CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@foone

I hate to say it, but it's surprisingly common despite being horrible: Alphabetical.

It's all over stuff for kids. Speak 'n Spell 4ever.

@lcamtuf

Salesman slaps hood: "There's some fine gibberish in this baby! Let's make a deal!"

Have to share.

My daughter has a turtle tank. Turtle is named "Soup". My fault. Anyway, Soup's tank was getting ugly, so she did a full cleaning, top to bottom. Sparkling clear. But after a day or so it got a white cloud in it; looked around, likely ammonia buildup because the ammonia-metabolizing bacteria went out with the water, advice is wait a few days and it should clear up. Relayed same to daughter.

Just overheard this in the kitchen:

younger daughter: The water is cloudy though.
older daughter: Dad says leave it alone, it'll clear up in a few days.
younger daughter: Why? How?
older daughter: Dad said "Science blah blah blah..."

I am so getting a T-Shirt made. "Science blah blah blah". Highly amused.

@cstross @CynAq

It doesn't mean LLMs are a dead end, even though yeah they probably are.

It means that the way LLMs "reason", or whatever the heck you want to call it, is not at some fundamental level the way meat brains do it. We are more "hardware" (or firmware or wetware or whatever) at the basic level than software/state.

Don't be too excited. It is *highly unlikely* that evolution builds brains in an optimal manner. It may well be we eventually build our own successors. We just won't (quickly/soon) build better "us"es.

@aral

It's even simpler. If you post on those platforms, I'll never see the post, as I decided long ago that twitter and facebook (now X, facebook, and instagram) don't need my traffic, ever. If it's important or ugly enough, I'm sure someone will screenshot it and repost, but you (and more importantly, the oligarchs) won't get my tracking or ad revenues.

@mapache @guinnessduck

A really important lesson I accepted only recently is: you don't have to read it all. There is no prize for finishing your feed, and there is no penalty for being "full" and stopping. And there isn't really any advantage to having more than you need. It isn't wasted if you somehow miss something - if it's good, it'll come around again.

@mapache

"Mainstream adoption" is a very poor metric for success. Indeed - it feels it may be an anti-metric - the more mainstream mastodon gets, the less it is a refuge from that very mainstream.

User satisfaction is a much better metric. Lack of aggressive corporate presence. Fewer assholes and nazis and "influencers"- we left them behind for a reason.

Growth pursued for its own sake is the very thing that poisoned the other platforms. Let's not make the same mistake.

If your feed has interesting posts from good people and is *already* more than you can easily read in a day - it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if you don't have enough to read, ask around. We're happy to show you good folks to follow who are already here, and have been for a while now. There is already far more good content than anyone can consume with just a bit of self-curation - no need for more "mainstream", thank you anyway.

@lcamtuf @kevinr @rustynail @ahltorp @bgalehouse @revk

If AI code cannot be copyrighted - you have no mechanism on which to force someone to accept the GPL, or any license. An AI artifact covered by GPL is meaningless.

@ArneBab @lcamtuf @kevinr @bgalehouse

We entered a gray zone about 8 off-ramps ago. Copyright never anticipated self-replicating code on computers and viral licenses and clean-room re-implementations and AIs.

As for income - I've lost track of the original driver, but it's GPL'd free code, no?

I like fair use. It and parody are one of the very few things keeping us out of peasants-with-pitchforks-and-torches mode. If you eliminate those carve-outs, the whole system goes down.

@marta

It's about how to reproduce the functionality - the code could be an entirely different language.

And - "commercially compete" with someone giving away code for free seems a non-concern.

@ArneBab @kevinr @lcamtuf @bgalehouse

Fair use isn't something the GPL grants you. That's what I'm trying to work out - set the GPL aside for a moment.

Does regular copyright fair use give me the right to look at the freely provided source code, make a mental model, and re-implement a workalike if I don't re-use the original source?

Pretend it's just me and not an AI, because that throws a whole new set of confusion into the mix.

BSD did it against regular copyright. Not sure this is all that different.

@ahltorp @bgalehouse @revk @lcamtuf @kevinr @rustynail

AI is a weird case as you could assert - probably correctly - that the original code may be part of its training corpus. Was that training a GPL violation? It's a stretch. Was it's training a copyright violation? Or was the AI (or rather its owners) exercising their GPL license rights? Or was it fair use under regular copyright?

Who knows?

It's a hot mess is what it is.

This is all so far outside the original reckoning of "it'd be nice if the bookbinder down the street didn't profit off of my work until I had a chance to profit off of it first" that it's not surprising it's a mess.

@marta

I'm not sure "closed" is the right word. Clearly it's not closed if you are providing it - it's right there, I can read it and even redistribute it without burden.

It's "copyrighted", not closed. You can't modify closed source because you don't have the source. The assertion being made is you can't modify GPL'd open source without accepting the license. But copyright has its own carve-outs, and I am unconvinced that writing a spec or net-new code is a modification, as opposed to regular old copyright fair use.

@lcamtuf @kevinr @revk @rustynail @ahltorp @bgalehouse

That's the "clean room" that keeps getting thrown around, originally used to try to legally protect free bsd derivatives. The idea was to make the "copy" argument so outlandish it was unsupportable.

It does set a standard, but I'm not sure it's a requirement. That is, reading code to create compatible code seems more of a fair use than an illicit copy. Especially of none of the original code appears in the finished work.

@lcamtuf @gisgeek @kevinr @bgalehouse

Heh. You might even say that's "fair use"...

@kevinr @bgalehouse @lcamtuf @ArneBab

It explicitly does not. If I don't accept the license, normal copyright applies. You don't get to make a legally binding contract without consent, "clickwrap" bullshit aside.

And normal copyright has carve-outs like fair use.

@lcamtuf @ArneBab @kevinr @bgalehouse

"Use" isn't part of the GPL. And "all rights reserved" means normal copyright law, not "you get no rights at all".

The GPL defines "modify" and "propagate" as the activities it burdens. If I modify the code, and propagate it, i have a legal burden under the license. Otherwise, I don't.

IANAL, but I don't think reading the code and re-implementing a work-alike without incorporating the original code is "modify" - it's "replace".

I understand that's where "clean rooms" come into play, but that always felt like splitting hairs and giving copyright too much power - it's about physical books, not ideas. The farther we move from the original intent, the weaker a strong copyright stance becomes.

I think you could make an argument that reading code to understand it's interfaces, explicitly rejecting accepting any license, then implementing compatible code is well within the normal copyright definition of "fair use", or should be if we aren't all copyright lawyers. More importantly, it's healthy for Society and the art. If I can read a book under copyright and write a detailed book report, I should be able to read provided source code and do the same. To the extent that we've strayed away from that, the legal system has failed and needs correction.

@lcamtuf @bgalehouse @kevinr

But here's an interesting question:

If you do not execute the code - did you accept the license? Does simply reading it sufficiently to be able to write a spec bind you to that license? That seems a bit too much.

@bgalehouse @lcamtuf @kevinr

Assuming you used the original source code to derive the detailed spec, then yes, that too is a derivative work.

The "viral" nature of that sort of license has bothered me for a long time. It's always been simultaneously overly far reaching and impossible to realistically enforce.