skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it was possible to point to where the code is actually stored in Copilot (i.e. run strings on the server and it spits out the copylefted code), I would be a lot more sympathetic to the view that LLMs are stealing code. Even if you decode the weights from floats to strings, you won't find the strings of code stored anywhere. It's probably not correct to say it's "learning" from code the same way humans are, but it is "learning" from code in the way LLMs learn.

Fundamentally it seems to me that Copilot truly does synthesise code from some store of knowledge (even if it's hard to understand what this store of knowledge is), and the problem is that it's synthesising code identical to existing code. There are legal tools and also rhetoric that are designed for dealing with this problem of "synthesising something that is identical to an existing thing", and it's different tools and rhetoric from the ones we have for dealing with the problem of "stealing or copying existing things". It's valid to have an issue with with Copilot ingesting your code, but unfortunately people are largely using tools and rhetoric from the latter category to approach the issue, and that slight misapplication is causing their issues to fall on deaf ears a lot of the time.
Thanks for the thorough reply.

I think part of my point was covered by nathansherburn's sibling comment

> It sounds like you took the primary criticism in the parent comment to be about reading in general.

> I took it to mean that the best way to learn say economics is not to read one of "the top 5 recommended books on economics" but rather start by googling a specific aspect or question about economics that interests you and then following the thread.

I think my reaction was a bit vehement because it's not the first time I've encountered (albeit well intentioned) lists of "great books" on HN. In general I've grown to dislike ticking lists of things, be they books, "things to do before you die" etc. I just feel like this is too simplistic of an approach to anything in life. In my experience, the things that I learned best or the most meaningful experiences I've had were self-guided, often extemporaneous, almost always not matching neat prior expectations.

> Who’s talking about humble bragging? Wether you brag or not it’s up to you, I don’t see anything on the website encouraging you to do so.

True. This was mostly conjecture on my part as I've seen many people having neat lists of read books on their private sites/blogs (or links to goodreads etc.).

Addressing specifically the content on the website, I can say that the lists often seemed arbitrary, too granular or simply besides the point. I won't go into details, but I find all/most of the following to be confused, confusing, cutesy pop-intellectualism:

https://fivebooks.com/category/mathematics-and-science/maths...

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/artificial-intelligence-gpt... (pretty nonsensical, I assume it was made for laughs mostly)

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/learning-python-and-data-sc... (as practicing data scientist I've used none of these)

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/data-science-roger-peng/ (a random mix of things - Introduction to Statistical Learning is useful, but basic.)

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/nicholas-higham-applied-mat... (recurring theme, well exemplified here, is of books about smth, not something books. You're not gonna learn maths from these books. You're not even gonna start learning maths from these books.)

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/luciano-floridi-philosophy-... (just rando stuff. Plato, Descartes, Kant... thrown all in, because there must be smth about information somewhere there, right?)
Sourcehut. I like how they approach things there, and am happy to pay for my account to support them.
Oracle would like to have a word..
> They are not transparent

what does this mean?
> yet you refuse to cleanly argue your point.

It's not a very large point, and I believe I fleshed it enough already.

> so if large scale storage failure leading to undersupply is your worry (as you indicate elsewhere)

I don't remember mentioning that. If we work under the hypothesis that we have large scale power supply available at reasonable cost, then yes, there is no reason not to use them. Currently, pumpable hydro is the closest we have, and it's more or less capped out here.

> But again, why? Storage backed energy grids are already a reality: we were running Europe on stored Gas for much of the winter.

This is the first time I hear someone mention gas as storage, in the context of a power grid. If you forget emissions, then, I guess, why not. But if you forget emissions, 90% of the public discourse on the european power grid stops making sense. To date, I have knowledge of no large-scale environmentally viable way to produce this fuel in a renewable way.

> You insinuate (without clarifying) that markets arent working, yet we have fantastically reliable grids in Europe.

The grid was already working well before the introduction of markets. Since then, in my neck of the woods we have seen a complete failure of investment in the production side. In other countries that already had a built grid like us, renewal was only possible with heavy public subsidies.

I would welcome an explanation on what you believe markets brought to an already working grid.
Kanban and scrum are solving different problems. Kanban focuses on the flow of work through the team. Scrum is a framework with the bare essentials to deliver value to the customer. Most scrum teams use kanban to control the flow of work through their team. They're separate processes.

What the article is saying is that bad scrum is much worse than no scrum - which is so so true. But good scrum is waaaay better than no scrum. Combine it with effective Kanban (eg. controlling WIP) and you're on your way to a very productive team.
I'm not interested in Bluesky atm, but having self-seekers among the first batch of users doesn't constitute a nice PR for the platform.
Strongly, but not statically typed.
While I sympathise with the remarks, I think these arguments are wrong.
In any programming language there are only that many ways to write something. For instance, iterate over a list of items and do some processing to them.
So when someone publishes their code under GPL, suddenly millions of projects that come up with exactly the same code can be in a violation?
I get this is complex, but copyrighting code is akin to copyrighting maths formulas.
Imagine if a company selling bottled water could also copyright water. That's very much what is happening.
Just a (very late) contribution to the 'It's Gone' discussion.

Anyone with a legacy blog that is causing headaches: perhaps wget to extract the static html pages and pop them somewhere?

Archive.org is always available as a last resort of course.
I'd love to work on a "boring" stack and just ship features and build stuff but... companies are like a herd, and they all ask for the same microservices' technologies when interviewing, no matter what they are building.

So if I stay with a boring stack, I'd lose competitive advantage and face the potential of being "un-hirable" in the not-so-distant future.
Maybe the word "boring" scare some people away, but it is a good contrast to exciting new technology anyway. "Mature" would probably the more appropriate term. Many times the exciting stuff is the problem domain itself. But developers tend to be more excited about new technologies than about customer needs.
Is Scrum supposed to increase velocity? I always view these processes as a consistency enhancer. "What can we accurately promise 6 months out" vs. "how can we get the most done possible?" This is important because the big risk is that you do 80% of 10 projects, rather than 100% of 1 project, especially if you have a team and not just a couple of individuals.

Lots of stuff pushes organizations in the direction of doing 80% of 10 separate projects, and it's a killer. This is good reading in this domain: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20171213
Github was a huge step up at the time, compared to Sourceforge and Google Code and the like. Git itself helped, since checking out code from Subversion and CVS didn't give you the history, so you'd lose that if you wanted to publish your own fork.
And GitHub’s EULA gives it the right to train Copilot on public code you host on GitHub.
It may be ethical and reasonable, but that would make the license incompatible with A/GPL and a non-free license according to FSF.
Seems like propaganda to me.
"The problem is not that Copilot produces code that is "inspired" by GPL code, it's that it spits out GPL code verbatim."

But only snippets as far as I can tell.

This is the codeexample linked from the author:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221017081115/https://nitter.ne...

It is still not trivial code, but are there really lot's of different ways on how to transpose matrixes?

(Also the input was "sparse matrix transpose, cs_", so his naming convention especially included. So it is questionable if a user would get his code in this shape with a normal prompt)

And just slightly changing the code seems trivial, at what point will it be acceptable?

I just don't think spending much energy there is really beneficial for anyone.

I rather see the potential benefits of AI for open source. I haven't used Copilot, but ChatGPT4 is really helpful generating small chunks of code for me, enabling me to aim higher in my goals. So what's the big harm, if also some proprietary black box gets improved, when also all the open source devs can produce with greater efficency?
You can say anything you want in your licence, I guarantee you people will break it.

If you don't want your code public, don't make it so. Because licenses are a thing of trust and you shouldn't trust anybody.
> obesity and other sources of heat are driving up sperm temperature

That and endocrine disruptors

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319125459.h...
I am unaware of any current law that would require devices which can run software to be able to run arbitrary software.

That being said, Google's Pixel phones have widely been known for their ability to unlock the bootloader and install an Android software of the user's choice. It was one of their selling points for a long time.

If this ability is turned into a "possibility" that can be taken away at any time and if it has not been properly communicated to the customers, then it might qualify as false advertising.
> people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license

I agree with 'can', but I find 'should' a weird choice of words here.

I don't think we are better off by phrasing hyper-specific licenses (or laws).
AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are
I had a company that went from nothing to marketleader and then back to nothing; the stress made me end up in hospital several times, the last time impacted my health enough to retire at 32. It was 10 years journey so I easily can write a book about it.
I rely mostly on Obsidian with daily notes (Periodic Notes plugin), tasks and kanban boards (Kanban plugin). I also use it to track progress on my projects, record meeting notes and periodic reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly & yearly).

I've documented my process, plugins, etc and packaged it for others to quickly get started: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit
Yeah, I just threw in a few things I happened to know the specifics of from working with them in a factory. So it was just the intersection of "materials you might be familiar with" and "materials I know the specific grade for". I am extremely glad to see more materials listed, your comment is wonderful!
I think it does.

See, if a comment like that crops up on a civilised society like this, it demonstrates that the barren wastelands of “the outside world” will have similar examples.
>it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it

I thought that was a sarcastic remark, given the capitalization of 'learn', but followed by IMHO dispelled that part.

We have no idea how humans learn, and the 'AI' has a statistical approach, not much more than that.
Bluesky needs to get out of Beta or it will be dead in a month when people move on.
In Linus Torvald's book "Just For Fun", there's a chapter about copyright where he presents both the upsides and downsides of it in a pretty much balanced way. I think it's worth reading.
>We waste precious time and resourcess explaining what the name means, instead of touting the benefits to customers.

This would happen with any name that isn't a description of products, so almost every company really.
Do you happen to have a link to where the FSF said they're working on it? I would be interested to know what legal status they speculate this might have, as in, reading a more informed opinion than random comments here that mostly just assertively assume one way or another.
Well, the answers I got actually helped me, so yes, that was what I was expecting. I could’ve/should’ve asked it in a less angry way, I agree. It was early, but that is no excuse.
That's not true. Judges consider the intent. Law is not software.

I found this on Google from Cambridge: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...

> Study 4 illustrated the importance of breaking the spirit above and beyond the letter, as individuals can incur culpability when breaking the spirit of the law even without breaking the letter
Just because code exists in a copyrighted project doesn't mean that it is on the only instance of that code in the world.

In a lot of scenarios, there is an existing best practice or simply only one real 'good' way to achieve something - in those cases are we really going to say that despite the fact a human would reasonably come to the same output code, that the AI can't produce it because someone else wrote it already?
Naomi Klein's recent essay about AI^[1] suggests that the real "hallucination" problem in AI is that it's promoters are not seeing the real world clearly. Some of her points about the effect of AI rollout on human employment may be germane to the present discussion.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-mac...
Apes love moralizing and being indignant. This joker wants to share open source code and restrict what other people do with it.
That's great, but GP's argument was

> Copilot does not 'steal' or and reproduce our code - it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it.

Not "the terms of use you agreed to allow them to do it". Different argument with different amount of merit in my opinion
No disrespect but I am baffled by your statement that it learns, even to go so far as to say as a human coder would learn.

I don't really want this to comment to be perceived as flame bait (AI seems to be a very sensitive topic in the same sense as crypto currency), so instead let me just pose a simple question. If Copilot really learns as a human, then why don't we just train it on a CS curriculum instead of millions of examples of code written by humans?
While this seems focused on trading, kinda like EVE (spreadsheet MMO), I think physical action is the real attraction of 3D graphics/audio:

So I made a very scalable MMO protocol: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse

It's event based so analog movement should be compressed, which means headshot FPS are not the target audience. But it works fine with action games that take scalability into concern.

I'm curious how hard people find it to adopt. I'm guessing I need to deliver a good and open game on top of it to see adoption.
These type of problems usually are not "actionable" with big legacy apps, poor coverage, etc.
> but from my experience and observation I have noticed that Apple shills/fanboys, especially, do not really change their views.

From my experience and observation, the people who hate on specific groups are more set in their ways than the people hated on.

The preconception that someone is a shill and won’t change their mind does more harm to the conversation than what the other person believes. It is impossible to change someone’s mind if you start from the assumption that it won’t happen.

Case in point: this very thread. It seemed like the person I replied to was angry and set in their ways, but they took stock of what was said, apologised, and vowed to do better. That is a positive outcome for everyone and all it took was to not lash out in return and a belief that everyone can have a bad day.
do you know if the stack anticipated people who will claim ownership of and request removal of repositories that they do not own? it seems like complying would require github to expend a lot of effort to combat abuse.
It would almost surely be fair use to include a snippet of code from a different library in your (inline) documentation to argue that your code reimplements a bug for compatibility reasons.

In general it is not fair use if you are using the material for the same scope as the original author[0] or if you are doing it just to namedrop/quote/omage the original.

It is possible to argue that a snippet can be too small to be protected, but that would not be because of fair use.

[0] Suppose that some Author B did as above and copied a snippet of code in their docstring to exlain buggy behaviour of a library they were reimplementing. If you are then trying to reimplement B's libary you can copy the same snippet B copied, but you likely cannot copy the paragraph written by B where they explain the how and the why of the bug.
> The entire global warming system has been caused by... the sun

The entire global warming ? As in 100% of it ?

No wonder you peeps "get your funding cut" lmao

> despite the fact that H20 has even more heat trapping capabilities than CO2 does and is far far more abundant.

Guess which one is stable and which one doubled in 200 years

Oh and btw, the sun isn't getting "hotter" if anything we're getting less energy from it in the recent years: https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/2502/
This one isn’t a quirk, it’s a fundamental constraint on the kind of code that you can write in CL. C++, Rust, Go (and even Java to some extent, with all the wizardry in Hotspot) all allow you to build a 2D vector abstraction without requiring you to box your vectors. In CL you simply can’t do this. Just look at the kind of bonkers workarounds my comment gave rise to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855576
But not mine …
I mean, MS is getting sued over Copilot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33485544
Static linkage is not there only by default but it is actually the only option because Rust doesn't have a stable ABI. I personally don't consider this as an advantage and in C++ you can also statically link against the standard library if you wish to. I don't see many valid reasons to do so but the option is there.
Sometimes it's enough that it's a catchy word with a free .com or .io domain. Doesn't need to be a meaningful acronym always, think Google, Sony, Xerox, ....

I made a name generator once that tries to do that: https://catchybrand.vercel.app
TRAINING your 3rd eye/branch predictor

if(nonfree_software){

// unhappy path

}
Spitting out lines or paragraphs from a repo is most likely fair use.

Unless you can reproduce a substantial portion of a repo, I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to argue it isn’t fair use. Though I suspect Copilot’s suppression feature will make doing so impossible.
In Denmark I think it is all Ericsson. Never heard of Samsung or Amazon (???) around here.
Ignoring improvements in battery tech, look at what BYD/Tesla are doing now with packaging/production/aero/etc.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/toyota-tesla-model-y-work-of-a...

Most auto production is optimized for ICEs. Even 20+ years ago, Toyota's engineers knew there was plenty to do in the EV space.

https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...

The problem was/is that optimizing EVs will undercut ICE sales, so Toyota just ignored what their engineers said for decades to maintain the status quo and, like most legacy auto manufacturers, fell behind newcomers in the EV space.
>> Is this a legal document?

>> No, it isn’t.

My limited understanding of international copyright law is that copyright disclaimers/licenses per Berne Convention are documents stating the author's wishes no different than this one. When a judge is going to be shown this page where the author states his explicit wish to not have his code uploaded code on Github, in direct conflict with his wishes stated in the LICENSE.txt file, I don't see how it will hold up in court as free software code.
Accessibility for designer: where do I start?
While this is absolutely true, and it should never have been implemented this way, I have been following the topic very closely and have not come across a single report of a flaming PinePhone in over three years. With five-digit numbers of PinePhone's out there in the hands of people who don't know what they are doing, this IMHO thus is fortunately mostly a theoretical issue.

BTW: PINE64 did better on the PinePhone Pro, and (since it's also going to be Rockchip (RK3566) based in all likelihood) is unlikely to replicate the mistake on the PinePhone 2.
Cambridge dictionary has it as: "knowledge or a piece of information obtained by study or experience".

If I scanned a thousand polaroid pictures, and took their average RGB values and created a LUT that I could apply to any photograph to make it look "polaroidy" - would that be learned? Or the application of a statistical inference model? This alone is probably far enough abstracted to never be an ethical or legal issue. However, if I had a model that was only "trained" on Stephen King books, and used it to write a novel, would that be OK? Or do you think it would be in the realm of copyright infringement?

By your definition anything a computer does means it has learned it. If I copy and paste a picture, has the computer "learned" it while it reads out the data byte-by-byte? That sure sounds like it is "studying" the picture.

"AI" and "ML" are just statistics powered by computers that can do billions of calculations per second. It is not special, it is not "learning". To portray some value to it as something else is disingenuous at best, and fraud at worst.
> Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument.

I disagree here. The idea, intent, philosophy is one (crucial) thing, the resulting practical artefact (here the license) is another. It works exactly as it was designed to work.

People/companies modifying GPL software for their own use (internal or external) without redistributing the software itself (so without requirement to redistribute the code) existed before SAAS grew on, only at the time, the small scale of this made it a bargain that was "interesting" only depending on one's capacity/hubris to maintain an internal fork on their own.

*aaS hugely tipped the scale, and the side effects, but the mechanics are the same.

And yes, that may not have been the original intent, and the AGPL is as valid a license as a reaction to provide a new tool more in line with the original intent, but that doesn't make the use of the existing GPL all within what it actually enables anyone to, invalid or unethical.

(but maybe only in a specific perspective of the framework of the original intent)
Well, that's the exact reason why they wrote this page: to explain to people why they think GitHub is unethical, and maybe convince them. It's the same as calls to boycott various other companies: they haven't necessarily done anything illegal, but if you convince enough people not to use their products/services anymore, you might make an impact...
Closed source code is beige corp-speak, its true name is 'malware'.
The author really doesn't have to convince anyone, "please don't do $X" is more than enough to state their wish for you not to do $X.
The Stack's removal request form is currently processed manually.
But it does though. There have been many times where this was the case.