I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains.
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@petealexharris It's the least oligarch-friendly bubble ever. Perfect substitutability. If Claude becomes too expensive, you can just go to Gemini, Chatgpt, Mistral or one of the Chinese ones and continue right where you left off. You'd have a better argument if you wrote this about the virtual girlfriend usage..
@trademark
If a significant fraction of the global software market is captured by a handful of big players who own and trade shares of that market among themselves, your ability to move from one to the other (at your own inconvenience, risk and expense) is of no concern to any of them. -
@petealexharris Eh. Given the amount of times I've seen "X project used the world over by every multinational ever is badly maintained by like one dude in Nebrahoma because nobody pays for it", I'm not sure about your base argument.
@adriano @petealexharris There are institutions that can support free software projects (and other public goods) that would render IP obsolete.
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@adamrice @petealexharris @hajovonta What copyright law is this and how does it exclude derivative works?
@njsg @petealexharris @hajovonta Whether you treat LLM output as a derivative work is an interesting question, and not an angle I was considering. I was thinking of U.S. copyright law, and one principle of it is that it only applies to work by people. So that famous monkey selfie is not copyrightable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
Hi @petealexharris
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@hajovonta I am not impressed by people who just blanketly condemn new technology. They are often motivated by fear and paranoia. The world is not so simple.
@galaxy_map @hajovonta Do you know who you are talking to well enough to know that they ARE blanket condeming new technology? Cause this tech has plenty of properties that make it worth condeming on its own.
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris In the early days of the internet people would build their own websites to create content that mattered to them for fun, they'd join #usenet groups and share software especially free #opensource software, the mentality was share with the world not for likes / status but for the benefit of everyone... Then corporations, ad companies and normies who want to make money online, took over every online space to do the bidding of oligarchs for them and #enshitification is the result.
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris
Very insightful! That makes total sense. -
@petealexharris Thing is, free software didn't "appear", proprietary software did. Free software came first. It's the natural state of these machines. Every decade or so they come up with some new tactic to try to overcome that but it never quite works...
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
very astute observation that more people need to understand
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris @ohne_sonne « We can't own those blueprints and chairs and tables because they are "free software"?
No problem, we will make you and your descendants depend entirely on our hammers, nails and saws that we will resell you for a subscription fee that we may increase at any time.
Also they come with ads now and we sell your personal info.
Please stop learning anything else.
Oh and also we will buy every piece of iron and coal making it unaffordable to forge your own tools. » -
I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris LLM = Layers of Layers of Misunderstandings
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris Not sure what you mean by “appearance” but free software has been around since the late 1950s, when compilers were first passed around.
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Somehow I suspect that once they've finished stealing the entire body of human knowledge, they will *copyright* that knowledge and require anyone who wants to use any part of it to pay through the nose.
What do you think?
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris
Note: Who owns Github? -
Somehow I suspect that once they've finished stealing the entire body of human knowledge, they will *copyright* that knowledge and require anyone who wants to use any part of it to pay through the nose.
What do you think?
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Since LLM outputs can't be copyrighted, and since those tools are very good at cloning existing programs, might LLMs not actually be very bad for the software industry?
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@trademark
If a significant fraction of the global software market is captured by a handful of big players who own and trade shares of that market among themselves, your ability to move from one to the other (at your own inconvenience, risk and expense) is of no concern to any of them.@petealexharris As the technology currently stands there really is no barrier to moving in fact I do that every day when I move between the free quota of various providers. You seem to be imagining an entirely different kind of technology. A different technology may of course turn out to be problematic, please complain as soon as you can actually identify it.
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I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.
@petealexharris Science fiction conventions are a century old. Wikipedia is unrelated. The gutenberg project is unrelated. AO3 is unrelated.
The internet is bigger than "free software". That's why Elizabeth Warren keeps trying to kill it: https://bsky.app/profile/dieselbrain.bsky.social/post/3mcatiujjj22h
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@petealexharris As the technology currently stands there really is no barrier to moving in fact I do that every day when I move between the free quota of various providers. You seem to be imagining an entirely different kind of technology. A different technology may of course turn out to be problematic, please complain as soon as you can actually identify it.
@trademark Please feel free to mute me if my analysis doesn't seem useful to you. Not everyone in the world needs to join every conversation with everyone else.
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@petealexharris Not sure what you mean by “appearance” but free software has been around since the late 1950s, when compilers were first passed around.
@MartyFouts
The appearance of the later wave of widely available "Free as in Freedom" software protected by copyleft licences into a growing lucrative market dominated by vendor lock-in in tools, business software and operating systems. Just to clarify what I mean.
