learned a rather interesting trick for getting a pointer to the VGA framebuffer going through those!
in any case, it was clear that demo-coders were more skilled, keeping everything in registers in the main iteration loop, whereas as the GPT example was using several temporary variables in RAM.
But I was just impressed that it worked at all.
The entire point was a request that it would have failed miserably a year prior , and something that leaned on the side of having the least training data available as possible - but when these companies have scraped every single corner of the internet by now, it might be difficult to pinpoint any particular task that doesn't have some sort of preceding example it can leverage.
It's difficult for me to measure improvement in quantifiable terms other than giving it these sort of challenges - you can see the various scores on things like ARC-AGI trending upwards with every new model, but that sort of thing is a rather abstract measure - what does that relate to in practical terms?
I feel like the AI companies must thank their lucky stars that coding ended up being AI's "killer app". OpenAI would never succeed with something as vapid as Sora as their flagship product.
The greater acceptance of generative AI by programmers is a very interesting phenomenon. There's probably quite a few psychology thesis papers to mine out of that topic. I'm not really ready to be completely cynical regarding the motivations of programmers vs visual artists or musicians. There may be something more fundamental at play.
@asie Those are all various categories of basic moral failings, but what I struggle with is knowing many people personally, people who I would call friends, who are happily just vibing away with Claude all day long.
The impartial observer might just suggest that this is the point where I realize they are all Bad People or such. It takes a lot more than that for me to write someone off. I've always viewed people as morally complicated, and I am not exactly a saint myself.
There is even a lot of frank hypocrisy in anti-AI crowd - a lot of people with dozens of terabytes of pirated movies and books on their NAS are suddenly outraged about companies not respecting copyright.
I tend to think that people can at best ascribe a handful of ethical positions that are actually important to them and then the brain just exhausts any ability to give a shit beyond that. The brain literally does not have the time to sit and be outraged about everything worth being outraged over. The more abstract you make it, and the more steps removed you are from direct responsibility, the more likely you can just shrug it off.
I really don't think the average person gives any sort of shit that Anthropic illegally scanned Harry Potter. I really don't.
@janeishly i would certainly include that under the ethical umbrella
we've had a hard time motivating people to give a shit about the environment even before AI though so good luck with making them care now.
my growing cynicism signals it is time for bed
@gloriouscow (getting even)
"They look like big, strong hands"
Not every country went for nukes. Same thing here (technology with no legitimate use).
@gloriouscow I am quite sick of holier than thou Linux nerds who insist the GPL is the only true way and is 'free software'. MIT and other BSD adjacent languages are true freedom - take the code, do what you want!
The GPL does not really prevent wholesale looting. It tries to enforce contribution, whereas MIT just implies it to anyone with a brain cell.
Have to say I tend to be quite binary about this. Whilst I understand the GPL viewpoint, and you're not wrong that the original author's intent should be preserved, in an ideal world it's in reality a choice between :
release code open source, knowing it will be taken from you
keep the source closed. Defend it legally.
If you want to make money from your own entirely open source system, you're going to have to make some non ideal compromises.
@brouhaha And that's cool, and I respect your ability to choose, and it's cool you'll relicense.
I've actually asked in a few cases whether I could people's code that had some sort of MIT-incompatible clause. It's good to point out that you have that option, although, if you're lucky enough to start a very popular project, that GPL is going to become very sticky unless you have all your contributors on speed dial or, apparently, if you have Claude and lack a moral compass.
I'm also a smelly, antisocial hermit and I don't want to talk to you about your indie game, just take my code and leave me alone lol
@gloriouscow
And I respect that choice as well.
The reality is that most of my published code is so obscure and eclectic that few people even want it. The commercial license requests really took me by surprise.
@brouhaha @gloriouscow Also, you're flexible with licensing... e.g. m5meta (GPL3) usage in Sentinel (BSD-2).
Not that I would abuse that kindness :D!
from my limited 'murican perspective:
collectively, we used to ask if something was ethical.
at some point, the question simply became if it was technically legal
now we are in the era where the question is 'will anyone do anything about it to stop me?'
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