The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
Can we accelerate it perhaps? You know, spending ALL our resources on making the snake more fat is not a good idea. Its only good idea when you have so much resources that you can easily suffocate the snake with negligible (for us) amount. If you try to suffocate several million snakes, that might backfire a little.
This is why I now check when I'm researching for a solution (that an LLM cannot figure out.) I go to github but often check if the project was created before 2022 due to AI slop concerns.
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
I think by "internet" they mean search engine results pages. If you restrict yourself to short, common queries and only look at the top 10 results on the page, then the space really is very limited. If all those top 10s for common queries start to get crowded out with AI slop, then people are going to start abandoning search.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high quality standards.
Maybe, but that's hardly comforting (and definitely not in the spirit of open source) if you're forced to take that decision, knowing it will hurt your project, because the alternative is getting DDoSed.
If by the spirit, you only mean the bazaar model, then yes. But it's in the original spirit of free software. GNU preferred to keep the development somewhat contained, even so many years ago.
AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws.
I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin, but if you want to use bitcoin to buy something it's about as easy/awkward as it ever was.
Food prices went up 15-20% more than they would have with 2% inflation. If PC prices do anything similar, it's not a big deal in the long run.
Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen? The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out. They wouldn't even want everything to be in the cloud, because a hundred rarely-idle cloud cores can replace a lot more than a hundred mostly-idle consumer cores, so they end up selling a lot less hardware.
> What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable?
That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
> By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
By what reckoning? And not just games, 3D workload, compilation. Hell. Even browsing + some productivity eats 32G of RAM as if it were nothing.
> I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin
The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
> Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen?
For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
Why not make anything for PCs? Because individuals can't compete with the coffers of large corporations and governments.
> The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out.
You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
Say all but one/two manufacturers leave the consumer market. The monopoly/duopoly hikes up prices again and again until you have a few stragglers on 40k USD workstations, and everyone else is on an iOS-like platform.
Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
> That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
Does it have to be DIY? Because a quick search says that if 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is enough then you can get a Zen 2 machine for $300 and a Zen 3 machine for $370.
But man, $400 in 2026 money is a really tight threshold for "affordable". It means PCs were almost never affordable. If I go back to 2017 when that was equivalent to $300, I don't think I can put together a viable build with even 8TB of RAM and 250GB of SSD. I think that standard is too demanding.
> The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
Oh, that was generally other cryptocurrencies but okay I understand.
nVidia has been overcharging, and they've basically increased the prices by one tier. A 70 card costs as much as an 80 used to.
But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050 beats a 1080 for half the price, before even factoring in inflation.
> For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
> You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
That works when there's enough demand to buy all the chips. AI will stabilize one way or another, and then the remaining datacenter market doesn't need that many chips compared to the consumer market. Manufacturers will have extra supply, and not selling it to consumers would be stupid.
And even if they charged datacenter-level prices to consumers, people would still be able to get PCs. Even if the cheapest new CPU was $500, that's still nowhere near the options being "no PC" and "$40k workstation".
Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
> Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
Enshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1].
…whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons.
It's very easy to set up and integrates nicely into git. Obviously only works if you don't need Actions or anything that requires Github to know what's in your repo (duh).
It’s not how many times, it’s what you do about it. DRY doesn’t mean you have to make abstractions for everything. It means you don’t repeat yourself. That is, if two pieces of code are identical, chances are one of them shouldn’t exist. There are a lot of simple ways you might be able to address that, starting from the most obvious one, which is to just literally delete one of them. Abstraction should be about the last tool you reach for, but for most people it’s unfortunately the first.
IME, even when an LLM is right, a few follow-up questions always lead to some baffling cracks in its reasoning that expose it has absolutely no idea what it's talking about. Not just about the subject but basic common sense. I definitely wouldn't call it the "same mental process" a human does. It is an alien intelligence, and exposing a human mind to it won't necessarily lead to the same (or better) outcome as learning from other humans would.
So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.
Well, you are not making things easier for yourself by looking at that source code if the author of chardet brings a case for copyright infringement against you.
The question is: if you had not looked at chardet's source would you still be able to create your work? If the answer is 'yes' then you probably shouldn't have looked at the source, you just made your defense immeasurably harder. And if the answer is 'no' then you probably should have just used chardet and respected its license.
Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?
Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.
By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.
Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.
EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).
No, the burden of proof is on the defender: if you didn't create it you are not the copyright holder.
Copyright is automatic for a reason, the simple act of creation is technically enough to establish copyright. But that mechanism means that if your claimed creation has an uncanny resemblance to an earlier, published creation or an unpublished earlier creation that you had access to that you are going to be in trouble when the real copyright holder is coming to call.
In short: just don't. Write your own stuff if you plan on passing it off as your own.
The accuser just needs to establish precedence.
So if you by your lonesome have never listened to the radio and tomorrow morning wake up and 'Billy Jean' springs from your brain you're going to get sued, even if the MJ estate won't be able to prove how you did it.
That much I understand, but that question only comes up when the similarity is already an established fact, no? If we take the claim that this is a "complete rewrite" at face value, then there should be no reason for the code to have any uncanny similarities with chardet 6 beyond what is expectable from their functionality (which is not copyrightable) being the same, right?
So my (perhaps naive) understanding is if none can be found, then the author of chardet 1-6 simply doesn't have a case here, and we don't get to the point of asking "have you been exposed to the code?".
No, they're on the record as this being a derived work. There is no argument here at all. Not finding proof in a copyright case when the author is on the record about the infringement is a complete non-issue.
You'd have to make that claim absent any proof and then there better not be any gross similarities between the two bodies of code that can not be explained away by coincidence.
And then there is such a thing as discovery. I've been party to a case like this and won because of some silly little details (mostly: identical typos) and another that was just a couple of lines of identical JavaScript (with all of the variable names changed). Copyright cases against large entities are much harder to win because they have deeper pockets but against smaller parties that are clearly infringing it is much easier.
When you're talking about documented protocols or interface specifications then it is a different thing, those have various exceptions and those vary from one jurisdiction to another.
What can help bolster the case for the defense is for instance accurate record keeping, who contributed what parts, sworn depositions by those individuals that they have come up with these parts by their lonesome, a delivery pace matching that which you would expect from that particular employee without any suspicious outliers in terms of amount of code dropped per interval and so on. Code copied from online sources being properly annotated with a reference to the source also helps, because if you don't do that then it's going to look like you have no problem putting your own copyright on someone else's code.
If it is real, then it is fairly easy to document that it is real. If it is not, after discovery has run its course it is usually fairly easy to prove that it is not if it is not.
This is a balance of probabilities standard of proof. Both sides have the same burden of proof, it's equally split. Whoever has the stronger proof wins.
If you wish to be able to claim in court that it is a "clean room" implementation, yes.
Clean room implementations are specifically where a company firewalls the implementing team off from any knowledge of the original implementation, in order to be able to swear in court that their implementation does not make any use of the original code (which they are in such a case likely not licensed to use).
Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.
compromise between observing the daylight saving time switch and not observing it. There are benefits to switching twice a year (sunlight in the morning during the winter when you're supposed to be getting up for work, or when kids are getting on the school bus) (sunlight later into the evening during the summer so you can go play soccer after work if you want to) and you lose things if you decide to stick with just one
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
I haven't heard that word used as a metaphor or hyperbole since I stopped playing on call of duty in 2014...
Weird that the hacker news community wants to stick to it. Yall need to grow up. Because I know you would not use it as a metaphor or hyperbole at work.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
reply