5,290 karma · joined February 26, 2009
However, I think, what they want is for people to stop making those shoddy additions altogether. And open source does not solve that problem because that's exactly what open source exists to allow.
Regardless, I think you're also confused.
"How it is being used ... to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front"
I'm sorry but this is literally exactly the thing GPL is designed to allow. I don't understand why this is so confusing.
Copyleft is designed to prevent people from improving on the code and then keeping their changes secret and closed source. That's not what Omarchy or anyone else is doing, they're all already sharing their changes.
Let's walk through it from the Asahi linux perspective so we're all on the same page:
- Asahi makes software licensed MIT
- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.
- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.
- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.
Now compare how it works under GPL:
- Asahi makes software licensed GPL
- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.
- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.
- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.
Normally you do something in response that would solve your perceived problem. In this case, it seems to be a random unrelated action they've taken to the problem they identified.
> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux, but this statement is basically nonsensical. Making the license copyleft does not prevent people from monetizing it, using AI to develop on it, improve it or wreck it. All it does is make sure that anyone who does will share their source code modifications.
It doesn't sound like they want their code to be open source. It sounds like they want it to be closed source or at least restrictively licensed enough that they can tell users of the source how they're allowed to interact with it and modify it.
The entire point of open source / free software is that it lets you do what you want with it. The original author doesn't need to accept your AI patches or write AI code themselves, but downstream users are not restricted.
I am just baffled by how confused even very smart people seem to be about how open source and permissive licenses work and what they are for.
(Now, should they use trademark law to ensure others can't use the name Asahi Linux confusingly? Absolutely. But that's got nothing to do with copyright.)
pgrust, high profile rewrites all over the place.
When you have an oracle to check behavior against, it is really easy to build a robust testing machine with property tests against the original.
Honestly though, it's pretty clear the AI rewrites work, we have a ton of high profile examples. It's just a holdover attitude about rewrites from before AI. In reality, AI is going to make the code better when it rewrites
In hindsight though, it was a mistake.
Evidence: when the world moved to 64 bit, we didnt just let int mean 8 bytes on amd64. That's a clear acknowledgement that the design was not correct once we understood things better.
Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.
But it's super complicated, and in this particular case does the state have some special right to name the body of water it's adjacent to that pre-empts the federal government? I dont know. Probably not, but I think the argument would need to be more explicit about what that right is rather than just claiming states are sovereign.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.
Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't!
Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM.
(The Claude Delusion is a banger title though)
I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real
First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.
Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.
Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.
This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"
That's why it's common advice to turn off MCPs for tools you dont think are relevant to the task at hand.
The idea behind skills us that they're progressively unlocked: they only take up a short description in the context, relying on the agent to expand things if it feels it's relevant.
What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.
I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $13 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.
https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pylon?utm_source=hn-whos-hiring
If you like:
- Programming languages
- Functional or Logic programming
- Operations research & optimization
- Working on an amazing team on a really hard problem
Come join us!
You do it when you have a bunch of automated integrations with you and you have to break them. The lights arent on at the client: their dev teams are focused on other things, so you have to wake them up to a change that's happening (either by causing their alerting to go off, or their customers to complain because their site is broken)
I am imagining all these overpaid founders etc just sitting in a room like reality show contestants. Trying to make smalltalk, brainstorm jamming for months, not really producing much because... who cares, they have unbelievable money and this is the weirdest scenario ever.