Interesting. Yeah I did think maybe this could be solved by more tooling. But at my place it work it isn’t, at least at the moment. Perhaps I could change that.
Do you have any info on what I could use to make the command-line “git diff” and “git rebase” handle this style of formatting? Ideally so the latter merges and produces code which matches “gofmt” output?
On the other hand I suppose my point is that even if there were such tooling, using style of formatting doesn’t offer enough (any?) benefit to justify the effort of introducing the tooling.
I am truly, both as a being and having a manager, at loss as to how a manager would ask that, and would get such an answer… what is the rationale and the expectation?
The ethical framework is simply this one: what is the worth of doing +1 to everyone, if the very thing you wish didn't exist (because you believe it is destroying the world) benefits x10 more from it?
If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.
I don't think that a 10x estimate is credible. If it was I'd understand the ethical argument being made here, but I'm confident that excluding one person's open source code from training has an infinitesimally small impact on the abilities of the resulting model.
For your fire example, there's a difference between being Prometheus teaching humans to use fire compared to being a random villager who adds a twig to an existing campfire. I'd say the open source contributions example here is more the latter than the former.
The ethical issue is consent and normalisation: asking individuals to donate to a system they believe is undermining their livelihood and the commons they depend on, while the amplified value is captured somewhere else.
"It barely changes the model" is an engineering claim. It does not imply "therefore it may be taken without consent or compensation" (an ethical claim) nor "there it has no meaningful impact on the contributor or their community" (moral claim).
Your argument applies to everything that requires a mass movement to change. Why do anything about the climate? Why do anything about civil rights? Why do anything about poverty? Why try to make any change? I'm just one person. Anything I could do couldn't possibly have any effect. You know what, since all the powerful interests say it's good, it's a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon and act like it is. All of those people who disagree are just luddites anyways. And the luddites didn't even have a point right? They were just idiots who hates metallic devices for no reason at all.
GenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).
The problem is the way this is written and formulated, these red flags "this thing has been thought and written extensively with an LLM" make the whole (rather compelling at first consideration but hollow-feeling when thinking more about it) thesis not very enticing.
Saying #1 and #2 are not possible or not likely is not a good take, in a world where our digital accounts take more and more a central place in our daily lives. It may work for autocratic societies, it won't cut it for democratic ones: imagine if our legal systems were that irresponsible to us collectively and individually?
Why not introduce friction on both sides, like: 1/ just face to face, physical meeting? 2/ or a basic (paid, yet reasonable) insurance that account management doesn't happen over the shoulder?
The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping.
I do wonder who the AI era's version of Marx will be, what their version of the Communist Manifesto will say. IIRC, previous times this has been said this on HN, someone pointed out Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.
* Policing and some pensions and democracy did exist in various fashions before the industrial revolution, but few today would recognise their earlier forms as good enough to deserve those names today.
"You bet your ass we're all alike... We've been spoon fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... The bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert."
I think some companies are making a mistake laying off employees who don't use it; because it's more important that employees have autonomy to choose the right tool for the job.
The mistake is pushing it too aggressively, instead of judging on the result of the job itself.
It wouldn't fit most of the current LLM cloud providers narrative about privacy and copyright either, so, not sure they would be as cooperative with a prosecutor as they are today with lawmakers and right holders.
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