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.

I have written Rust FFI bindings for GPL licensed code, and I have rewritten GPL licensed code in Rust. In both cases the results remained GPL licensed, because I generally try to go through life with at least a minimum amount of thought about not being a colossal chode.

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.

If I just made you sad thinking about that scene, I am sorry.

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.

@gloriouscow it's also a very materialist way at looking at it. Sure, stable diffusion can produce pretty looking images. But is the point of art solely to produce pretty looking images? Is the point of writing solely to produce words that are accurate or interesting? Is the point of engineering solely to produce a working product? Is the point of medicine solely to diagnose illnesses? I argue that the answer to all of these is 'no'.

The fact that AI outputs are slop is not because of the quality of them, although I haven't noticed the exponential improvements that other people have reported over the past year, but because in almost all cases the LLM is tasked with producing slop, and it can produce slop so quickly and in such great quantities that it is impossible to deal with. Human-produced slop, at least, was limited by how quickly humans could produce it.

@yakmacker

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