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Permacomputing Berlin Picnic: Sat, Aug 15th at Treptower Park

If I remember correctly, Apple makes it really hard to bridge iMessage and they implemented some sort of hardware check and even disallowed older versions of MacOS or so. As usual, they really like to lock people into their ecosystem.

P.S.: something is wrong with that link you shared.

Seems not too bad. It seems to boot with mainline Linux (or at least Ubuntu ISOs) and the vendor releases patches for recent kernel versions, which is much better than most ARM SoCs.

Cool, let us know how it goes and maybe also see if the power consumption has improved with more recent kernel versions.

Seems indeed relatively good value for money, but how is the mainline Linux kernel support for that SoC?

Edit: also in the early reviews people found some strangely high idle power consumption, which really isn’t good for a home server.

That is not my understanding of the timeline. Yes, they asked their members to vote on it a month ago. But these votes take time, and once the vote was settled and the ToS adapted they immediatly put up the banner.

It is not my argument, but the official stance of the US copyright office and some other similar bodies around the world.

But yes, it poses some interesting philosophical questions, but those are not of very high relevance to copyright law.

Basically the transformative abilities of LLMs can make copyright obsolete.

That is wishful thinking. Copyright was originally designed to protect human creativity, and a lot of the laws and precedence cases involve human effort specifically to distinguish between plagiats and original works.

As long as courts don’t start to rule otherwise, LLM generated code is not considered to be copyrightable itself, thus it can not be original work as defined under copyright laws. This in turn lowers the threashold for such code to be considered a derivative regardless of if there is a clear pathway from one to the other. All it takes is someone to claim that it is derivative, and the burden of proof that it isn’t largly falls onto the person accused. And if the code is functionally identical and with no significant human involvement, that is very hard to proove.

IANAL of course.

Copyright can also apply to code rewritten in another programming language, if the overall structure and functionality is identical. Although tbh, that is a bit of a grey area, and in previous rulings there is some precedence that if the “translation” involves significant human effort then it can be considered to be sufficiently transformative. But promting an LLM to “rewrite this in Go” very likely doesn’t pass that relatively high bar.

The study you linked is interesting (and likely underestimates the issue*), but it also shows that it is possible to automate detection of copyright infringing code in LLM output, and even just 2% is more than enough to open a case for malicious litigation. Large companies can write that off as the cost of doing business, but for small individual open-source developers this is a significant risk.

‘*’ Because human programmers usually reuse existing licensed code as libraries, while LLMs are prone to rewrite them, and as explained above a rewrite is at an elevated risk of being considered copyright infringing.

Everyone is the hero in their story 🤷

And what do you think “concerns over licensing” means? 🤦

You realized that those parts refer to two different things? But since you clearly live in a world entirely detached from reality I don’t think this makes sense to discuss further.

Yes, that’s why they put up a big banner informing everyone after they decided on the ToS change.

I really get the feeling there are a bunch of people here commenting that have never visited Codeberg even once 🤦

It is not. There are plenty of studies showing that LLMs spit out code that is near verbatim to existing code and LLM companies even go so far as to instruct their models to not also add the corresponding license/copyright headers with that code.

There are probably law firms analysing common code patterns LLMs often use right now and are approaching copyright holders of similar enough code to buy up the rights. It might not all stand up in court, but it will be enough to scare some people into settling for fee that guarantees a profit for these law firms. This is a tried and true method for an entire industry of law firms.

At this point I must assume you are trolling 🤦

It is a totally different thing to have the occasional copyright take down request from a legitimate copyright holder, or hosting code that is in the majority likely copyright infringing and just waiting for someone to start targeting for mass copyright litigation.

No, these malicious law firms intentionally go after the small fish, who are much more likely to be intimidated and give in to a settlement payment before it even reaches the courts.

And for Codeberg it makes absolutly sense to minimize the issue for them now before it becomes an even bigger issue.

What hasn’t happened? Sure, this isn’t wide spread yet, but it also took malicious law firms a while before they realized going after p2p torrent users is a lucrative business.

And I seem to have a much better grasp at copyright than you do.

It is still a parody project 🤷

You are linking to a parody project 🤦

And you are also misunderstanding my point. Yes the cat is out of the bag and companies will absolutely copyright wash their codebases like that, but they have big legal teams to defend against copyright trolls and generally do not publish most of their code base for anyone to see.

Small hobbyist open-source projects that make up near 100% of the projects hosted on Codeberg on the other hand are easy marks for malicious litigation, just like home users torrenting movies were in the 1990ties and early 2000.

You are still not understanding the issue.

LLMs cause a lot of people to unknowingly violate copyright, and those people then become easy targets for malicious copyright litigation. And Codeberg is caught in the middle of that and doesn’t want to be involved in the resulting mass legal cases because they are just a small volunteer organisation without a legal team.

And Codeberg’s explanation is very clear that is isn’t a blanket ban on LLM generated code for “purity” reasons. It is a risk mitigation strategy against projects that are mostly LLM generated.