I agree that copyright is bad, but it's even worse if I lose all of mine while the large corporations get to keep theirs.
A great example is Steve Yegge who by most accounts was a productive member at both Amazon and Google (and made enough there to retire in his 40s), now wastes his time on endless AI self-referential nonsense such as
gas town.
I was going to criticize Steve Yegge for denying Lisp Machines in one of his old blogs, but then I realized I'd confused him with some different guy.
Still, it's funny watching these people fall to such smug psychosis. Read this shit from Chris Wellons:
These people have lost their minds, and I'm just waiting for this nonsense to crash and burn so I can mock them over their ruined reputations.
That's how we went from hand-hacked assembly everywhere to using optimizing compilers, and we're all better off for it.
There's
a saying I like to bring up when this appears:
Alan J. Perlis said:
49. Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
We'd be better off if we'd raised computer hardware to human understanding. As an acquaintance of mine likes to say, there's no law of nature stating our computations must be split into millions of incomprehensible little pieces. This vibecoding shit is making things even worse. This is how humanity becomes something straight out of W40K with people praying to start an engine or some shit.
You do it in a clean room by having one LLM scan the project to come up with a requirements / features document, then you feed the requirements doc into a different model and session so it creates a project with the same functionality but it doesn't infringe any of the code. Then you manually review and clean up the code and it's as easy as maintaining any other piece of code. People have been shitting themselves about this all year.
That's not how it works, as others have pointed out before me.
The extra stupid thing is this whole kabuki dance is only needed if you're a law-abiding western company. Chinese and Indian devs just steal the GPL code and nobody ever finds out, we are following the rules out of principle. That's another way the GPL is communist, it transfers wealth and IP from the first world to the third world.
The fucking FBI raids people who harm Disney's business, which is propped up by the same shit. Almost all large businesses in the US deserve to die by this metric, and I agree. The US desperately needs to go back to making things, but playing legal games backed up by the military has been easier for the past few decades.
So? Perfectly legal. GPL can't stop it. Welcome to your future: a vibe-coder pointing at Richard Stallman and laughing... forever.
It's really unbecoming to be this smug about a plagiarism machine, and so hateful towards a man who dedicated his life to helping others. Ask ChatGPT what a human should feel in that situation, and it'll reply with shame, perhaps.
I think going after LLM code in court would be a disaster for copyright, in that I believe there's a huge chance for a judge to rule in favor of the LLM code. I can't really articulate why I believe this because it's just a feeling I'm still trying to explain.
It's simple: They've got the money, and wormed their way into the economy so deeply it'll fucking collapse if they don't get away with their crimes, because the US doesn't do much beyond play financial games these days.
