3 ms·

there's a nice example here of it reproducing carmack's famous inverse square root function from Quake 3 (sans GPL, of course) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/st

there's a nice example here of it reproducing carmack's famous inverse square root function from Quake 3 (sans GPL, of course) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 this is clearly copyright infringement, and if it isn't: it should be

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 - July 2021 (625 comments)
astrange 5y ago
Calling it Carmack's rsqrt is an attribution issue already since it seems to have been invented a decade earlier and used at SGI.
lacker 5y ago
I don't think it should be infringement. You can't copyright an algorithm, and Carmack's function is like six lines of code. If you just read Carmack's source code, then rewrote the same algorithm with different variable names, it would clearly not be infringement. Is it really so bad if you keep his precise variable names, comments, and indentation? How does it hurt Carmack to reproduce this tiny snippet of code exactly, rather than with a small rewrite?
bootlooped 5y ago
That function appears in hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos. It's plausible that it's the most famous block of code ever. Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%29&type=code https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%2... The only ways this argument could be less alarming to me is if people were bothered that it was writing the same Hello World as somebody else, or that it was naming variables "foo" and "bar". Let's wait until we have a bulletproof, egregious, and inexcusable case of it lifting code until we panic.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  > Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? If those portions of code are not licensed GPL, yes, it is copyright infringement.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 - July 2021 (625 comments)

astrange 5y ago

Calling it Carmack's rsqrt is an attribution issue already since it seems to have been invented a decade earlier and used at SGI.

lacker 5y ago

I don't think it should be infringement. You can't copyright an algorithm, and Carmack's function is like six lines of code. If you just read Carmack's source code, then rewrote the same algorithm with different variable names, it would clearly not be infringement. Is it really so bad if you keep his precise variable names, comments, and indentation? How does it hurt Carmack to reproduce this tiny snippet of code exactly, rather than with a small rewrite?

bootlooped 5y ago

That function appears in hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos. It's plausible that it's the most famous block of code ever. Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%29&type=code https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%2... The only ways this argument could be less alarming to me is if people were bothered that it was writing the same Hello World as somebody else, or that it was naming variables "foo" and "bar". Let's wait until we have a bulletproof, egregious, and inexcusable case of it lifting code until we panic.

betwixthewires 5y ago
> Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement? If those portions of code are not licensed GPL, yes, it is copyright infringement.