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by margalabargala 46 days ago
> but that's not true freedom, that's anarchy

Will an LLM drop capitals and write all lowercase if you ask it to or does it require postprocessing?

The writing style reminds me of the people in college who would fake an English accent.

Addressing the actual comment, "it's anarchy not freedom" isn't really meaningful when talking about software modification instead of societal governance. Why is "anarchy" of home software modification a bad thing?
1 comments
em-bee 46 days ago
what are you implying here? take a look at my posting history. i have been writing like this since before LLMs existed. also i am not an english native, but i lived in various english speaking countries with very diverse accents for many years as well as using english as the main language for more than two decades. that's bound to create a weird mixture of accents, especially for a non-native speaker who doesn't have the grounding of a native accent. but even in my native language i grew up in areas with very different accents or dialects, so that i don't even have a native accent in my own language.

Why is "anarchy" of home software modification a bad thing?

because anarchy allows everyone to do hat they want, which means it does not offer protection for people who can't protect themselves.

the point of the GPL is to protect the user, to prevent the developer from locking the user in, it is not to give freedom to the developer. BSD/MIT licenses don't have that protection. no protection for the user equals anarchy to me.

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margalabargala 46 days ago
> LLM

> GPL

> BSD/MIT

Aha, your shift key does work! Now that you've found it we can work on using it when sentences start.

I find your anarchy analogy unconvincing. It seems like you're conflating the existence of permissive licences, with a lack of a legal obligation to use the GPL. If anarchy exists rather than user protection, it's in the ability to choose a non-GPL license altogether.

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em-bee 46 days ago
i just had the all lowercase discussion (i wasn't even the reason it started) so i am just going to refer you to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47889553 (that link is a top level comment responding to the article)

you're conflating the existence of permissive licenses, with a lack of a legal obligation to use the GPL

well, the interpretation of 9dev creates a legal preference for public domain software. so there is that. but that aside, i don't get your reading, how am i conflating anything. i am making an analogy. permissive licenses enable a state or behavior that is comparable to anarchy, in that there is no protection for anyone, whereas the GPL has a strong focus on user protection. if we want to stretch the analogy even further, the GPL could be compared to socialism. oh, and binary only distribution is capitalism. (ok. i'll stop now ;-)

what you are describing is something different entirely. the original developer of course has the freedom to set the rules for his software. what i am talking about in my analogy, is how that choice affects the environment in which their software gets used and distributed, which is either like anarchy or like socialism (or anything in between).

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