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apantel commented on The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus   baldurbjarnason.com/2024/... · Posted by u/zzzeek
NoraCodes · a year ago
> Isn’t the game with licenses that you must specify what can and cannot be done with the code?

No, not at all. Microsoft's argument is that training an LLM on code is fair use, and thus doesn't trigger copyright-based licensing at all. That's why they include unlicensed code in Copilot, which under a training-triggers-copyright theory they have no right to at all.

apantel · a year ago
Thanks for the clarification.
apantel commented on The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus   baldurbjarnason.com/2024/... · Posted by u/zzzeek
robinsonb5 · a year ago
> We don’t yet know which parts of the FOSS system is sustainable,

Probably the parts that have been around for decades.

As someone who's created open source software in the past, I'm put off mostly the explosion in software complexity over the last two decades, the constant churn in libraries and tooling which places an unreasonable maintenance burden on a spare-time hobbyist, and the bad taste left in the mouth by Microsoft using copilot to license-launder the github corpus.

I still produce open source software and gateware on a recreational basis, but in quiet little backwaters of the noosphere which aren't going to change the world (or be tainted by AI) any time soon!

apantel · a year ago
> Microsoft using copilot to license-launder the github corpus

Isn’t the game with licenses that you must specify what can and cannot be done with the code? It’s a big issue that no one prior to now had the foresight to forbid ML training on code without attribution. If the licenses going back 30 years had that stipulation then it would be easy to take down Copilot and ChatGPT. But the licenses simply don’t cover the use case of training a neural net, so it’s probably going to slip through the cracks just like SaaS slipped through the cracks of the GPL by not distributing code, hence the need for AGPL. So I’m sure we’ll see these kinds of clauses added to licenses going forward, but they can’t be applied retroactively.

The irony in all this is that from the start, open source licensing has been a game of wits where software creators try to cleverly use copyright as a lever of control. Well, they weren’t clever enough. They missed ML training and didn’t forbid it. As a result they’ve basically lost the whole game.

apantel commented on The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus   baldurbjarnason.com/2024/... · Posted by u/zzzeek
zzzeek · a year ago
I use ads on my OSS projects' websites so to the degree ad blockers block low key, non intrusive ad networks favored by OSS projects like Ethical Ads and Carbon Ads, they are hurting regular people
apantel · a year ago
Ads are unwanted. If you serve ads, you are doing something unwanted to your visitors. So they block the ads, and you get the unwanted effect of not making money. The pain point is not that your ads are being blocked — it’s that you don’t have a way to make money that doesn’t start with doing something unwanted.
apantel commented on Calling All Hackers   phrack.org/issues/71/17.h... · Posted by u/picture
elefanten · a year ago
Thoughtful and insightful reflection, thanks for sharing. I think that interplay between personal sense-making, personal strengths and the addictive/rewarding aspects of belonging to a specialized/esoteric community are a very common combination driving the creation of new narratives, new factions/interest and, ultimately, all kinds of change in general… for better or for worse, usually only time and intervening chance can tell. It’s cool how meaningful it is to the participants, and also cool when you can zoom out and connect it to the experiences of others across space and time.
apantel · a year ago
This is also what drives people into cults: not fitting into normal social environments, finding some esoteric community where suddenly there is a fit.
apantel commented on Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely   github.com/magic-wormhole... · Posted by u/tosh
tptacek · a year ago
And then we'll have 11.
apantel · a year ago
That would further increase the need for a single standard.
apantel commented on Are we living in the age of info-determinism?   newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/pseudolus
silverquiet · a year ago
I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning. The truth is we're just apes living on a planet that we're unable to stop ourselves from destroying; a tiny, ultimately meaningless rock that will be gone one day in a universe that won't even notice, let alone care. That truth is very hard to accept (I never really have) and so we create other stories to give us meaning, but these stories are too arbitrary and subjective for us to collectively agree upon.
apantel · a year ago
Nothing you said is truth. Those are just your own blind beliefs. How do you know the universe is meaningless? Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome. You’re just spouting YOUR truth, which is not truth at all.
apantel commented on Are we living in the age of info-determinism?   newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/pseudolus
keiferski · a year ago
I am curious about the problem from the perspective of a startup idea / nonprofit website. What would you look for in an authoritative source that doesn't exist now? And which topics were you looking into?
apantel · a year ago
The person writing about the thing has to be knowledgeable, correct, and telling the truth.
apantel commented on Optimize the Overall System Not the Individual Components   deming.org/optimize-the-o... · Posted by u/max_
apantel · a year ago
I just want to make a comment about optimizing applications even though the article is about optimizing organizations:

The way to arrive at the optimal system is to continually optimize all individual components as the system develops. You have to walk the razor’s edge between “premature optimization is the root of all evil” and not optimizing anything until it’s too late and a bunch of bad design decisions have been baked in.

If you want to write the fastest program, profile its performance from the start and try different ways of doing things at each step of the process. There’s usually a way of doing things that maximizes simplicity and performance at the same time because maximum performance == doing as little work as possible to complete a task. Chances are that ‘littlest amount of work’ will be elegant.

Dead Comment

apantel commented on Public Work: a search engine for public domain images   public.work... · Posted by u/throw0101d
apantel · a year ago
The infinite scrolling of the same images over and over again makes it harder to use. You can’t tell how many results you’ve actually received and what they are.

u/apantel

KarmaCake day649October 18, 2023View Original