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.
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.
gloriouscow
asie