Gormo

After your post I reviewed the first page of your comment history and I was pretty sure I knew where you would stand on this issue.

Yes, that seems reasonable. I try to root my positions in a baseline understanding of reality and a core set of underlying principles, rather than allow them to be unduly influenced by polemic and arguments from emotion (as is unfortunately all too common these days) so there should be a certain level of consistency in my stances on various issues. Thanks for recognizing this.

Once you get off your soapbox, reality may find you surrounded by pitchforks.

Where I live, alligators are a bit more common, but perhaps a bit more rational in their actions than the allegorical pitchfork-bearers. The alligators may act to obtain food that's actually present, but the mob is usually reacting only to imaginary stimuli.

This is where our conversation ends, because we have a different interpretation of value creation and reality, and neither one of us will change the other's mind.

I supposed not. But where empirical propositions are concerned, reality is what it is regardless of how you choose to interpret it, and things will play out as cause and effect entail, with people acting on the motivations that they actually have, irrespective of the normative opinions of uninvolved stranger.s

The billionaire class have different rights and opportunities.

I thought you'd ended the conversation with the last paragraph. Nevertheless, I'll respond to point out that there is no such thing as a "billionaire class", or any other kind of class, as a causal entity in the world: it's all just people pursuing motivations deriving from fundamental human nature, as parsed through their individual reason.

The taxonomy you're engaging with exists in your own mind, not the world itself, and encompasses disparate people who are often at odds with each other as you suspect they are with you.

And no one has "different rights and opportunities"; the former are normative boundaries that are definitionally the same for everyone, and the latter are states of affairs that exist in the world at large. Indeed, the specific people we're talking about here did not start out as billionaires, but acquired their wealth by pursuing opportunities that already existed.

They have more sway in the political system, and they can greatly impact how things play out.

This is a defect of the political system, not the broader world in which the political system exists. My suspicion, though, is that you may not want to acknowledge this and join those who seek to restrain the reach of political power itself, out of a desire to use political power for your own ends and the fatal conceit that it can be used effectively for those ends without ultimately just becoming an instrument of greater abuse than the abuses you aim to rectify.

But currently capital allocation and mechanisms see to it that the representation and opportunities are limited, which is the entire problem caused by having such wealth disparity.

Ah, an empirical claim! It sounds like you're saying that some people earning large amounts of wealth from success in businesses -- that exist on account of widespread availability of capital in the first place -- is somehow blocking other parties' access to liquid capital. Can you cite any examples of this? It doesn't seem to make sense, given how capital markets actually work, so some actual specifics would definitely help you make your argument here.

It is thorn in the side of democracy,

Democracy is a political decision-making process that has nothing per se to do with how much wealth anyone in particular has, and if political decisions are being distorted by misuse of wealth, that again is a defect of the political system that can only be remedied by constraining politics itself.

and antithetical to freedom.

People you don't know and have no relationship with having more stuff than you is absolutely not antithetical to your freedom; rather, organized attempts to take anyone's stuff away from them is a threat to everyone's freedom.

Well, it's not so much a "rhetorical fishing expedition" as much as I just initially gave you the benefit of the doubt, and didn't assume you were aiming to divert the thread into a platform for inane propaganda. Sadly, the doubt did not resolve in your favor.

Needless to say, people who have little or nothing to do with each other having different levels of wealth as a consequence of activities entirely unrelated to one another is not a "problem" that needs to be solved. People having their rights violated or opportunities artificially limited is a problem, but attempting to attribute that sort of problem to someone else, somewhere else, not being artificially transgressed against is disingenuous and fallacious.

It's not possible for any of these to be "basic human rights", regardless of what rhetoric may be employed by states seeking to assert centralized political control over their provision. Goods and services that must be actively supplied by other people cannot be rights.

Rights are norms that protect people's inherent rights unto themselves as baseline rules we use to negotiate society in the first place. They can't pertain to things that can only be obtained within society.

It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.

Until what problem goes away? What are you talking about?

In fact, there is no relationship whatsoever between these considerations.

Apart from the fish being visible inside the pelican's mouth.

Culture does not exist in a vacuum -- it's downstream of fundamental human motivations that are manifest in all times and places.

And using "culture" as a general concept to dismiss concerns about specific behavior, without actually attempting to posit any particular cultural values, or describe what mechanism actually causes those values to have a determinant effect on behavior, is equivalent to saying nothing at all.

Whatever official party line the current Chinese government espouses, it's plenty clear from even a cursory understanding of Chinese history, from the Warring States period to the warlord-era conflicts of the early 20th century, to the current behavior of the CCP, that China does not have any effective cultural guardrail against factions seeking advantage over opposing factions, which is a phenomenon that has been present in all societies that have ever existed in human history.

How does releasing open weight models to FOSS communities help capture market share for subscription-based cloud services?

Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.

What about the formatting seems indicative of AI generation? It just looks like normal long-form writing to me.

"Welcome to our ool. Notice that there is no 'P' in it. Please keep it that way."

Maybe the ice cream was just that good, and GAP was lucky to be able to sell their polo shirts to ice cream enthusiasts who'd otherwise have bought them at Old Navy.

Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.

Was the interviewer a macroeconomics grad student working his way through school at the ice cream shop? Because I can't imagine anyone but a macroeconomics student aggregating all demand into a generic concept of "time and money" without regard for qualitative distinctions between entirely different product categories.

Did he also think the shop was in competition with United Airlines or the local dentist's office, because time and money spent on a trans-Atlantic flight or getting a root canal was time and money that couldn't be spent at the ice cream shop?

Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.

Which demonstrates that the model of treating the content users are looking for as bait so you can sell their attention to someone else was always an adversarial one in the first place.

Users themselves were never looking for time sinks, they were looking for specific information or experiences that they've had to increasingly endure time sinks to get to due to the perverse incentives in the social media landscape.

AI destroying the viability of "eyeball harvesters" as a business model is an opportunity for people actually creating interesting content, not engagement-maximizing filler, to pivot back to pitching quality directly to their users. That's exactly the point that Tim Ferriss was making in the article: he points out that he already prefers to sell his books to a niche audience of 10,000 readers who actually find value in them than try to engage with 10 million passers-by on social media.

AUR isn't a package repo. It's a collection of user-contributed PKGBUILD scripts, to make building packages from upstream source distributions more convenient. It's not meant to be treated like an official repo of binary packages.

Direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o

It's quite interesting, and describes how the developer used COBOL to implement a raycasting algorithm and generate a stream of PPM images to to pipe into FFplay. There's zero evidence of this being written in Claude; there are multiple clips of the developer working in VSCode, where the Claude plugin doesn't even appear to be installed.

In Belfast? Was that a Protestant Somali man or a Catholic Somali man?

It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years. Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”

This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".

And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.

The camera analogy is a good one but I have never had a camera that had every great picture somebody else had taken, plus every work of art, baked into it.

I've never had an LLM that had any of that baked into it either. LLMs just have token correlations trained on those works. Trying to get an LLM to output the data it was trained on verbatim is something I'd expect to be heading into monkeys-on-typewriters territory. "Write something in the style of Shakespeare" and "give me the original text of Hamlet" are two very different things.

I agree with the framing of the AI as a tool not an autonomous entity. The thing is, to me, it is exactly that framing that makes it so the use of that tool means "copying" more than it means "learning and taking inspiration and creating new art", because who is doing the learning and being inspired?

It's not learning or taking inspiration, though. It's just making statistical inferences based on token correlations. Whether or not that's analogous to how humans learn is something I think is a metaphysical question that is of little practical relevance. The fact remains that LLMs are not human, have no intentions of their own, do not exercise any kind of agency despite how often people employing the misnomer "agentic", and are ultimately glorified statistical models.

The LLM is a tool that extends human capacities in the same way as any other mathematical framework or technological device.

I think of a trained AI like a lossy, highly compressed copy of its training data set.

I've seen a few people in this thread make that argument, but I just can't agree with it. It's not compression, lossy or lossless, which aims to deterministically encode a representation of the specific input data. The training data is analogous to the sample set used in a regression analysis to generate a polynomial function -- it's not valid to treat the output from any application of that polynomial as a copy of the original sample data.

It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.

I'd say that from work experience managing an IT department that maintains and deploys both Windows and Linux machines, the administrative overhead involved in working with Windows first exceeded that of Linux at some point in the Windows 10 life cycle -- at least five years ago. Since then, Windows has been getting worse and worse, and Linux has been getting better and better.

With most corporate software being accessible via the web and/or being cross-platform these days, we're seriously debating moving the standard corporate workstation configuration to Linux.

But try to write your own story of a lion cub chased away by his uncle and living in a jungle until his childhood friend finds him and convinces him to reclaim his kingdom, and you'll quickly hear from Disney's lawyers how non-derivative it really is.

I'd expect them to say "we don't like this, but since it's not actually a derivative work, we can't do anything about it". As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.

That's why Armageddon is not a derivative work of Deep Impact, the Shark Attack series is not a derivative work of Jaws, the more famous Titanic is not a derivative work of 1979's S.O.S. Titanic, and the Harry Potter series is not a derivative work of Teen Witch.

Using the same story themes, plot points, and setting as another work does not implicate that other work's copyright. Only substantial copying of specifics does.

Of course, one might construe Apple as an MITM in the relationship between the user an and the software vendor.

under the condition that if you use it for anything, I get credited; else, you get nothing.

But this has never been a condition in the FOSS world, as far as I'm aware. I've only ever seen attribution requirements attach to redistribution of source, not usage of the software.

I understand that the crux of the debate here is whether training an LLM is redistribution of the underlying code, but to me, it seems to be fairly clear that it is not.

Luckily, FOSS is specific published works, and unless LLMs actually reasonably-provably do such decomposing into ideas/facts (good luck reasoning about that), that part is also irrelevant.

That's literally all LLMs do. That's what tokenization is. And it's trivially provable, since if you compare LLM models with the copyrighted works you're claiming they replicate, all you'll see on the LLM side is probability matrices representing correlations between decomposed units of knowledge aggregated across the entire dataset as an integrated whole.

Depending on intent, that very much can happen, it's called plagiarism. Good luck proving an LLMs intent.

The only intent ever in play is that of the user. LLMs are just software.

But it does exist, and within this framework, the creator gets to say how you may redistribute their IP,

Right. And the way the creator gets to exercise that say is by releasing their work under a license. If you release your work under a FOSS license, you're saying "you are free to copy this work and use it for your own purposes".

Complaining that people are using it for purposes you don't like after you've already given permission to them to use it for whatever purposes they please seems a bit disingenuous.

and "We compressed it very much" isn't an out.

It's not, but I don't think we're discussing that. We're talking about LLMs, not people redistributing zip files containing someone else's work. If you're trying to imply that LLMs are merely a form of compression, that's a position you've got to argue for, because I'm definitely not seeing any similarity between the two.

If you put a GPL C program through Emscripten to run in a browser the output doesn't include the original C code but it's surely a derivative work.

Because it does include content from the original work -- this is just a translation, and isn't comparable to how LLMs work.

To me the answer is simply that humans are special.

I don't disagree, but I also view LLMs as tools that extend human capacities and not autonomous entities unto themselves. LLMs are still just software, and can't really be regarded as anything other than instruments that humans use to broaden their capacity to see, appreciate, understand, and draw on that experience in what they create.

That may seem remarkably unfair to the machines, or like a cop-out.

No, it's unfair to the humans. The machines are just tools that they use. The "double standard" is really a set of inconsistent standards applied to the same underlying moral agents.

After all, if you want to treat a machine exactly like a human who learns from prior art to create new art, then the ownership of the new art would also belong to the machine. Not to the person who prompts it.

No, it always belongs to the person who prompts it. The machine is not a conscious entity, bears no intentions, and has no capacity to act on its own initiative. The machine is always just a tool that extends human capacity, as all machines always have.

For a good comparison here, we've never not credited a photographer as the author of a photograph. But the photographer is in a sense merely prompting the camera by framing the shot, selecting the exposure, adjusting the lighting, etc. -- the hard work in actually creating the photograph is being done by the camera itself, with the photographer playing no role in directly constructing the final image, and with the many of the qualities of the final image being determined by pre-existing features of the camera's functional design and components that the photographer also played no role in defining, apart from choosing which camera to use.

LLMs are like cameras in this way. And the fact that they rely on external data for model training no more disclaims the user as the author of the resulting work than looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia does the same for the author of an essay.

I mean, the most restrictive license, the GPL, was conceived specifically to protect the "four freedoms" and prevent subsequent modifications from violating them. The "copyleft" concept was specifically designed to create an ecosystem that behaved as if copyright didn't apply in the first place.

I don't know how you can imply with a straight face that it did anything else.

I don't know how you can possibly argue that non-redistributive usage of software could ever violate the GPL -- and the other common FOSS licenses don't even have the copyleft provision, and literally are saying "do whatever you want, but I'm not responsible".

Uh, that is exactly what a derivative work is.

No, it isn't. A derivative work isn't something based on extracting underlying ideas or patterns from another work, it's something that includes copyrighted portions of the other work.

An annotated edition of Hamlet is a derivative work. A Cliff's Notes summary of Hamlet is a derivative work.

Strange Brew and The Lion King are not derivative works of Hamlet simply because they include literary themes and plot points that originated in Hamlet. A list of word counts of popular works of literature that includes an entry for Hamlet is also not a derivative work. The Markov chain described above is not a derivative work.

The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under.

And I would agree with them. An LLM that actually is outputting non-trivial code that matches a public project's code verbatim is engaging in copying, and not stochastic inference.

I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.

It's a shame that the same fundamental questions have to be relitigated over and over again just because the contextual formalities and modes of expression have changed. I wonder how many of the legal cases are going to be copies or derivative works of previous ones.

That's wrong. What on earth gave you that impression when the licenses specifically set constraints on what downstream can do (from "release derivatives as open" to "put me in the credits").

These are restrictions on redistribution, not use. And they're there to make sure that derivative works can't themselves impose restrictions on use.

It sounds like your view of things is limited mostly to that last version of FOSS, the copyleft style.

No, I'm well aware of the different motivations for and approaches to FOSS. I'm mostly focusing on the copyleft/GNU GPL side of the discussion here because that's the side of the house where most of ideas of a social contract and desire to see a specific ecosystem develop have been located. People on the MIT/BSD side of things, which has always had a much more direct "do whatever you want" ethos, are not the ones I'd expect to be making these arguments in the first place.

For one, it allows laundering of the copyleft license so their work goes into closed-source products that are never shared.

I'd agree that someone using an LLM to create a deterministic transcription of someone else's work is indeed violating the license. But I think the argument goes beyond that, into using LLMs in any way at all.

That doesn't mean I will be writing OSS software with a new made-up unenforceable license. It just means, like OP, I'll weigh differently whether I want to bother releasing stuff at all.

That's a reasonable position, and from the perspective of examining whether the current LLM climate is sapping motivation to participate in FOSS, I can understand where you're coming from.

But to that point, I'd argue that if your motivation was to gain recognition, participate in a community, etc. then you're going to lose those things by keeping your code private anyway, whereas you won't necessarily lose those things just because an LLM was trained on your code. If you contribute to a popular project, people were almost certainly already using your work to do things you don't approve of -- if that didn't take away your motivation, why would LLMs do much worse?

This is extremely false. Copyright additionally grants you exclusive control over the production and distribution of derivative works.

A derivative work is a work that itself includes copyrighted content from the original work.

That is to say that for something to be a derivative work, some measure of its content must be "CTRL-C, CTRL-V" from the originating work.

Something that's merely inspired by another work, or draws underlying themes or factual knowledge from it, is not a derivative work.

A training set is just an anthology,

Which might make the training set itself a derivative work, but works created by using the model trained on that anthology are a different matter.

and the training process is condensation.

No, it isn't. It's the creation of a new work that represents patterns extrapolated or interpolated from the data set, without the resulting model actually including any of the copyrighted elements of the work.

The underlying ideas and facts in the original work were never protected by copyright. Only the specific fixed form of expression is copyrightable.

Someone who looks at a dozen code examples in public repos to learn how to do e.g. a quick sort, then upon understanding the logic flow of the quick sort algorithm, writes his own quick sort implementation is not creating a derivative work of the code in the repos he exampled. And the way LLMs work is much more similar to that process than to the "compressed anthology" concept you're describing.