@foone@digipres.club i will take this opportunity to once again tell tale of the time i worked on an embedded device with a firmware written in C, roughly a 150,000-line codebase on a little STM32 chip

the original author of the code base did not, in fact, seem to understand what an array was.

the device communicated to another device bolted to the same machine, using MODBUS. with potentially up to 10,000 MODBUS registers storing data, but realistically only a few actually in use.

the file defining the structure where the data was stored for the registers simply made a struct, with elements starting at "reg0" and incrementing up to "reg10000". the implementation file was just as bad.

this is why the codebase was roughly 150,000 lines. it should have been perhaps 5000.


the code used a small function that did pointer math in order to actually access the register, usually, unless it was referenced directly in code, or sometimes used a macro instead.

none of this was even the worst offense within the codebase.

@Daojoan@mastodon.social there was a time when extensive knowledge of things was something only easily attainable to the elites. that time is now past, yet we still have not shaken ourselves of the patterns we collectively learned to recognize. this benefits the new elites, and so they perpetuate it. i hope we can learn from this soon.

@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social the "pr" one is for pull request descriptions, but the "commit" one is about the contents of the commit, not just the message, as far as i can tell.

@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social from the Claude documentation I have read about this feature, it is explicitly used for adding co-authorship to commits and pull requests that are written substantially by the LLM.

@mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org yeah. in this case i think it primarily raises concerns for future contributions. one wonders if a judge might, if reviewing this, rule that all contributions after this commit are public domain, unless the provenance of the code is very clear, e.g. patchsets taken from other projects which do practice due diligence

@mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org

my understanding is that what you said is the case if it is disclosed, or failing that as in this case, can be determined after the fact:

"Zarya of the Dawn: A February 2023 decision that AI-generated illustrations for a graphic novel were not copyrightable, although the human-authored text of the novel and overall selection and arrangement of the images and text in the novel could be copyrighted."

but that if it is not disclosed, and the AI-generated output cannot be separated upon request from that made by humans, then the entire work is at risk:

"Théâtre D’opéra Spatial: A September 2023 decision that an artwork generated by AI and then modified by the applicant could not be copyrighted, since the applicant failed to identify and disclaim the AI-generated portions of the work as required by the AI
Guidance."

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social attached excerpts are why i believe this. these come from this document, the Congressional Research Service's report on Generative Artificial Intelligence and
Copyright Law.

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social according to my understanding of current copyright guidance in the United States, doing this means they forfeit their copyright to the entire Firefox codebase.

@cstross@wandering.shop @JustRosy@universeodon.com they've already been around for 30, so yes. and you don't need a URL, you could do this (and people have) with the EICAR test string embedded directly in the code, which antivirus programs near universally detect as a virus for testing purposes. and in practice you absolutely can crash some surveillance systems this way