9 ms·

You can do a lot better than this, by using Go as a JIT code generator, dynamically linking the result, and jumping into it with cgo. Easily saturates the CPU v

You can do a lot better than this, by using Go as a JIT code generator, dynamically linking the result, and jumping into it with cgo. Easily saturates the CPU vector math units. I use exactly this approach for the futures/options prediction transformers on my website. But I will never "open" another piece of software, now that it's all grist for the LLM code generator industry. Anonymous common property, sold by the LLM companies. No credit to the author. Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

ncruces 2y ago
Because some people just don't care where their code ends up. Many people release code to the "public domain" (or under very liberal licenses). If those never cared if corporate entity™ used it in proprietary software, why should they care if LLM chews on it and regurgitates it out? Also, it's far worse if entitled user® posts abusive issues to my repo, than if they copy snippets of my code through a LLM and are forced to support their inferior spitballed copy all by themselves.
- csdvrx 2y ago
  > Because some people just don't care where their code ends up. Yes, take me for example. > Many people release code to the "public domain" (or under very liberal licenses). In my case, the MIT license, because I saw it was popular, and I was afraid that in some places, "public domain" might cause unexpected legal issues to whoever wants to "play by the book" and use my code. > if LLM chews on it and regurgitates it out As work coming from a machine does not have copyright protection, whoever gets a LLM to spit out my code back can then claim it as their own, under whatever term they like. If this person wants to contribute to a free software project and release the code under the GPL v2 or v3, good: it may help create a new feature that users will enjoy! If this person wants to contribute to their company private software that's only available on a subscription basis (and let's say the subscription is sold at an eye-watering price), good: it means whoever pay this subscription will get more from their money, and whoever use the software may get a new feature they will enjoy! Software has nearly 0 marginal costs. LLM is the closest thing to a Star-Trek level "replicator", getting everyone everything they want. On which moral grounds would you object to a Star-Trek level replicator for physical good? (please make them good, as offering any food anyone may want would fix world hunger once and for all) Then why object to that for virtual goods? Maybe I'm reading too much into your reply, but I don't see it as trolling or negative faith. I see variants of it in many places, and they all look to me very close to luddism: rejecting a new technology, because you fear for your own work, while ignoring what this technology will enable in the greater picture: for the orignal case of luddism, reducing the price of clothing for everyone by increasing production and decreasing labor, therefore allowing workers to get in other fields where they may try to satisfy other human wants - some that would be inconcievable to the original luddites like videogames We should feel graceful we get more technology, as it removes constraints and make more people happy.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    I don’t think fearing one’s job is necessarily a bad reason because as much as I love the idea of a Star Trek utopia, real and present people have real responsibilities like children which are cared for from money generated by their careers. This is particularly relevant in societies which take a dim view of their social responsibilities (I’m looking at you America) which means there’s less of a safety net should that career disappear. We are already seeing more developers than job vacancies is the tech market, so this isn’t a theoretical concern either. That all said, I don’t think hiding our valuable code for fear of LLMs is the right solution either. If your code is really that good then you’ll be more likely to secure your career by sharing your code because it builds a visible reputation that extends further than any verbiage on a CV might. So while I don’t agree with the LLM excuse I can still completely understand why someone might cite it as a reason not to open their source. Another valid reason is that some people have been completely burnt out deadline with entitled complaints from users. Thankfully I’ve had a mostly positive experience personally but I’ve read that others haven’t been so fortunate.
    - csdvrx 2y ago
      > I’m looking at you America And I'm looking back at you from America :) > We are already seeing more developers than job vacancies is the tech market, so this isn’t a theoretical concern either. Agriculture also employs far fewer people than a few hundred years ago, yet we have more food in quantity and diversity, so I see that as a good thing. I suppose we just have very different beliefs and values. Thanks for your answer, as it helped me understand your perspective.
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        I think you’ve misread my comment. I’m neither the GP nor against LLMs. I’m just offering a counterpoint that a fear for one’s job isn’t an unreasonable perspective.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > On which moral grounds would you object to a Star-Trek level replicator for physical good? Then why object to that for virtual goods? This just made me realize a distressing thing - if we ever built a replicator, a lot of people might then want to destroy it. For the same reason I believe they object to LLMs - greed and entitlement. Because they don't get to benefit personally, they don't get first right to refuse, the instinct is to deny the value to others. The Dog in the Manger.
csdvrx 2y ago
> Anonymous common property, sold by the LLM companies. No credit to the author. Yes, and? > Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Before LLM: to share nice things with other people who may like them After LLM: to share nice things with other people who may like them > We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Yes, and? Before LLM, anyone could already take free software and copy-paste the code while stripping away the author's name or the license. There are more motivations than getting credit, or money. If what I create can ultimately have a positive impact, it does not matter whether the credit goes to the LLM, to me or anyone else. I would suggest you question and analyze your motivations.
- throwaway0123_5 2y ago
  > I would suggest you question and analyze your motivations. Full disclosure up front: I'm not anti-AI and think there are a lot of potential positive applications. I currently work on improving some aspects of AI. That said, it really isn't that hard to see why many people (including me to some extent) are nervous about AI getting better, and upset that the people who made the content that facilitated this are not benefiting from it. If you're a SWE and not already extremely stable financially, AI replacing software engineering (and if that happens, ~all white-collar labor) means that you'll likely be unable to achieve anything close to the economic status expected and planned on. > Before LLM, anyone could already take free software and copy-paste the code while stripping away the author's name or the license. Before LLM, people doing this posed ~0 existential threat to the livelihood of the author. AI doing it at a massive scale arguably does (remains to be seen, but at least plausible). I think most people want their work to have a positive impact, and aren't that concerned about credit. But they aren't confident that helping LLMs will lead to long-term positive impacts, and in any case are less worried about that than not being able to own a house or maybe even buy necessities because of the possible economic impacts of AI. Is this more of an indictment of our current social/economic system than of AI itself? Probably yes, but I'm not sure it matters.
  - csdvrx 2y ago
    > you'll likely be unable to achieve anything close to the economic status expected and planned on It may be a problem of expectations + loss aversion, as high income from software jobs is a historically "recent" phenomenon > AI doing it at a massive scale arguably does (remains to be seen, but at least plausible). I agree that scale can change many things, but the core argument is still someone fearing for their job > Is this more of an indictment of our current social/economic system than of AI itself? Probably yes, but I'm not sure it matters. I just want to better understand why so many people here have such a negative take on a technology that is new, exciting, and could bring so much to so many people! Thanks for your detailed reply: like you I believe it's just self-interest, and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
ninininino 2y ago
I suppose there's a different angle, which is that the Open community can distill the privately trained models and then open the distilled model in turn, like many believe Deepseek did. In effect, letting private corps pay for expensive training (w/o paying the authors of the data they are training on, as you correctly point out), but then benefiting from their training labor/cost by copying it back to the open community and making it free again.
- pona-a 2y ago
  That does make me optimistic. "Stealing back" our stolen data does in the end a free model make — unless the current, very... unprecedented US admin decides distributing unauthorized distilled models carries a prison sentence. But I think most of it is psychological. There used to be goodwill between the public and NLP researchers: what heartless monster would object to some linguists using the by-product of their conversations to make a computer learn that a "king - man + woman = queen" or generate some unintentionally comedic writing? Now this honeymoon is over. You see that what you've been feeding your public life is now a monster with a hundred vices and a few good deeds. It is behind the tidal wave of spam and misinfo, it is the oracle breeding ignorance among the gullible, it is the iron hand of censorship for many a police state, but most insulting of all, it is sold by its makers as a replacement for any genuine talent or minimal human effort. "Why learn to draw when you can have an AI produce a cheap imitation instead? Why learn math, CS, or foreign languages when you can delegate any and all thinking to the great machine? What did we even have you all for, anyway — intellectuals, artists, and craftsman — with your constant complaining and demands we learn a skill? Who do they think they are? Experts?" No, the future belongs to the lazy and talentless, to thieves and usurpers, who will sit at the top with an aristocratic, borderline catatonic, brainlessness, while you will be at their knees, polishing their boots — since the machine to do so costs an order more than your meager wage. It is anti-intellectualism in a form purified to industrial potency, directed at the very people by whose generosity their rather inept "replacements" were manufactured. I can't say what's the rational response in all this. I can tell you what emotional response seems most appealing.
sph 2y ago
> But I will never "open" another piece of software, now that it's all grist for the LLM code generator industry. This is an interesting, albeit offtopic, discussion. My last few projects are still stored as private repos because I do not want them to be gobbled up by LLMs for junior, expendable and cheaper devs to replace me, especially when I am exploring novel problem-spaces. In fact, I do not care to be convinced otherwise, I am ideologically speaking completely opposed to any form of LLM or "AI". I daydream of a niche, nerdy network of nerds, outside the world wide web, to share my stuff with humans. Until then, I am not sure whether my projects should be open-source. The ones that will benefit the most are the idiotic machines and their operators. Should we resurrect Gopher for a few months, until they catch up?
- csdvrx 2y ago
  Your perspective is very strange, as I want to be replaced by cheaper devs - or ideally, even machines, which would free us humans to work on other problems that machine can't work on yet. > In fact, I do not care to be convinced otherwise, I am ideologically speaking completely opposed to any form of LLM or "AI". Then could you try to convince me of your argument? I don't see tech problems as worse or better than other problems like growing food, which we were fortunate to solve with industrialized farming and other technological breakthroughs like the Haber–Bosch process Explain me why I should join your daydream!
  - sph 2y ago
    > which would free us humans to work on other problems We have heard this refrain since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      And it’s been true. I don’t have to break my back toiling the earth to grow crop. Nor risk other kinds of life changing injuries working in factories, down the mines, etc. Instead, I’ve got a comfortable job which requires using my brain. Which is an opportunity that someone from my social class wouldn’t have been granted even just 100 years ago.
badsectoracula 2y ago
> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Because i open my software to be useful to others, including others that may benefit from my code indirectly via LLM being trained on it. If anything, just recently i was thinking of how to make a documentation generator system to generate documents in a format that'd be easier for LLMs to "grok" so that people can feed it to an LLM and ask questions about it. I'd advocate for using a local LLM instead though, they may not be technically as good as the cloud stuff you rent, but they are good enough, can run on most mid-to-high-end PCs and you are in control.
PaulHoule 2y ago
Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s said that technology and culture are moving so fast that we are "driving by looking in the rear view mirror" Nothing says "I am slow on the draw" to me than "all of a sudden I'm worried about getting ripped off by Open AI" as the open source and web economies have long been recognized as exploitative (1) This guy http://www.seobook.com/blog http://www.seobook.com/blog has been talking about how the Google economy has been rigged since at least 2010, and I can say that I've lived it. (2) This cartoon https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ illustrates the hard time open source has sustaining itself. Open-source doesn't need to fund all the value-subtracting vultures that you need to sell enterprise software, but it struggles to scrape together just a few bucks for people who are capable of doing work on a shoestring. (3) Open source licenses have been getting tougher for database products in particular because hosting a database like mysql is a great business for the likes of AWS or Azure which doesn't need to send a penny back to the creators and the GPL's copyleft doesn't do anything about it. --- I'd say also as a creative person everything I'm exposed to becomes part of my work, particularly when I am receptive and "on the make"; I think of the video for Groove Armada's Superstylin' [1] which is all about a person seeing everything in the environment and finding inspiration and using their talents to make other people's talents even greater. Don't laugh but my son and I got a lot of out the anime 2-5 d Seduction [2] because it is all about people of different generations, under pressure, figuring out how to blend their talents to compete and cooperate. So much of what I consume nourishes me, becomes part of me, and becomes part of what I create, not any different from a LLM. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kE0pxRkMtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kE0pxRkMtQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5_Dimensional_Seduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5_Dimensional_Seduction
zbobet2012 2y ago
It depends on how long the time you spend in your c function is. cgo has a substantial overhead for calling. I tend to prefer just writing ASM functions for critical path code. You can use libraries like https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo to make it easier to write/maintain.
- bborud 2y ago
  Have you tried writing Go assembler instead of x86? https://go.dev/doc/asm https://go.dev/doc/asm (I'm not suggesting, merely asking since I haven't written any assembler for Intel for 30+ years and I have never written Go assembler)
EGreg 2y ago
Because we live in a society where the incentives are not conducive to collaboration. Imagine if everyone had a UBI, and you contributed fixes and improvements to a project because you thought it was cool. That's how professors with tenure for centuries rushed to publish scientific articles, for instance. In fact, in antiquity, we had the opposite problem to what you describe ... often things were credited to a certain leader of a school (e.g. Pythagoras) even if he didn't invent them. The problem is that people are thinking about how to make a profit, and it's ubiquitous because it's wrapped up with trying to survive, at all. By the time you make millions of dollars, you still have the PTSD from trying to outrun the bear, you keep going by inertia and making billions. Competition is far less healthy than collaboration. It's what causes the countries on earth to speed towards AI apocalypse for instance, or fossil fuel apocalypse, etc. The few times they cooperated (e.g. Montreal Protocol, or nonproliferation of chemical weapons) has been a resounding success. I doubt they'll be able to come together like that for AI, though!
umvi 2y ago
The software I open is usually a gift to humanity/public service. I'm not seeking to gain anything. Anyone can use it for anything - for profit or not.
- diggan 2y ago
  Or put the way I usually say it, in completely normal conversations: > free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software, to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
  - anonym29 2y ago
    If I had a nickel for every time I repeated this exact line, verbatim in casual conversation...
timewizard 2y ago
> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Cynically? To get noticed and get a job. > We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. What makes you think they weren't already doing it? It could be that LLMs masquerading as "AI" is actually just a risk reduction measure for already existing practices.
godelski 2y ago
> We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Issue is that this has been going on for decades. We've been really bad at allocating capital to people who are building important and highly influential software. These big companies do play a role, but it is a shame that a small portion of these profits does not go back to the people who did work that is cornerstone to their success. I often wonder what the world would look like if being an open source developer was actually profitable. But we definitely know what the world looks like when being a open source developer essentially means having two full time jobs and getting paid for one. I think the problem is people see it as "charity" and see charity work as less valuable. I remember Steve Levitt talking about a conversation he had with Bill Gates over this. I think it was in the PIMA episode where they discuss CEO pay for charities and how their pay is far less than that of a corporation, even if the work is the same.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > We've been really bad at allocating capital to people who are building important and highly influential software What does this mean? Can you give an example?
  - realo 2y ago
    Well... there you go! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Sorry - I might be being a bit slow. How is that an example of poor capital allocation?
      - godelski 2y ago
        - XZ is critical software - XZ was (is?) developed by a single person - XZ developer does XZ development in their spare time, having a normal job to pay the bills - XZ developer gets overburdened. Not making money, they can't hire another dev. - Pressure builds up. Hacker leverages and takes advantage of this. Especially since everything can't be checked due to said overburden Look at it from the flip side. Take the counterfactual of if XZ Utils was making money for their work - XZ is critical software, therefore it is funded - XZ is funded and critical, so more than one developer is hired to ensure quality - XZ is funded, developers don't have a second job. They have ONE job - XZ is over burdened. XZ is funded. XZ hires more devs. It's true that a hacker can still infiltrate corporate software, but it is also true that the pressures would have been far lower were the main dev not doing 2 fucking jobs.
muscomposter 2y ago
culture works backwards from how you think it works the mystery to me is how people like yourself do not realize the scarcity your intentions lead towards
aaa_aaa 2y ago
Unlike you, many people do not care what they think, write or utter is copied or used. Also some believes intellectual property is not property. Real thieves are the ones who got phony monopoly grants to protect it.
- spudlyo 2y ago
  I personally hold that intellectual property isn't property, and is increasingly becoming a net negative to humanity as a whole. I see AI as an accelerant in the erosion of IP's relevance and enforceability. With AI being able to crank out derivative works at scale, it blurs the lines between infringement and transformation. The flood of such content makes enforcement increasingly impractical. While I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of creatives, and their need to eat, I feel like the pendulum has swung so far to the interests of the copyright holders and away from the needs of the public that the bargain is no longer one I support.
shpongled 2y ago
How did you learn how to program? Ever read any open source code?
EigenLord 2y ago
I see what you mean. Sometimes I intentionally divulge certain information in the hopes that I will influence the dominant LLM's outputs and thereby surreptitiously influence humanity. It's obviously a stretch but if you think about chaos theory there's a chance it might work out.
tw1984 2y ago
> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Me noticed the same and concluded that most of those open source software are no longer hard core science or engineering stuff. open source is becoming more like a marketing approach for 3rd class companies to show off their reinvented wheels.
xyproto 2y ago
I want my open source projects to be used for training LLMs. An LLM is like a bundle of knowledge. I want to have a tiny bit of influence on these bundles of knowledge, since they will be used by many people for many years to come. If anyone can benefit, even just a little bit, I am for it. If not for the benefit of others, what's the main point of open source software in the first place?
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. We did alright for millennia without it we'll be ok
treyd 2y ago
Intellectual property isn't real. It's a fiction we constructed to try to control expression in order to allow extraction of profit from ideas. We had to keep exceptions like expiration and "fair use" to make it not absurd and obviously self-contradictory. All LLMs are doing is shuffling around the roles to bring light to an underlying contradiction. Yes they are profiting off of unpaid labor, but what that actually means is the models themselves should be "property" of everyone just as the training data should be.
- golergka 2y ago
  > Intellectual property isn't real. It's a fiction we constructed Regardless of my opinion about IP in particular, argument "X isn't real, it's a fiction we constructed" is silly. We have "constructed" things like justice, duty, charity, mercy, and a lot of other social and moral constructs, and it's good that we did. They're also just as real as potential energy in physics: it's not a material object that you can see or touch, but it greatly affects what happens in reality.
  - treyd 2y ago
    Sure, but I would argue that those are concepts that have existed for millennia and has real material grounding in reality. Whereas intellectual property is entirely a fictional construction. At its core, owning property involves the ability to use force to assert your control over it. This is completely impossible with ideas (and information more broadly) since they're non-physical, so it's not really property in the way real world property like land is. So because it's not reflective of how the material world works, that's the heart of the contradiction I alluded to in my previous comment. There is no way to resolve the problem of LLMs from within the logical framework that doesn't lead to some further counterintuitive result. There has to be legislation around it if we want to keep the charade going, or ideally we'd want to drop it altogether.
    - immibis 2y ago
      If you share enough copies of a Disney movie, lots of men with big guns will come to your house and haul you away to a locked room. I fail to see how this isn't using force to control intellectual property, nor how it's impossible.

ncruces 2y ago

Because some people just don't care where their code ends up. Many people release code to the "public domain" (or under very liberal licenses). If those never cared if corporate entity™ used it in proprietary software, why should they care if LLM chews on it and regurgitates it out? Also, it's far worse if entitled user® posts abusive issues to my repo, than if they copy snippets of my code through a LLM and are forced to support their inferior spitballed copy all by themselves.

csdvrx 2y ago
> Because some people just don't care where their code ends up. Yes, take me for example. > Many people release code to the "public domain" (or under very liberal licenses). In my case, the MIT license, because I saw it was popular, and I was afraid that in some places, "public domain" might cause unexpected legal issues to whoever wants to "play by the book" and use my code. > if LLM chews on it and regurgitates it out As work coming from a machine does not have copyright protection, whoever gets a LLM to spit out my code back can then claim it as their own, under whatever term they like. If this person wants to contribute to a free software project and release the code under the GPL v2 or v3, good: it may help create a new feature that users will enjoy! If this person wants to contribute to their company private software that's only available on a subscription basis (and let's say the subscription is sold at an eye-watering price), good: it means whoever pay this subscription will get more from their money, and whoever use the software may get a new feature they will enjoy! Software has nearly 0 marginal costs. LLM is the closest thing to a Star-Trek level "replicator", getting everyone everything they want. On which moral grounds would you object to a Star-Trek level replicator for physical good? (please make them good, as offering any food anyone may want would fix world hunger once and for all) Then why object to that for virtual goods? Maybe I'm reading too much into your reply, but I don't see it as trolling or negative faith. I see variants of it in many places, and they all look to me very close to luddism: rejecting a new technology, because you fear for your own work, while ignoring what this technology will enable in the greater picture: for the orignal case of luddism, reducing the price of clothing for everyone by increasing production and decreasing labor, therefore allowing workers to get in other fields where they may try to satisfy other human wants - some that would be inconcievable to the original luddites like videogames We should feel graceful we get more technology, as it removes constraints and make more people happy.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  I don’t think fearing one’s job is necessarily a bad reason because as much as I love the idea of a Star Trek utopia, real and present people have real responsibilities like children which are cared for from money generated by their careers. This is particularly relevant in societies which take a dim view of their social responsibilities (I’m looking at you America) which means there’s less of a safety net should that career disappear. We are already seeing more developers than job vacancies is the tech market, so this isn’t a theoretical concern either. That all said, I don’t think hiding our valuable code for fear of LLMs is the right solution either. If your code is really that good then you’ll be more likely to secure your career by sharing your code because it builds a visible reputation that extends further than any verbiage on a CV might. So while I don’t agree with the LLM excuse I can still completely understand why someone might cite it as a reason not to open their source. Another valid reason is that some people have been completely burnt out deadline with entitled complaints from users. Thankfully I’ve had a mostly positive experience personally but I’ve read that others haven’t been so fortunate.
  - csdvrx 2y ago
    > I’m looking at you America And I'm looking back at you from America :) > We are already seeing more developers than job vacancies is the tech market, so this isn’t a theoretical concern either. Agriculture also employs far fewer people than a few hundred years ago, yet we have more food in quantity and diversity, so I see that as a good thing. I suppose we just have very different beliefs and values. Thanks for your answer, as it helped me understand your perspective.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      I think you’ve misread my comment. I’m neither the GP nor against LLMs. I’m just offering a counterpoint that a fear for one’s job isn’t an unreasonable perspective.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > On which moral grounds would you object to a Star-Trek level replicator for physical good? Then why object to that for virtual goods? This just made me realize a distressing thing - if we ever built a replicator, a lot of people might then want to destroy it. For the same reason I believe they object to LLMs - greed and entitlement. Because they don't get to benefit personally, they don't get first right to refuse, the instinct is to deny the value to others. The Dog in the Manger.

csdvrx 2y ago

> Anonymous common property, sold by the LLM companies. No credit to the author. Yes, and? > Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Before LLM: to share nice things with other people who may like them After LLM: to share nice things with other people who may like them > We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Yes, and? Before LLM, anyone could already take free software and copy-paste the code while stripping away the author's name or the license. There are more motivations than getting credit, or money. If what I create can ultimately have a positive impact, it does not matter whether the credit goes to the LLM, to me or anyone else. I would suggest you question and analyze your motivations.

throwaway0123_5 2y ago
> I would suggest you question and analyze your motivations. Full disclosure up front: I'm not anti-AI and think there are a lot of potential positive applications. I currently work on improving some aspects of AI. That said, it really isn't that hard to see why many people (including me to some extent) are nervous about AI getting better, and upset that the people who made the content that facilitated this are not benefiting from it. If you're a SWE and not already extremely stable financially, AI replacing software engineering (and if that happens, ~all white-collar labor) means that you'll likely be unable to achieve anything close to the economic status expected and planned on. > Before LLM, anyone could already take free software and copy-paste the code while stripping away the author's name or the license. Before LLM, people doing this posed ~0 existential threat to the livelihood of the author. AI doing it at a massive scale arguably does (remains to be seen, but at least plausible). I think most people want their work to have a positive impact, and aren't that concerned about credit. But they aren't confident that helping LLMs will lead to long-term positive impacts, and in any case are less worried about that than not being able to own a house or maybe even buy necessities because of the possible economic impacts of AI. Is this more of an indictment of our current social/economic system than of AI itself? Probably yes, but I'm not sure it matters.
- csdvrx 2y ago
  > you'll likely be unable to achieve anything close to the economic status expected and planned on It may be a problem of expectations + loss aversion, as high income from software jobs is a historically "recent" phenomenon > AI doing it at a massive scale arguably does (remains to be seen, but at least plausible). I agree that scale can change many things, but the core argument is still someone fearing for their job > Is this more of an indictment of our current social/economic system than of AI itself? Probably yes, but I'm not sure it matters. I just want to better understand why so many people here have such a negative take on a technology that is new, exciting, and could bring so much to so many people! Thanks for your detailed reply: like you I believe it's just self-interest, and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

ninininino 2y ago

I suppose there's a different angle, which is that the Open community can distill the privately trained models and then open the distilled model in turn, like many believe Deepseek did. In effect, letting private corps pay for expensive training (w/o paying the authors of the data they are training on, as you correctly point out), but then benefiting from their training labor/cost by copying it back to the open community and making it free again.

pona-a 2y ago
That does make me optimistic. "Stealing back" our stolen data does in the end a free model make — unless the current, very... unprecedented US admin decides distributing unauthorized distilled models carries a prison sentence. But I think most of it is psychological. There used to be goodwill between the public and NLP researchers: what heartless monster would object to some linguists using the by-product of their conversations to make a computer learn that a "king - man + woman = queen" or generate some unintentionally comedic writing? Now this honeymoon is over. You see that what you've been feeding your public life is now a monster with a hundred vices and a few good deeds. It is behind the tidal wave of spam and misinfo, it is the oracle breeding ignorance among the gullible, it is the iron hand of censorship for many a police state, but most insulting of all, it is sold by its makers as a replacement for any genuine talent or minimal human effort. "Why learn to draw when you can have an AI produce a cheap imitation instead? Why learn math, CS, or foreign languages when you can delegate any and all thinking to the great machine? What did we even have you all for, anyway — intellectuals, artists, and craftsman — with your constant complaining and demands we learn a skill? Who do they think they are? Experts?" No, the future belongs to the lazy and talentless, to thieves and usurpers, who will sit at the top with an aristocratic, borderline catatonic, brainlessness, while you will be at their knees, polishing their boots — since the machine to do so costs an order more than your meager wage. It is anti-intellectualism in a form purified to industrial potency, directed at the very people by whose generosity their rather inept "replacements" were manufactured. I can't say what's the rational response in all this. I can tell you what emotional response seems most appealing.

sph 2y ago

> But I will never "open" another piece of software, now that it's all grist for the LLM code generator industry. This is an interesting, albeit offtopic, discussion. My last few projects are still stored as private repos because I do not want them to be gobbled up by LLMs for junior, expendable and cheaper devs to replace me, especially when I am exploring novel problem-spaces. In fact, I do not care to be convinced otherwise, I am ideologically speaking completely opposed to any form of LLM or "AI". I daydream of a niche, nerdy network of nerds, outside the world wide web, to share my stuff with humans. Until then, I am not sure whether my projects should be open-source. The ones that will benefit the most are the idiotic machines and their operators. Should we resurrect Gopher for a few months, until they catch up?

csdvrx 2y ago
Your perspective is very strange, as I want to be replaced by cheaper devs - or ideally, even machines, which would free us humans to work on other problems that machine can't work on yet. > In fact, I do not care to be convinced otherwise, I am ideologically speaking completely opposed to any form of LLM or "AI". Then could you try to convince me of your argument? I don't see tech problems as worse or better than other problems like growing food, which we were fortunate to solve with industrialized farming and other technological breakthroughs like the Haber–Bosch process Explain me why I should join your daydream!
- sph 2y ago
  > which would free us humans to work on other problems We have heard this refrain since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    And it’s been true. I don’t have to break my back toiling the earth to grow crop. Nor risk other kinds of life changing injuries working in factories, down the mines, etc. Instead, I’ve got a comfortable job which requires using my brain. Which is an opportunity that someone from my social class wouldn’t have been granted even just 100 years ago.

badsectoracula 2y ago

> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Because i open my software to be useful to others, including others that may benefit from my code indirectly via LLM being trained on it. If anything, just recently i was thinking of how to make a documentation generator system to generate documents in a format that'd be easier for LLMs to "grok" so that people can feed it to an LLM and ask questions about it. I'd advocate for using a local LLM instead though, they may not be technically as good as the cloud stuff you rent, but they are good enough, can run on most mid-to-high-end PCs and you are in control.

PaulHoule 2y ago

Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s said that technology and culture are moving so fast that we are "driving by looking in the rear view mirror" Nothing says "I am slow on the draw" to me than "all of a sudden I'm worried about getting ripped off by Open AI" as the open source and web economies have long been recognized as exploitative (1) This guy http://www.seobook.com/blog http://www.seobook.com/blog has been talking about how the Google economy has been rigged since at least 2010, and I can say that I've lived it. (2) This cartoon https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ illustrates the hard time open source has sustaining itself. Open-source doesn't need to fund all the value-subtracting vultures that you need to sell enterprise software, but it struggles to scrape together just a few bucks for people who are capable of doing work on a shoestring. (3) Open source licenses have been getting tougher for database products in particular because hosting a database like mysql is a great business for the likes of AWS or Azure which doesn't need to send a penny back to the creators and the GPL's copyleft doesn't do anything about it. --- I'd say also as a creative person everything I'm exposed to becomes part of my work, particularly when I am receptive and "on the make"; I think of the video for Groove Armada's Superstylin' [1] which is all about a person seeing everything in the environment and finding inspiration and using their talents to make other people's talents even greater. Don't laugh but my son and I got a lot of out the anime 2-5 d Seduction [2] because it is all about people of different generations, under pressure, figuring out how to blend their talents to compete and cooperate. So much of what I consume nourishes me, becomes part of me, and becomes part of what I create, not any different from a LLM. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kE0pxRkMtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kE0pxRkMtQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5_Dimensional_Seduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5_Dimensional_Seduction

zbobet2012 2y ago

It depends on how long the time you spend in your c function is. cgo has a substantial overhead for calling. I tend to prefer just writing ASM functions for critical path code. You can use libraries like https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo to make it easier to write/maintain.

bborud 2y ago
Have you tried writing Go assembler instead of x86? https://go.dev/doc/asm https://go.dev/doc/asm (I'm not suggesting, merely asking since I haven't written any assembler for Intel for 30+ years and I have never written Go assembler)

EGreg 2y ago

Because we live in a society where the incentives are not conducive to collaboration. Imagine if everyone had a UBI, and you contributed fixes and improvements to a project because you thought it was cool. That's how professors with tenure for centuries rushed to publish scientific articles, for instance. In fact, in antiquity, we had the opposite problem to what you describe ... often things were credited to a certain leader of a school (e.g. Pythagoras) even if he didn't invent them. The problem is that people are thinking about how to make a profit, and it's ubiquitous because it's wrapped up with trying to survive, at all. By the time you make millions of dollars, you still have the PTSD from trying to outrun the bear, you keep going by inertia and making billions. Competition is far less healthy than collaboration. It's what causes the countries on earth to speed towards AI apocalypse for instance, or fossil fuel apocalypse, etc. The few times they cooperated (e.g. Montreal Protocol, or nonproliferation of chemical weapons) has been a resounding success. I doubt they'll be able to come together like that for AI, though!

umvi 2y ago

The software I open is usually a gift to humanity/public service. I'm not seeking to gain anything. Anyone can use it for anything - for profit or not.

diggan 2y ago
Or put the way I usually say it, in completely normal conversations: > free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software, to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
- anonym29 2y ago
  If I had a nickel for every time I repeated this exact line, verbatim in casual conversation...

timewizard 2y ago

> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Cynically? To get noticed and get a job. > We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. What makes you think they weren't already doing it? It could be that LLMs masquerading as "AI" is actually just a risk reduction measure for already existing practices.

godelski 2y ago

> We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Issue is that this has been going on for decades. We've been really bad at allocating capital to people who are building important and highly influential software. These big companies do play a role, but it is a shame that a small portion of these profits does not go back to the people who did work that is cornerstone to their success. I often wonder what the world would look like if being an open source developer was actually profitable. But we definitely know what the world looks like when being a open source developer essentially means having two full time jobs and getting paid for one. I think the problem is people see it as "charity" and see charity work as less valuable. I remember Steve Levitt talking about a conversation he had with Bill Gates over this. I think it was in the PIMA episode where they discuss CEO pay for charities and how their pay is far less than that of a corporation, even if the work is the same.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> We've been really bad at allocating capital to people who are building important and highly influential software What does this mean? Can you give an example?
- realo 2y ago
  Well... there you go! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Sorry - I might be being a bit slow. How is that an example of poor capital allocation?
    - godelski 2y ago
      - XZ is critical software - XZ was (is?) developed by a single person - XZ developer does XZ development in their spare time, having a normal job to pay the bills - XZ developer gets overburdened. Not making money, they can't hire another dev. - Pressure builds up. Hacker leverages and takes advantage of this. Especially since everything can't be checked due to said overburden Look at it from the flip side. Take the counterfactual of if XZ Utils was making money for their work - XZ is critical software, therefore it is funded - XZ is funded and critical, so more than one developer is hired to ensure quality - XZ is funded, developers don't have a second job. They have ONE job - XZ is over burdened. XZ is funded. XZ hires more devs. It's true that a hacker can still infiltrate corporate software, but it is also true that the pressures would have been far lower were the main dev not doing 2 fucking jobs.

muscomposter 2y ago

culture works backwards from how you think it works the mystery to me is how people like yourself do not realize the scarcity your intentions lead towards

aaa_aaa 2y ago

Unlike you, many people do not care what they think, write or utter is copied or used. Also some believes intellectual property is not property. Real thieves are the ones who got phony monopoly grants to protect it.

spudlyo 2y ago
I personally hold that intellectual property isn't property, and is increasingly becoming a net negative to humanity as a whole. I see AI as an accelerant in the erosion of IP's relevance and enforceability. With AI being able to crank out derivative works at scale, it blurs the lines between infringement and transformation. The flood of such content makes enforcement increasingly impractical. While I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of creatives, and their need to eat, I feel like the pendulum has swung so far to the interests of the copyright holders and away from the needs of the public that the bargain is no longer one I support.

shpongled 2y ago

How did you learn how to program? Ever read any open source code?

EigenLord 2y ago

I see what you mean. Sometimes I intentionally divulge certain information in the hopes that I will influence the dominant LLM's outputs and thereby surreptitiously influence humanity. It's obviously a stretch but if you think about chaos theory there's a chance it might work out.

tw1984 2y ago

> Why anyone opens any software anymore is a mystery to me. Me noticed the same and concluded that most of those open source software are no longer hard core science or engineering stuff. open source is becoming more like a marketing approach for 3rd class companies to show off their reinvented wheels.

xyproto 2y ago

I want my open source projects to be used for training LLMs. An LLM is like a bundle of knowledge. I want to have a tiny bit of influence on these bundles of knowledge, since they will be used by many people for many years to come. If anyone can benefit, even just a little bit, I am for it. If not for the benefit of others, what's the main point of open source software in the first place?

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> We are witnessing the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. We did alright for millennia without it we'll be ok

treyd 2y ago

Intellectual property isn't real. It's a fiction we constructed to try to control expression in order to allow extraction of profit from ideas. We had to keep exceptions like expiration and "fair use" to make it not absurd and obviously self-contradictory. All LLMs are doing is shuffling around the roles to bring light to an underlying contradiction. Yes they are profiting off of unpaid labor, but what that actually means is the models themselves should be "property" of everyone just as the training data should be.

golergka 2y ago
> Intellectual property isn't real. It's a fiction we constructed Regardless of my opinion about IP in particular, argument "X isn't real, it's a fiction we constructed" is silly. We have "constructed" things like justice, duty, charity, mercy, and a lot of other social and moral constructs, and it's good that we did. They're also just as real as potential energy in physics: it's not a material object that you can see or touch, but it greatly affects what happens in reality.
- treyd 2y ago
  Sure, but I would argue that those are concepts that have existed for millennia and has real material grounding in reality. Whereas intellectual property is entirely a fictional construction. At its core, owning property involves the ability to use force to assert your control over it. This is completely impossible with ideas (and information more broadly) since they're non-physical, so it's not really property in the way real world property like land is. So because it's not reflective of how the material world works, that's the heart of the contradiction I alluded to in my previous comment. There is no way to resolve the problem of LLMs from within the logical framework that doesn't lead to some further counterintuitive result. There has to be legislation around it if we want to keep the charade going, or ideally we'd want to drop it altogether.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If you share enough copies of a Disney movie, lots of men with big guns will come to your house and haul you away to a locked room. I fail to see how this isn't using force to control intellectual property, nor how it's impossible.