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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gloriouscow Mar 6

@spacelogic @ozzelot @leathekd @tante

We risk overanalyzing what might be something a simple as a dopamine hit.

Creators know it feels good to create things. Every programmer has experienced a little emotional high, however small, seeing their code run successfully, or smashing a difficult bug, or writing a complex function and having it work right off the bat.

And for many of us that is a feeling that has never ceased to be pleasurable even after decades of coding.

The danger I suppose is thinking any of us are fully immune to replacing the process, the effort and the art of coding and proceeding directly to the reward.

Insert prompt, see result, receive dopamine.

Does it matter, philosophically, if the result is now disconnected from your personal pride, effort, skills and knowledge, if it tricks your dumb meat brain into releasing those sweet sweet endorphins?

So much of modern civilization involves convincing ourselves that we are far more sophisticated animals than we really are, perhaps because our need for base physical desires are camouflaged by the indirect ways by which modern life requires us to go about satisfying them.

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gloriouscow

@spacelogic @ozzelot @leathekd @tante

There's a million ways to justify it - let's take the example of chardet - if you look at the number of commits involved, Dan Blanchard did indeed spend a lot of time instructing and directing Claude to complete the task.

To that end, maybe people discover that they have a knack for management. They can take pleasure in the successful planning they credit the result to. He can tell himself that not just anyone could have prompted Claude this way - his unique skills and experience were the key to his success, and so his satisfaction is justified, as his ownership of the creative process.

And that's even not entirely wrong, perhaps. People can insert a joke about middle-management here, but it's a skill that people apparently do enjoy and find fulfilling enough to make a career out of it.