[kstenerud]

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years.

Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.

[kuschku]

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

We've always been able to do that, but that's not the point. There's a reason free software licenses require the "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" to be opened.

One of the core tenets is that any user should have the exact same access as the original developers.

[mmustapic]

But I can't have the weights of the LLM model I'm using for this.

[satvikpendem]

Open weight models exist.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

Jesus christ.

"The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentially whatver they want for lockpicks or how they got accesss to everyones keyfob, or the danger of someone breaking into your house"

That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...

The open source community wants people to upskill, people become tech literate, free solutions that grow organically out of people who care, features the community needs and wants and people having the freedom to modify that code to solve their own circumstances.

[Supermancho]

> That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...

Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.

How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrelevant. A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open, for better or worse. Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.

[simoncion]

> It's already happened.

Agreed.

> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument.

As you mentioned, it's not an abstract argument. It's statements of fact.

> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open...

No, not at all.

1) If you honestly believe that major tech companies will permit both copyright- and license-washing of their most important proprietary code simply because someone ran it through an LLM, you're quite the fool. If someone "trained" an LLM on -say- both Windows 11 and ReactOS, and then used that to produce "ReactDoze" while being honest about how it was produced, Microsoft would permanently nail them to the wall.

2) The LLMs that were trained on the entirety of The Internet are very, very much not open. If "Open"AI and Anthropic were making available the input data, the programs and procedures used to process that data, and all the other software, input data, and procedures required to reproduce their work, then one could reasonably entertain the claim that the system produced was open.

[kstenerud]

This is looking at the current situation through the old lens.

That ship has sailed. The revolution is happening. We live in a new reality now, one where we're still trying to figure out what rules should even be.

And there will be winners and losers, and copyright and patent law will be modified in an attempt to tame the chaos, with mixed results because of all of the powerful players on both ends.

You can live on the front of it for high risk/reward, or at the back for safety. But either way, you're going to exist in this new reality and you need to decide your risk appetite.

[simoncion]

Your set of statements and their surrounding context reminds me very much of the mass grave scene in Kubrick's Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670Y3ehmU74>

[kstenerud]

I'm not sure why it would. Kubrick was criticizing the false morality of the entire adventure, mixed with common bureaucratic fuckups in an unaccountable environment, with tragic results.

I'm talking about a change brought on by a new technology, where the market (i.e. all of us collectively) push it forward, like the internet revolution and subsequent consolidation. Good shit happens. Bad shit happens. People get rich, people get poor, people get left behind. You can argue the moral implications, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle, just like you couldn't snuff out the industrial revolution. So at some point you have to decide: Where will I fit in all of this?

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.

yes and lockpicks also exist. Promotting the ability to break into homes when people are talking about the housing crisis is a crazy, short sighted and frankly embarrasing position to take.

And mischaracterising the people in the open source community as belonging to that ideology is insulting.

> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open

You are missusing the word open here, for accesible. Having an open house, and breaking into someone's home are not the same thing, even if the door ends up open either way.

> Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.

Taking unethical shortcuts that ultimately lead to an even worse outcome is not a cause of chagrin, its a cause of deep and utter terror and embarrasment.

Wanting people to own their skills and tech stack and be informed, smart and engaged is a goal that "just ask the robot you dont control to break into a corporate codebase and copy it" is not even remotely close to helping get close to.

[satvikpendem]

This argument commits the same fallacy as the argument against piracy; copying is not stealing, because the original still remains. A lockpicked and squatted house means someone else does not have that house, it's a zero sum game which information which is freely copyable does not align with.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

That only works if you assume that the exclusive value is in the object and not the labour.

The reproduction of the object is essentially free in the internet, but the labour to produce it isn't.

If I spent 3 years making my codebase, and you copy paste the git repo, yeah your access to the information is not going to replace the original. But your labour cost is 0 and you can undercut the 3 years of expense, loans or debt I adquired to produce it.

Btw the FBI murdered Aaron Swartz for attempting to open access to research papers, Mark Zuckemberg admitted to stealing those ssame papers through libgen and showed off the results of Llama and his stock price went up.

I think the piracy argument falls apart when the class warfare and 2 tier justce system is openly weaponised towards open access

[satvikpendem]

Labor doesn't have value inherently, it's about what is produced by said labor. These days even the labor to create something falls to zero via LLMs so I'm not sure the point is valid these days.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Labor doesn't have value inherently

Almost nothing does. Value is largely subjective. You deciding it is irrelevant to you is as inherently worthless as the marxist ideal that labour is the maximal value of society.

The non subjective opinion is that there is a necesary amount of work/energy requiered to create things and that the created things can be consumed/used by others.

LLMs do not reduce labor to 0, the energy to power the GPU, the labor to create the gpus, the labor to train the models is all there, as well as all the labor to produce the original material the LLM is trained on. Even if the subjective experience of someone consuming the created thing is the same.

[joquarky]

If you're worried about theft, then make backups.

Code isn't like a house, you can just copy it and put the copy somewhere safe.

[doctorwho42]

Reengineering from scratch is different than being able to form an existing software.