7 ms·
Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler
- turtleyacht 4mo agoIt was nice hearing about it. If this is a healthy direction for the project, then so be it. At least source to previous versions is still available.
- kator 4mo ago> Yet, this shift made me re-evaluate the open source code publishing. Prior to that, I have been positive about free and open software, and considered this to be the default mode for work such as kefir. I did not require any justifications from myself to publish something. Now, however, I feel more and more that the main beneficiaries of my unpaid work are companies scraping the internet to train large language models. Currently accepted status quo in this area goes against my own intentions in licensing this work under GNU GPLv3. Publication has ceased to be the "null hypothesis" for me, and requires explicit mental justification which I am not able to provide. I feel this pain, one of my small donation driven sites has been destroyed by crawlers who just ignore robots.txt and burn the site into the ground. Sort of jokingly I proposed an update to the "spam fax" law: https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/ https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
- jagged-chisel 4mo ago> The sender pays, not the receiver. You have a hole here. Your web server is sending the response and the bot is receiving. Fix that and … profit? :-)
- malwrar 4mo agoReally hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.
- irdc 4mo agoHere is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all.
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoGreat. More work for AI then.
- egypturnash 4mo agoPeople who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.
- irdc 4mo agoWithout any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?
- egypturnash 4mo agoI personally am sharing stuff because I want people to read my comics, and maybe join my crowdfunding campaigns. If I could put everyone pushing all this AI crap into a meat grinder, I would.
- 4mo ago
- account42 4mo agoThis is essentially the digital world transforming from a high trust society into a low trust one. Sad to see.
- Gormo 4mo agoTo whom would you attribute the greater part of that reduction in trust: the people using FOSS to train LLMs, or the people trying to block them?
- Xirdus 4mo agoPeople who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.
- dlev_pika 4mo ago“No, no, what was she wearing?”
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Xirdus 4mo agoPeople who take steps in response to social contract being broken are the ones responsible for the steps they've taken, not the ones who break the social contract.
- Gormo 4mo agoSo the questions here are (a) is any generally accepted social contract actually being broken, and (b) if so, who are the ones who are breaking it?
- boothby 4mo agoYes, and obviously: bots crushing servers in strict contravention of the robots.txt rules.
- garaetjjte 4mo agoIncredibly rich to complain about LLM scraping with LLM generated article.
- neoparker 4mo ago[flagged]
- neoparker 4mo ago[flagged]
- Max-Ganz-II 4mo agoI put my site behind a username/password wall, to block LLM bots.
- krystalgamer 4mo agosame, not worth getting 100GB of content getting scrapped every other day.
- Xirdus 4mo agoSpambots learned to autoregister 30 years ago. Do LLMs not do that? Crazy.
- Max-Ganz-II 4mo agoUser has to email me for access.
- Xirdus 4mo agoSo that's less of username/password wall and more of manually vetting every reader wall?
- Max-Ganz-II 4mo agoYes, you're right. Works as current readership is very small, about 20 or 30 people.
- rgoulter 4mo agoSeems to me LLMs have changed some things. I'm not sure how it's best put, but it used to be: - Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to. - There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into. With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where thought didn't go into it. So, seeing some result isn't an indication of skill, but also not even an indication thought went into it. I guess there's still something lost if someone isn't going to share code they've put thought into. -- But on the other hand, if it's just for me & I don't have to share it with a wider audience, getting LLMs to write out code isn't so expensive.. so code itself isn't necessarily something to value so much.
- irdc 4mo agoBut LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative. So what happens in 10 years? Are we headed for a great stagnation?
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoIt’s like arguing that nobody is going to invent new ways to ride horses in the age to automobile.
- irdc 4mo agoIf the way humanity advances were via new ways to ride horses, then yes.
- asibahi 4mo agoYou made me curious. Has anyone invented new ways to ride horses in the age of the automobile?
- VladVladikoff 4mo agoBest I could find: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1174605 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1174605 There was a relatively big shift in riding style right around the same time of the first mass production of vehicles.
- altmanaltman 4mo agoWhat a well-rounded nicely written announcement that touches on all parts of the argument without any rage baiting or flex etc. It would be easy to just ramble against AI and how its the end of the world etc but the author focused on a point that's not even related to use or misue of AI in software but rather how we have made it acceptable that large corporate companies can skirt copyright without any issue and make rivers of money with it. This problem extends not only to coding but other industries as well.
- snarfy 4mo agoInstead of a derivative work we have a machine that creates derivative works. I fail to see how this is fair use.
- bjourne 4mo agoPeople taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoThere's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP. I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet. And the AI IP that makes that possible is still enclosed rather than open.
- fragmede 4mo ago> But we're not quite there yet. Judging from the number of projects I've seen from people who aren't software developers, we're there enough.
- nine_k 4mo agoDon't open-weight models sort of returning the favor?
- Gormo 4mo ago> There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP. Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly? Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?
- bjourne 4mo agoSure, Free Software hasn't been the vehicle for societal change that RMS and others certainly hoped. I remember being flamed out in a user group for suggesting that our conference shouldn't be held in a "non-free" country such as Morocco, Turkey, or China because it's counter-productive to freedom. Very few people actually got it. But it's orthogonal to LLM trainers also using free software in "non-approved" ways.
- jdw64 4mo ago[dead]
- binaryturtle 4mo agoI'm also very hesitant to release any new works (code, artworks, etc.) to the public. I usually release code under the GPL or AGPL, but I don't think any of those choices are properly respected by the AI crawlers, and subsequent "mixing into" those models. Multiple times I got partially broken "citations" of GPL licensed code out of the models as answers to basic research questions (aka prompts) w/o any mentioning of the original license applied to the code. Just adding some random bugs every 10th line doesn't make it not a direct derivate. Image generators happily generated Sonics or Bart Simpsons (w/o directly prompting for that either). No mentions that those are copyrighted characters either.
- Lerc 4mo agoI have gone the other way, I used to release things under MIT licence, but have switched to public domain or unlicenced. I mostly make things because I felt they should be made. I am fine with what I produce being used by others provided they don't take it away from anyone else. I was never very happy with the selfishness of the GPL, which is why I tended to prefer MIT, but the stances taken by people in recent years made me realise that nobody owns ideas, and even attribution is commoditised. I am ok with voluntary attribution so that it may be used as a means to confirm additional information. I don't like the idea that if I think of something, someone else is not allowed to think about it without my permission. Citation farming is a problem that happened because the value of the idea was placed on the names attached to it. That generated motivation to attach names to ideas as a way to gain power or prestige. To take credit for someone else's idea can only occur is because people have put the credit value onto the person and not the idea. Many of those names are of no use when it comes to verifying if the idea is sound, it's creating a denial of service attack on the ability to validate. I understand the realities of commerce and academia that put these things in place, and how those who work within those frameworks have to do so in a way that is compatible with them. I don't like it though, I think it makes the world less informed and less free. I don't have to create under those frameworks myself, so I made the decision to make any idea I have to not be bound to my will or identity.
- rurban 4mo agoOne of the very few small compilers which passes the full gcc torture tests. But for me kefir is good enough as the reference small compiler. Not as fast as tcc, but more correct
- paufernandez 4mo agoI've been taking a look at the source and it's a work of art :O
- RetroTechie 4mo agoSo how big is the community around this project? If a one-person show, closing it up would effectively kill it? Or (re?)turn it into a hobby project developed at snail pace. If some community exists: fork coming up?
- tocariimaa 4mo agoOne person show. Effectively, it is dead since now it became the proprietary toy of its author. The author is entitled to do what he wants with his own creation, however.
- keyle 4mo agoThis project in particular has been unconcerned with new coding practices so far, primarily, because I derive pleasure from hand-written implementations of my ideas, and believe that overcoming challenges the hard way is the main value I get from it. This 100% the same for me. Outside of work where speed is more important than quality, and I work with people that use AI, I don't use AI at all on my own projects. It poisons the mind and the soul. Ok that sounds dramatic, but I felt down up until the point where I started hand writing everything again. Software engineering is still fun and powerful, and the hell with where the world is going.
- 34aSHGAS 4mo ago[flagged]
- ryanshrott 4mo agoThe gcc torture tests are no joke. I skimmed them once thinking I’d write a toy C compiler. Thousands of test cases covering edge cases I’d never even thought about. Respect to anyone who gets through the full suite.
- genxy 4mo agoSurprised no one has yet linked to the source https://sr.ht/~jprotopopov/kefir/ https://sr.ht/~jprotopopov/kefir/
- fithisux 4mo agoSame situation some time ago with Solar assembler
- kazinator 4mo agoI'm finding it hard to be motivated to continue on language dev work. I feel it may also have to do with AI. Not so much the predatory aspect of it, like this author, but something else: shall we say, certain revelations about the nature of the target audience.
- Rochus 4mo agoI have many GPL projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron) and spend a significant amount of time in them. GPL has always explicitly permitted commercial use; that's a feature, not a bug, dating back to Stallman's original vision. Any person or company can use my code (or Kefir code) under the terms of the GPL, as I use code given away by companies under GPL or even more liberal licences for free. That's the deal. GPL is a license explicitly designed to maximize use, so it doesn't make sense to object to a specific form of use. The claim that AI companies are somehow violating GPL by training on GPL code is legally baseless (I studied law here in Switzerland and had lectures about international IP law); also the FSF itself has not claimed otherwise; even if it were prohibited, it would be a copyright enforcement problem, and not a reason to stop publishing. I don't know Kefir, but it looks like a great (even optimizing) compiler. So it's really a pitty that its development is no longer open source.
- ergonaught 4mo agoThe GPL, unlike the BSD and such, intends to prevent the closing of distributed derivative works. LLMs trained on GPL code can produce derivative works without any enforcement mechanism. You may be fine with that, but the GPL is not a public domain license, and LLM training treats all things as if they were public domain.
- Rochus 4mo ago> LLMs trained on GPL code can produce derivative works This confuses two completely separate things. GPL governs distribution of derivative works. An LLM trained on GPL code does not distribute that code. The model weights are not a copy, a derivative, or a distribution of the training data in any legally recognizable sense; "influenced by" is not "derived from". The enforcement argument is a non sequitur; the GPL has never had a technical enforcement mechanism; it's always been legally enforced after the fact by copyright holders who discover violations. So if the LLM would indeed produce output sufficiently similar to my code and someone would publish it in violation of GPL, I have the same legal means to enforce my rights as if the code was copied by a human.
- sneak 4mo ago> I also do not want my future work to be exploited for naught in commercial purposes. Other people using your code to enrich their lives or businesses doesn't exploit you in any way, as it doesn't cost you a thing. This is irrational.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoAlso irrational because just as others benefit from his code, he benefits from theirs. LLMs fulfill the promise of Open Source, they don't violate it. As long as they are universally available, that is. That's the part people should be concerned about.
- nianderwallace 4mo agoPeople in other professions are jumping on this bandwagon - Tony Gilroy decided not to publish Andor TV show scripts to prevent AI companies using them for training. see https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/andor-creator-refuses-publish-scripts-ai-fears-1236339283/ https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/andor-creator-refuses-publi...