My partner is a teacher, as well.

it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand

Yes, but this is a symptom of structural problems with our school system. Looking at phones didn’t make kids hate school. Hating school made kids want to look at their phones.

Schools have been shifting from places of learning, which requires exploration, to places of compliance and regurgitation. And it’s not just about the shift towards obedience-based, rote memorization in service of standardized testing (or how schools care about attendance only for funding reasons), we’ve even shifted the literal architectural design philosophy behind how we construct school buildings to be more prison-like.

The pandemic lockdown was horrible for kids, but the rush to reopen schools wasn’t about the negative impact it was having on their social development, it was about serving business interests who wanted their parent-employees back at work. They wanted the childrens’ holding cells reopened.

When we actually start shifting schools back towards environments of learning, at a structural level, I will have sympathy for the mission of education over sympathy for the disinterested inmates students.

I’d rather make a benign Linux distro feel like a windows version I like, than papering over a hostile Win11.

This should have been obvious. Why would you only be able to bully someone digitally in the time you’re in the school building? I was in high school when cell phones were first coming out, so I remember school before and during phones, and kids always could and would ignore class if they wanted to. This feels like an attempt to divert blame from school systems not being reactive to generational learning differences and needs. There are reasons to ban phones in schools, but if you think that doing so is going to prevent bullying or ignoring class, methinks you don’t remember pre-phone school.

I’ve been playing since Ice Age. I remember this same argument back when Kamigawa first came out, because it was obvious pandering to anime fans, but frankly the early Kamigawa series were great sets, and that really changed my view on expanding the lore of magic. Do I wish you still saw Kavu decks? Yeah, sometimes that nostalgia is there, but I also enjoy a random Bilbo Baggins popping up.

Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider?

They’re absolutely shipping all your local data up to their cloud.

Besides, as far as I’m concerned, strong anti-AI sentiment does actually help temper the harms of the tech and its owners.

My worry is that much like gun control legislation, I see our neoliberal fear-based media pushing AI use by individuals as the “real danger”, and will only end up funneling anti-AI sentiment into 1) limiting actual open AI access (e.g. open-weight, FOSS models) by individuals, and 2) legitimizing governmental and corporate use of AI as the only “safe” and “legitimate” AI usage.

The ratio of “government-controlled AI is literally being used to kill people right now” awareness out there, versus e.g. awareness of deepfakes, is astoundingly unbalanced. Both are real dangers, but only one is getting legislation passed on it, and once again it’s not the one that would put limits on corporations and government.

Stoking fear is not useful if your opponents are the ones who will actually utilize that fear to their own ends successfully.

I think that “stop being mad the hammer exists, start being mad at the group of people who are beating your face in” is a very important message. Getting rid of AI (which isn’t even something we can do; you can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this) won’t fix the issue, they’ll just make another hammer. The hammer is both a weapon in this case, and a distraction.

AI is non-deterministic, sure

This is incorrect. They are in fact completely deterministic. Studies have proven that when all inputs, weights, and precision values like temperature are static, they produce the exact same token sequences (outputs). The appearance of non-determinism is a result of pseudo-randomized (another thing which is deterministic but appears otherwise) values and user ignorance (in the technical sense, not the value-judgement sense). In fact, the process of ‘tuning’ LLMs is heavily focused on adjusting input values to surface preferred outputs, which would not work in a non-deterministic system.

When I type “ls” I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not going to get “rm” style results.

Yes, but we don’t trust humans not to rm what they shouldn’t either, which is why the --no-preserve-root flag exists. ls is not supposed to perform write actions. Agentic LLMs are. And just like you wouldn’t build and test on your production server in case the code you execute has an unexpected adverse effect, you shouldn’t be running LLM agents in a location or way that the actions it performs has an unexpected adverse effect either. The genre of jokes about a new employee bringing down Prod or deleting source code is older than most people (which to be fair, given that the median age is 31, is true for a lot of things).

LLMs are just a class of software. They’re not good or bad any more than a hammer is good or bad (and can also be used to build or to destroy).

The problem isn’t LLMs, it’s the entities who control the most powerful ones (corporations and governments), and what those entities are doing with them; using them as weapons against us, rather than as tools to aid us.

As usual, politicians trying to use children and fear as a wedge to get people to accept government surveillance and control.

Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.

As the article concludes:

Valve Corporation didn’t win by locking people in. It won by making sure they never really wanted to leave.

itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they first emerged right after Desura collapsed in 2013, and everyone moved their indie titles there, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.

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It’s more that compositors (picom, xcompmgr) and window managers are extremely complex, and adding that feature in could have much larger impacts than just the functionality itself, e.g. security context implications, task scheduling, rendering pipeline issues, etc. Wayland actually combines the compositor and WM, so it’s more readily extensible than X11.

State-level bills have heretofore only required OSes to ask a user if they are of majority age. A federal bill is likely (based on the groups backing and who proposed it) to require OSes to validate (i.e. have users prove, not just assert) their ages.

Depending on what mechanisms are mandated, and who they target punishment at, it could lock 99% of users (who are not willing or capable to use means to bypass this) into tying all their actions online to a government-run database.

It’s not enough that means to bypass it exist; the government shouldn’t be able to mandate this kind of control, and shouldn’t be propagating the expectation that this behavior and level of control is normal or acceptable.

“Power isn’t given, it’s taken.” - Malcolm xAI

This is something I see my partner’s high school students having to deal with now: the suspicion that competence or intelligence must indicate AI use. It feels like when dumb film writers or directors make non-MC character unbelievably dumb to make the MC look smart (cough BBC Sherlock cough), but applied to real life.

I think the assumption is that buy-to-play MMOs tend to be less microservice-based or ‘cloud native’ than subscription ones, such that they are more likely to already feature a monolithic server application. They’re probably thinking games like ARK: SE, and DayZ, rather than Guild Wars. In reality, some sub-based MMOs have monolithic servers (e.g. Mabinogi), and some buy-to-own MMOs have distributed architectures.

This was probably also an easier sell to politicians, by saying, “hey, they said they sold the whole game for that price, so why can they not deliver the whole game, server included?” With a subscription, it becomes harder from a business ‘rights’ perspective to argue that a player who paid for e.g. 1 month of a subscription immediately before the game is retired should be allowed to then own and operate the full game indefinitely, and then becomes a sort of, “how long paying the sub is long enough to ‘own’ the game?” debate. This is especially important because it could impact a lot of non-game software as well, so politicians are much more likely to quash this out of fear of backlash. So they may just be picking their battles.

WRT market impact, I am sure the shittier companies would use the exemption as a loophole, and just make all their multiplayer games subscription-based. I doubt it will encourage more buy-to-own MMOs in the future as well, but I think SKG cares more about the extant software people paid for already, than the market impact.

If you are saying that you are making long comments without reading the post

I didn’t say that. I read the post, but did not click through to the other post from December to realize it was part of a pattern.

I’m not really interested in getting into an argument around license choice

That’s fine, you are not beholden to respond to me.

Unfortunately, yes.

Facebook v Power Ventures is probably the strongest anti-scraping ruling, because it held that a simple CAPTCHA is sufficient to qualify as “bypassing technical measures” so as to qualify as hacking under CFAA.

YouTube has a number of technical controls to prevent downloading, and it’s always been considered iffy to mass-download YT vids because all the downloader tools (usually) incorporate some kind of means to bypass their protection schemes.

Perhaps you should have titled the post “AI Code Hollowing Out Copyleft Ecosystem”, then, unless you’re intentionally trying to conflate Open Source with Copyleft (you are, based on your other blog posts). But I remember seeing your post about the “social contract” of OSS last December, and you are in fact exactly who my comment is about:

Copyleft is a reactionary movement from people who turned into the beast they hated in trying to fight it. “Permissive” licenses are FOSS. Copyleft is certainly maybe OSS, but it’s not “Free” (as in either “libre” or “gratis”) if some other person can mandate both that you do something, and what you do. If usage of something is contingent on payment (including payment via feel-good attribution), it’s not free.

I’ll add here: FOSS is also not about some one-sided “covenant” where a creator believes the users of said freely-given software owe them something (money, gratitude, or even just ‘reciprocity’ and attribution). If you’re in OSS for the fuzzy feeling you get when someone forks your repo, or the conviction that OSS contribs are intrinsically good in some nebulous way, it’s no wonder you’re hung up on seeing a transactional return on your labor instead of just knowing it’s out there maybe helping someone, somewhere.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

Open source != copyrighted. Public domain source code is also open source.

I hate this trend I see of the FOSS movement retreating from the foundational principle that it started on: Free Sharing of Software.

Not shareware, not ‘libre but not gratis’, not ‘buy me a coffee to get access to the code on my patreon’, not ‘free to look at but not to use as source code’: free period. Libre and gratis.

These non-lawyers traipsing in to make claims about the effect of AI on open source licensing are giving me big “I release my code but only if I can 1) get paid for it and 2) control who and how it’s used” vibes. That’s what’s ‘hollowing-out’ open source.

value leaks out of the project

What value? Value to whom? The value of source code is what it does, i.e. the program it compiles or is interpreted into. That doesn’t change by someone else using it differently than you. Google taking Linux and spinning off Android doesn’t “hurt” Linux. It doesn’t decrease the ‘value’. There’s no universal counter out there that says, “this GPLv2 attribution appears more than someone else’s, so therefore this project is more valuable”, that is being eroded if a company goes and uses it without reprinting the license notice as well. OSS licenses have never prevented that.

I said it before the last time FOSS came up, and I’ll say it again:

FOSS is about propagating software to as many people as possible, to help as many people as possible. It’s not about creating legal barriers to diminish the power of corporations; making tools available to people that are better and cheaper will do that naturally (and you were never going to beat the corpo lawyers anyways trying to enforce licenses).

If your zeal to prevent corporations from ever misusing FOSS leads you to remove some aspect of it (free, open, or source), then you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face.