The recent post criticising Free Software advocates for advocating user-modifiable software and then being annoyed at LLMs annoys me and the reason is best illustrated by this analogy:
-
@raymaccarthy @david_chisnall None of that is relevant to the point being made here. Comparisons do not mean that two things are the same in every regard - only in those regards that are relevant to the issue at hand.
@raymaccarthy @david_chisnall And I'd argue we do need arguments against LLMs that do not hinge on them being useless garbage, because improvement is happening and a lot of people are already claiming they increase their productivity. I disagree with them - but they firmly believe that, and the "LLMs are useless garbage" argument IS NOT going to get through to them.
-
@raymaccarthy @david_chisnall And I'd argue we do need arguments against LLMs that do not hinge on them being useless garbage, because improvement is happening and a lot of people are already claiming they increase their productivity. I disagree with them - but they firmly believe that, and the "LLMs are useless garbage" argument IS NOT going to get through to them.
@raymaccarthy @david_chisnall incide tally, i tried to order an Uber for the first time ever yesterday.
"tried to" being the operative word.
-
@ermo @david_chisnall how come what? Me finding it weird that FOSS people see excluding non-human entities, that were the reason why FOSS movement started, to be incompatible with their goals?
-
The recent post criticising Free Software advocates for advocating user-modifiable software and then being annoyed at LLMs annoys me and the reason is best illustrated by this analogy:
Public-transport advocates spend years advocating for a connected public-transport infrastructure, where it’s easy to take a small combination of busses, metros, trams, and trains to get from anywhere to anywhere. The network would be efficient and operated as a non-profit-making public good, making individual movement cheap (or, ideally, free). They work with municipalities to build out some of this infrastructure, persuade national governments to invest in the longer routes, and so on.
Someone comes along with a massive subsidy for a handful of private taxi companies to hire a bunch of drivers and give free (paid for by investors) ride to everyone. The drivers are immigrants who don’t speak the language very well, which is great for the taxi companies because they are easy to exploit (they are, in fact, underpaid and put in dangerous situations routinely). The owners of the taxis are pocketing a load of investor money for every ride though.
When you get in one of these taxis, there’s a 90% chance they’ll take you where you want, a 9% chance they’ll take you somewhere nearby, and a 1% chance they’ll just drop you off in a dangerous part of town. A bunch of people are mugged and a few more murdered as a result of this, but the companies aren’t liable. The investors behind this tell everyone ‘don’t bother learning to drive, there’s no point, our taxis will take you anywhere, for much less money!’. At the same time, ridership on existing public transport drops off, leading to calls to cut its funding and there are mass redundancies for bus drivers and so on. The taxis are all diesel and heavily polluting, leading to worse air quality everywhere they go. To make sure that they can pick people up easily, the ones not actively giving rides are constantly circulating, placing huge strain on road infrastructure and further increasing pollution.
And then someone says to those public-transport advocates: ‘this is what you wanted, why are you unhappy just because it’s not delivered in the way you imagined?’
@david_chisnall The fact that this actually happened still boggles my mind! -
@ermo @david_chisnall how come what? Me finding it weird that FOSS people see excluding non-human entities, that were the reason why FOSS movement started, to be incompatible with their goals?
The problem is that it's very difficult to exclude corporations in a way that doesn't exclude people, or cause other harms to people.
Let's start with the second one. Imagine you have a perfect license that exactly excludes corporations, but doesn't exclude individuals. You release a replacement for MS Office with it. But now you need to interoperate with corporations and they are precluded from using your code, so they are now incentivised to keep sending you MS Office documents. Your program now has to perfectly interoperate with MS Office, or normal people need to buy MS Office. Fortunately, LibreOffice and friends didn't pick a license that excludes corporations and so governments are now in a position to mandate ODF for interoperability and say 'just use LibreOffice' if a corporation complains that MS Office doesn't import it properly.
But excluding corporations is itself hard. If I'm a sole trader, I'm presumably not excluded even if I use the program for work, but if I collaborate with another person in a partnership are we now both excluded? If I work for a community interest corporation such as lowRISC, am I excluded? What about an animal sanctuary? If you exclude, say, companies worth over a billion dollars (hard, because you'll need to keep adjusting for inflation), what stops employees of such a company from using the program on their own time? Or simply subcontracting work that needs it to a smaller company. You cannot craft a license that specifically excludes the people you want to, so you end up with one of two things:
- Some people are accidentally excluded, which harms them.
- Some corporations are accidentally included, which gives them a competitive advantage and skews markets to favour the very groups you were trying to harm.
-
R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
