Of course you can ragequit a conversation and block me if you want but you don't need to insult and incite other people to block. You can just leave.

If you're an author and you wrote a book, and I liked it, could I copy it (except for a few words I change) and publish it?

What if I'm a corporation with deep pockets and a massive marketing budget, and my copy becomes wildly popular?

Now no one is reading your original and you're not even credited as an inspiration. But that's okay, because it let someone else write a book, you're saying?

Free software and writing both depend on copyright, and LLMs famously violate copyright at scale.
@david_chisnall

I'm gonna block you now because you're tedious.

I'm sorry but a fake analogy is not a valid argument and will never be.

Most of the people who actually use LLM codegen they DO understand "AGI" is a lie. Maybe is a surprise to you but there are people who understand that all technologies can be used in the right or the wrong way.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250428214428/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html

That said, the popular view is that if you want to restrict usage, the only reliable way will be writing proprietary software where you can control who gets it. No one will stop you from doing that.

I'd suggest that the more useful thing to do is to convince other people of the rightness of your predilections and get them to vote. Reshape the world such that people are punished for doing unethical things, rather than rewarded, and you won't have to special-case your software licenses.

You don't "attack the idea that codegen is beneficial to the company" by making a fake analogy about FOSS and LLMs compared to public transport and uber. You DO attack that idea by showing statistics that demonstrate software developers are not being more productive with LLMs. Those papers exist.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

You have to attack the idea that codegen is beneficial TO THE COMPANY, or you are wasting your time.

If an argument does not get through to people, it is not the best argument, unless your goal is to be a smug asshole rather than actually convincing people.

I don't think that any of the arguments David makes are weak or easily dismantled - in fact, I think pointing out that all the providers are muscling in on loss leadership so they can start extorting their customers just like Uber does is a very solid argument that actually gets managers to listen.

The argument that "AGI is a lie" will not have pull over people who use LLM codegen.

@ratsnakegames @raymaccarthy @david_chisnall

Eventually the people will understand that the way big tech is approaching AI is wrong, just wait for the bubble to burst.

Yo don't need to use weak arguments they can easily dismantle. There are lots of solid arguments against the way big tech is trying to ride an insane race to make gigantic LLMs. Like for example the expense in water and energy, or the fact they are making gigantic investments and they don't even have a clear business model.

The best of all arguments is that "AGI" or "ASI" (the excuse they use to get investment) is a lie, a children's story as credible as Narnia or the elves of the north pole. Believing LLMs are going to become "superintelligence" just by pouring more compute and data on them is like believing children are going to fly just because they learn to walk and then quickly they learn to run.

Making a mess in a context where the mess is understandable and you can incrementally improve on it is how you learn.

While this next question sounds like a gotcha, I do genuinely want to know your answer because it helps me figure out what I'm responding to.

If an author, artist, or musician told you "if you don't like it, write/make it yourself" would you feel the same way if the person responding to that statement told an LLM "write a spinoff of this famous novel for me" or "make a painting kind of like this one, but with the changes the artist said no to"?

Editing to clarify I don't actually believe the sentiment. More the whole thing smacks if dipshits who way that.

For 30 years, nerdy rail engineers (on their days off) have tinkered with door-to-door rail networks. They build impressive examples in their back yard – tech that becomes light rail, and is absorbed by existing rail companies

Buses and cars are invented and solve the last-mile problems. They crash due to flaws and operator error all the time.

The backyard rail engineers are angry.

We have never delivered on the idea of user-modifiable software. We have sometimes freed software builders from unnecessary toll booths and restrictions. In other words, we built something that works for us and stopped.

I think your analogy of literal crazy taxis is good when talking about LLMs for noncoders. But there was no actual product from FL/OSS world that it’s displacing

That's ridiculous, there's no way any municipality would fall for such a transparent plot to loot public coffers for private gain.

It would be almost as stupid as running all healthcare through for-profit private insurance companies and saying it's to keep costs low.

The problem is that it's very difficult to exclude corporations in a way that doesn't exclude people, or cause other harms to people.

Let's start with the second one. Imagine you have a perfect license that exactly excludes corporations, but doesn't exclude individuals. You release a replacement for MS Office with it. But now you need to interoperate with corporations and they are precluded from using your code, so they are now incentivised to keep sending you MS Office documents. Your program now has to perfectly interoperate with MS Office, or normal people need to buy MS Office. Fortunately, LibreOffice and friends didn't pick a license that excludes corporations and so governments are now in a position to mandate ODF for interoperability and say 'just use LibreOffice' if a corporation complains that MS Office doesn't import it properly.

But excluding corporations is itself hard. If I'm a sole trader, I'm presumably not excluded even if I use the program for work, but if I collaborate with another person in a partnership are we now both excluded? If I work for a community interest corporation such as lowRISC, am I excluded? What about an animal sanctuary? If you exclude, say, companies worth over a billion dollars (hard, because you'll need to keep adjusting for inflation), what stops employees of such a company from using the program on their own time? Or simply subcontracting work that needs it to a smaller company. You cannot craft a license that specifically excludes the people you want to, so you end up with one of two things:

• Some people are accidentally excluded, which harms them.
• Some corporations are accidentally included, which gives them a competitive advantage and skews markets to favour the very groups you were trying to harm.

"tried to" being the operative word.