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As the longest serving and most senior member (now ex-member) of the Facebook source control team, I had no problem with your post. I'm just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.

Thanks for the response, Durham. I hope you're doing well. I've always appreciated your magnanimity, but I want to note that this belief is not unanimous among the current source control team at Meta.

There's a certain irony in the fact that Facebook did basically exactly the same thing when they made their post here: https://developers.secure.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/15/...

I see zero mention of srcfs or blaze.

Perfectly aligns with the V-Capitalist/Zuckerberg mindset: First you salvage them (like Facebook did salvage MySpace and others via interoperability), then you build walls (walled garden) to keep others from doing the same as you did, complaining about it via PR, and lobby law-makers to forbid interoperability to keep your money garden safe. Never mention who's shoulders you stand on or how you got there. Propel the myth It's all made by hand from the mud by the single 'genios' CEO-archtype - that sociopathic mindset infects the whole company and, if these companies are successful on the market, infects the whole economy, then society until we are where we are.

If the original idea was in those projects, Anthropic "forgot" to credit them too. One wrong doesn't give an indulgence for other's to copycat that wrong action later on.

To be clear, I don't believe either of these were wrongs. In my opinion, this is just a symptom of Facebook's PSC process training people to clout chase and demand recognition.

Thank you for responding. With the new footnote [1], I now believe the attribution is sufficient. I've added a link to it, as well as to your response, as an update to my blog post.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...

Milking this fake drama for all it's worth huh? Good to know you, the authority on the subject, believe it's sufficient now.

As if attributing Sapling didn't include its server, Mononoke. What's next, an author of some sub-module of Mononoke will be "outraged" he didn't get personally attributed?

This is all just your ego speaking. Good job taking advantage of the "anthropic bad" undercurrent, I guess?

> Update: Nick G. from Anthropic has responded on Hacker News, and sufficient attribution has been added to Anthropic’s blog post. I stand by my posts as of the time I wrote them.

This is such a weird turn of phrase. You _stand_ by your posts, implying that you currently stand by them, but then add "as of the time" that you wrote them, implying that you no longer stand by them? Either you stand by your posts or you don't; you can't have it both ways. It's just a little confusing.

It just means that Rain continues to stand by the posts each as a response to the circumstances at time of writing.

So you are claiming that if someone says “it’s raining” while there is precipitation, and then it stops, they can say it is “no longer raining” but aren’t allowed to believe it was raining before?

Seems to me that this is an inherent problem in all AI derived outputs. Take "inspiration" from everywhere else and give no attribution to the giants whose shoulders you build upon.

Maybe the next solution in search of a problem that anthropic and any other frontier data harvester should be looking to solve is accurate attribution to those "inspirations".

Do you give credit to every textbook you read and learned from in your entire life, every time you publish something?

Textbooks are not the source of the algorithms though, are they? They just usually republish them.

The Art of Computer Programming would like to have a word with you.

Hehe, This is how I know you're a programmer finding the edge case or exception.

If I have seen further, it is because I shat on the shoulders of giants.

(h/t amlib: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963529 )

Thanks for coming on to "take the heat." Do you have any internal tools for auditing the codebase/model outputs to see how much direct overlap there is with the inspiration?

As a human who is deeply familiar with the codebase, what percentage of Scion's codebase would you estimate is directly inspired by Mononoke?

Very little, overall.

This system was actually built incrementally over several months and did not start out as a full VCS -- it started as a read-only service that ingested data from our Git repo to take pressure off of CI and other tools needing to materialize checkouts for certain types of repo/graph questions. Even when we did decide to go all the way, we were operating in a hybrid Git/Scion world for months during the migration and the path to get there made the system and code very unique to our infrastructure.

This is detail that would have been interesting to read in the original post.

This is very similar to the way SCMQuery existed before Mononoke and eventually became served by it. The source control team at Meta was, and is, quite familiar with hybrid deployments of the kind you describe, though of course at longer timescales.

I'm finding this all really much ado about nothing. What does it matter how much overlap there is? I laud nickg for clearing the air because I personally would've just let everyone stew if it were up to me. All this scrutiny is happening because "big AI taking everything" and it's ultimately pointless. They made a tool that has a lot from an existing tool, yes. They also stated where some of the inspiration came from, which is directly related to the project the author is screaming about. Blog post author decides - against their better judgment IMO - to dip a toe in, and suddenly there's drag on that toe, for nothing. This is all just... wild.

Looking deeper, I think Ant really did copy the work. I don't think you should feel ashamed or defend it by saying that a lot of research is required.

Yes, copying takes a lot of research. It takes a lot of effort to collect OSS data, and a huge amount of research is needed.

It feels strange to put "-anthropic" in your Hacker News username. Never seen this before. What happens if you don't work there anymore?

They throw it away?

Just make a new account? Not like it costs money.

He might already have a main account but intentionally doesn't want to use it. I've noticed on X that OpenAI employees tend to post a lot more regarding their employer on their main X accounts than Anthropic employees do.

I don't use HN often, so I made an account for this purpose that would make it clear who I was in relation to the article.

You also register -openai -deepmind -meta and -xsi

Then there will be no more time spent trying to manage Orange Site public opinions regarding Anthropic.

Just a way to separate one's personal comments from their professional ones, like a work email address.

Why would someone respond to a post in a professional capacity with their personal HN account?

You ask that like it's not the absolute norm :P

While your post sugar coats it in positive words: "joyful", "inspired", and so on, it just largely confirms the accusations in the blog post:

> However, after publishing the post I privately received confirmation that Scion intentionally and blatantly ripped off Mononoke, and in particular that there was overlap in personnel.

I come out of this that Anthropic actually ripped off Mononoke, but did so in a joyful and inspired manner. Maybe the prompt to Claude has a trailing smiling emoji.

Do you actually have a specific ethical line in mind that you think Anthropic was on the wrong side of here?

FWIW, I think they should've been much more open in their announcement and credited original teams instead of selling this as some kind of almost-autonomous Claude project.

"We took existing system we helped to implement at Meta and changed it a bit" doesn't sound as cool as "Redesigning source control at Anthropic", but seems to be closer to truth?

Yes, dishonesty. Flaunting this great technical achievement of their Mighty Labor Arbitrage Machine when it would have been impossible for them to have done without Mononoke already being open source.

Yes, they should have been clear that they ripped off an existing product instead of trying to make it sound like Claude came up with this amazing new thing.

I too can use LLMs to copy existing shit.

Yet another case, when a company steals someone's IP (1), then that person/org has to complain which spending their valuable time for that, then they are getting blamed by readers for even raising the doubt, then they need to waste even more time for writing a laundry list of proofs that they were right the first time, and then maybe the corporation infringing on their rights acknowledges that "oh, sorry, here is the attribution" in best case.

It's like that joke, about praying to god for a bicycle, but then realizing that god doesn't work this way, so instead stealing a bicycle and praying for forgiveness. Seems to be an operating principle of all megacorpos these days.

(1) Not complying with a license to commercially using someone's IP is stealing said IP; license requires attribution which wasn't given so that was the infringement.