I don't think you understand the qualifier. I meant in the tradition of liberal free markets that have unlocked human potential on the global scale. I'm saying no it's actually good that you don't have to ask the local government when you want to do something. If American style free markets didn't gain traction we'd still be doing subsistence farming.

The thing is, since we recognized that such a tradition led to the unfettered destruction of the natural environment which we depend upon to survive, we have decided that local governments should be responsible for preserving said environment by regulating the destructive actions performed by the liberal free market. Not doing so will even destroy our ability to perform subsistence farming in the long run.

So far all I hear is complaining about electricity prices. No one actually cares about the "environment". They are just mad that the KW/h is up 3 cents.

Then you are not replying to me in good faith. I didn't say a thing about electricity rates.

It's controlled by a guy who spends all day retweeting white supremacists and lying about his companies. Why should anyone who isn't a white supremacist use it?

They would not. The do not.

What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?

"in accordance with its license" is the key part that's missing with LLMs. The licenses are completely ignored.

It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM training). I believe that holding these contradictory views is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.

There is no contradiction. Open source software licenses allow use without conditions. Ad blocker use does not distribute the modified web pages.

I have not seen any evidence that LLMs ‘distribute’ modified software, though they do seem capable of replicating it.

I fail to see how mass scale reproduction of copyrighted code isn't a form of distribution.

Reproduce is a definition of replicate. And LLMs reproduced code.

The view LLMs should respect open source software licenses is not for replication alone. Models and generated code are derived from training data.

Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.

As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.

Depends on how you define "learn": usually, a company wanting to rebuild and publish something under a different license prohibits their developers from having ever looked at original code, to avoid the risk of copying over exact snippets out of their memory accidentally.

Copyright protects only arbitrarily non-trivial parts of the original being reproduced, but that means that you have to be careful with learning from copyrighted material. Programming books will have direct clauses allowing snippet reuse, but not for teaching purposes.

> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.

This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.

> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.

How?

LLMs are not people. They do not learn the way people do.

Even if they did, if someone memorized copywritten code and then typed it back out that would still be a copywrite violation

> Open source software licenses allow use without conditions.

Don't a number of open source licenses notably involve restrictions?

Copyright is all about gating access, as media rights holders for sports well know.

Well no, it’s about legally gating the ability to copy so the original author doesn’t have to compete in the same market to sell his own book with every other bloke with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything else is an addendum.

No, it's to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

The current implementation has recently become obsolete.

Don’t confuse the social justification with the actual purpose of copyright law just because it’s written into the US Constitution that way. America didn’t invent copyright law.

That may be the reason copyright came to be, but it's much more expansive now.

That is still the meat and potatoes of copyright law.

> The licenses are completely ignored.

Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.

In reproducing code that requires the license be reproduced alongside it.

Are you doing a full search of every GPL licensed repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem reasonable

This is what GitHub promised years ago. Showing repositories where similar code is present so you can guess the license and use appropriate outputs.

I’m not sure whether this is implemented or not since I don’t use generative AI for coding.

Why not? Up until a year or two ago LLM pair programmers weren't even a thing.

The user would know how?

That's because licenses are an abstract complexity tacked on to a simple material reality in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.

OSS licenses haven't grown in complexity all that much in the past forty or so years. They're being ignored more now because it's become easier to ignore them, not because it's become harder to abide by them.

> He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away.

That's his choice and I assume he licensed his code accordingly. That doesn't mean that the choices of others who used different licenses are invalid.

How would you know whether or not it is AI slop, you haven't reviewed it

Sorry, definitely my mistake for sharing too early.

You shouldn't ask other people for feedback before you have done the bare minimum of reading your "own" book

Clear, sorry, my mistake. I just was excited to share and hoped it can be useful.

Though I genuinely wrote a substantial part of the book myself.

I will finish the review on Github in the coming days/weeks and will hopefully get some collaborators there

Ahh, "you're holding it wrong"

The classics never go out of style

This has basically been my experience since Sonnet 3.5. I've been working on a personal project on and off with various models and things since then and the biggest difference between then and now is that it will do larger chunks of work than it did before, but the quality of the code is not particularly better, I still have to do a lot of cleanup and it still goes off the rails pretty frequently. I have to do fewer individual prompts, but the time spent reviewing the code takes longer because I also have to mentally process and fix larger chunks of code too

Is it a better user experience now? Yes. Has it boosted my productivity on this project? Absolutely.

But it still needs a ton of hand holding for anything complicated and I still deal with tons of "OK, this bug is fixed now!" followed by manually confirming a bug still exists.

There are no good cops