And people would rather demand change just because they say so, versus changing any of the incentives involved.

We could just make these companies share their scans. Then it would only affect one (1) copy of every published work. There are no ongoing commercial concerns for a book that’s been out-of-print for thirty years.

Copywriting means you work in advertising. Copyright is a different thing.

Commercial parody is commonplace fair use. If it surpasses the original… oh well.

The amount being used becomes negligible as the corpus grows. Filtering a billion webpages into one gigabyte means their average contribution is one byte. Play with the numbers all you like, it’s gonna come out to less than a paragraph.

If we went full copyright maximalist, and criminally banned using anything but public-domain / BSD / CC0 works, the commercial impact would not be much different. The technology itself shifts the economics of text, images, video, and code.

Quoting one sentence from a book is fair use even if you shoplifted that book.

Genuinely surprised it’s even opt-out.

These companies train on Disney DVDs. Permission is not a factor. Training is transformative use, as much for counting letter frequency as for building a chatbot that can sort of code.

You’ll take my code and have a nice life or so help me!

Admiral Patrick being a crank again. Same guy one-strike permabanned oodles of people for voting wrong on comments about some prick getting shot.

His instance is proudly named after West Virginia. Y’know, the cantankerous gun-toting hillbillies who fought the rest of Virginia to end slavery and fought the army to unionize miners. But we can’t go discussing any extremist solutions to societal problems.

Cutting-edge JS is for boring stuff anyway. We’ve gone from formalizing the best bits of jQuery to ‘click thing to make box appear.’ So you’re only avoiding tutorial-ass boilerplate, and quite frankly, boo hoo.

Meanwhile CSS is still in the “Jesus Christ why wasn’t it like this to begin with” phase of feature adoption.

“Okay, that was always an option.”

Gradual adoption is fine. It’s so much better than seeing StackOverflow answers from like 2013, and knowing not a goddamn one of them works anymore. It’s massively better than having to write separate code for IE and Netscape.

“How do I?” is a question. “How to” is an explanation.

Compare XKCD.

Oopsie.

Prelude.

Downvoters have absolutely fucking nothing to say, but sure are mad about something they can’t defend.

Not sure whether you’re being sarcastic here

Jesus.

“Name a publicly traded company that generated significant profit as a result of buying llm services from a provider.”

This at least is just a problem of relevance. Utility is not measured in money - especially for open-source non-profits like Zig - and people selling shovels and promises are obviously not the best place to look for success stories in mineral rights.

But I’ve seen several Youtube channels hand-wave complicated software for devices they’ve just built from scratch.

And several copyleft projects are caught in philosophical arguments against permissive rewrites with completely different code, structure, and/or programming language.

And a few ultra-niche projects simply typed “rewrite this in Rust” for an order-of-magnitude speed boost.

The kneejerk insistence that LLMs are never useful is wishful thinking. It’s less defensible than equally glib promises of institutional value, because even some of the people loudly distancing themselves do so because it worked. ‘I didn’t recognize my own codebase!’ Yeah, because you didn’t write it. The chatbot did. It’s not Inception-ing the experience of making it yourself; it’s inventing exactly the Github dead-end you’d like to find.

The linked Asimov story is only dimly related. You’d expect a culture relying on other minds, kept simple, somewhere between Brave New World and HG Wells’s Eloi. But it’s about the method of learning, not capacity or demonstrated ability. Like Bowie: “the fingerprints will prove that you couldn’t pass the test.” Your typical mid-century sci-fi civilization where The Committee has dictated how everything works, and obvious criticisms could be resolved by doing things very slightly differently.

The twist is even less relevant, because it treats originality as some vanishingly rare thing that must be tricked out of people. Hard left turn into YA protagonist syndrome. Even though the main character just got done describing the simplicity of learning incremental improvements.

Meanwhile the reality of LLM programming is, here’s an idiot robot that will do its best for literally anything you ask… and you are expected to spot where it has fucked up. The only way it’s better than letting project leaders run it themselves is if you are putting in the effort to babysit and second-guess the chatbot.

Thinkin’ about LLMs? That’s a paddlin’.

Same reason as before this policy: they care about the project itself.

If you don’t view these tools as the devil, of course you might roll your eyes and say, that’s nice, anyway, here’s an improvement.

A nice low bar, set fairly and in good faith.