Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.

Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)

> We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.

example of what is not possible to fix with code?

How does one make sure the implementation is sufficient and complete? It feels like assuming total knowledge of the world, which is never true. How many false positives and false negatives do we tolerate? How does it impact a person?

No code architecture will enforce privacy or guarantee security.

Some code architectures make privacy and security structurally impossible from the beginning.

As technologists, we should hold ourselves responsible for ensuring the game isn't automatically lost before the software decisions even leave our hands.

Politicians aren't generally leaders, but rather followers. To force politicians to do something, lead where people follow you. But of course, paradoxically, this will by definition make you a practitioner of politics yourself... To quote from The Hunt for Red October, "Listen, I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and liar. When I'm not kissin' babies I'm stealin' their lollipops. But! It also means I keep my options open."

Which, if you think about it, is a mostly uplifting timeline.

Back in 1770 there were basically 0 democracies on the planet. In 1790 there were 2. Now there are about 70 with about 35 more somewhere in between democracy and autocracy. So most of the world's population is living under a form of democracy. I know that things are degrading for many big democracies, but it wouldn't be the first time (the period between WW1 until the end of WW2 was a bad time for democracies).

I have no idea how we get from here to a civilized internet, though.

Voluntary “censorship” (not being shown visceral media you don’t ask) and censorship for children are very important.

Bad “censorship” is involuntarily denying or hiding from adults what they want to see. IMO, that power tends to get abused, so it should only be applied in specific, exceptional circumstances (and probably always temporarily, if only because information tends to leak, so there should be a longer fix that makes it unnecessary).

I agree with you that children should be protected from beheading and extremism; also, you should be able to easily avoid that yourself. I disagree in that, IMO, anonymous accounts and “free” websites should exist and be accessible to adults. I believe that trusted locked-down websites should also exist, which require ID and block visceral media; and bypassing the ID requirement or filter (as a client) or not properly enforcing it (as a server operator) should be illegal. Granting children access to unlocked sites should also be illegal (like giving children alcohol, except parents are allowed to grant their own children access).

I thought it was easy: watch videos with your kid, don't allow them to doomscroll or be raised by the "featured"/"front page" algorithms.

Well, I would say it should be like that already & no new license is needed. Basically if a LLM was ever based on GPL code, its output should be also GPL licensed. As simple as that.

We need countries to start legally enforce that. Nothing will change otherwise. I stopped open sourcing my code and LLMs are one of the big reason.

Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?

It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?

Interesting. Is there a license that acts this already ?

That is a complete fools errand. If it ever passes it would just mean the death of Open Source AI models. All the big companies would just continue to collect whatever data they like, license it if necessary or pay the fine if illegal (see Antropic paying $1.5 billion for books). While every Open Source model would be starved for training data within its self enforced rules and easy to be shut down if ever a incorrectly licenses bit slips into the models.

The only way forward is the abolishment of copyright.

I think the attribution is a very good point!

Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes.

With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.

For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.

I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc.

It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith.

My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.

If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do.

If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded.

And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior.

These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.

I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic.

For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians.

Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?

"Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté"

Saint-Just

all talks are recorded. so you can watch it live or on replay. Talks are free to attend; they are @ ULB campus in Brussels. 31st of jan - 1 of feb.

> that doesn't mean that they're intimately aware of the full EU budget.

There's no "intimate" knowledge required in order to be aware of the EU spending tens to hundreds of billions of euros on the war close to its Eastern border, it has been one of the main topics of discussion in the media for a good time now. Unless this speech holder has lived under a rock since February 2022, which doesn't seem to be the case (he was the one mentioning the "war" thing).

I imagine anytime the people that control the war resources decide to use them, there are plenty of other people not interested or involved in the destruction. If the UK declares war on an African nation tomorrow, since the US is an ally you would say those other people in the US should disallow devs from the target African nation from contributing to their project?

the burden of proof lies on someone making a positive assertion. why do you think it's possible for "AI" to be either of those things at this point in time (let alone whether it's possible at all).