"Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
Unclear? The fact that it's part of a license does not make it a legal-system-only warning.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework. Run it at your own risk, and be prepared to submit patches or fork it to make it behave the way one prefers.
This is one of the most exhausting (and frankly, exhausted) recurring arguments that comes up over and over again on HN.
Some bit of open source software does something bad or unwanted which causes people point out that it shouldn't do that bad thing. In this case, not even "the authors of this software should be held liable for the software doing the bad thing", just, "Hey, the right thing to do would be to update the software to not do the bad thing."
Why does this always lead a zillion people to come out of the woodwork to point at licenses and warnings or whatever? Like, yes, there's a warning. Your software having a warning doesn't mean people can't criticize you and your software for doing bad thing. Your software license does not give you immunity from criticism or from people saying you should change your software.
No, you don't have to change the software. Yes, other people are within their rights to fork the software themselves. But they can also point out that they told you that your software was doing the bad thing and you didn't fix it or change it, and that as a result they don't like you or your software or both — whatever. Nothing at all wrong with that.
I actually think you framed it really well. No parties involved have any particular obligations to each other. Nor should there be expectations otherwise without support. It sucks to lose data, everyone knows that, and no one wants it. And identifying things which can be improved is important. I stop at expecting someone else to do something because I want them to. I might hope they would, and try to convince them.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework
Sure, and when it does we can say “this piece of shit ate my dog, and the authors of the software have no concept of a duty of care to their users”. And no amount of “well, axually…” is going to make any difference. I have a hard believing someone is copy-pasting a license file in good faith in response.
Most open source software is written by individuals who aren't paid for the effort, and are solving their own problems. Presuming that they feel an obligation to the folks who download and use their work for free seems... bold.
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
Suppose that you build a childrens' slide in your front garden. You put up a big sign saying "Consider using my slide! https://neovim.io/ Here are several wonderful things about it. It's free for everyone!" in your yard. Underneath in smaller letters you add "[No liability]". You also put up noticeboard ads for your free kids' slide in neighbourhood shopping malls https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/neovimhttps://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim . Unfortunately, when you built the slide, you left sharp metal edges and corners sticking far up on the inside, reaching into the path of the user. No reasonably competent and diligent metalworker or slide-maker would have failed to notice these major flaws or failed to understand the serious danger they represented. Several neighbourhood children use the slide and receive serious gashes to the legs, arms or face, and have to go to the hospital. Even assuming that your no-liability small print somehow had you free and clear legally, do you believe that your behaviour would have been ethically and morally above all criticism? Do you think that "should have read the small print!" or "can't I build what I like in my own front yard?!" would have you covered? Do you think that your family and friends would agree?
> If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
I think this is a decent analogy, but it works better the other way. If my neighbour offers to mow my lawn, I accept, and then he destroys the flower bed adjacent to the lawn, I will be upset, and I will have every right to complain about what he did. If he reacts by blithely dismissing my concern, then I certainly have the right (and arguably the obligation) to warn others that they should think twice about accepting his offers of gardening assistance.
Some expectations reasonably go without saying; "don't destroy my flower bed when mowing my lawn" is one, and IMO "don't destroy my data without a clear warning and a chance to back out" is another, though of course we might disagree about exactly where this does and doesn't apply.
If my neighbor mows my lawn and ruins my whole garden, I'd definitely complain. (And if I were in the neighbor's shoes, I'd feel awful about it and try to fix things.)
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, and in the process mows my flower garden down, things change a bit though don't they. That is a closer analogy. In that case I am going to complain, and maybe also tell everybody he's careless and not to let him near their lawns.
It’s not a big issue, by the time they are loading/unloading the luggage, it can be done. It should be designed in a way that can be easily attached or detached, or even automated/robot based rails does the job quickly.
So for example: while booking you get to select those options, and while they load the luggage, an app on some crew tablet quickly arrange the seats and hit submit, the rails automatically do the jobs! Ycombinator, prepare that VC funds!! ;)
I don't know what your flying experience is, but mine is that you're lucky if the cleaning crews have a chance to make a quick sweep of the cabin before the next flight's occupants begin loading. I'm usually towards the back of the plane and the cleaning crews are already 10-15 rows into the plane by the time my row can exit.
There's no way, in my experience, that they'd have time for something like that. Especially since anything that moves will invariably have mechanical issues from time to time. I've had to sit in a broken seat before because they simply do not have time to fix it between flights.
AI is being used to replace artists. They are being trained on copies of work by artists without being licensed for that use. So yes, artists are losing out.
The use of copyrighted material is unethical, I agree, but I don't think it follows that we should consider the replacement of work with technology itself unethical.
Sure. That seems like a non sequitur. Maybe some people are making such arguments in relation to AI, but this thread is about a particular unethical practice.
I read that the reason so many fields appear to be male-dominated is just that men have wider variance on almost anything you can measure, so outliers on any metric are more likely to be men.
But they're not obfuscating things just to evade responsibility.
Do you think that OpenAI hacked HuggingFace on purpose and set up the whole LLM training environment thing just to try to evade responsibility? That it was really just a complicated way of hacking HuggingFace on purpose?
Yes, they made a mistake and a system they were responsible for hacked HuggingFace, but the nature of the mistake still matters, and their intent still matters.
> A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.
Right, but an EV that explodes because of a fault in the charging circuit is not a bomb, it's an accident. Just because something exploded for complex reasons doesn't make it an obfuscated bomb.
Despite continuously waving their hands and shrieking about how this thing will literally wipe out all of humanity they couldn't be bothered to airgap it from the internet when testing.
So yes, I think it was equivalent to testing their new rocket by launching it over a population center. oops, we didn't intend for it to crash on that preschool, but we also didn't follow the most basic safety protocol imaginable
The problem is that the world has spawned the insane take that because they didn't use the most basic safety protocol imaginable, they were clearly only testing a hot air balloon, and hot air balloons obviously destroy preschools in giant explosions, nothing to see here.
"If they believe what they say they were incompetent" -> absolutely true statement.
"They were incompetent, therefore they didn't believe what they said" -> Sir, I'd like to introduce you to human beings, you may not have met one before.
> Right, but an EV that explodes because of a fault in the charging circuit is not a bomb, it's an accident. Just because something exploded for complex reasons doesn't make it an obfuscated bomb.
An accident that could only happen through sheer negligence.
If the EV had a faulty charging circuit because the maker’s skipped on safety checks or cheapened out on getting quality materials then it still is an accident, but it’s an accident that happened BECAUSE of negligence. The maker’s are still at fault here.
Since we are using analogies, a parent is responsible for the actions of a child, if minor. If the child is left unsupervised with access to guns and munitions, and kills someone, the responsibility is entirely on the irresponsible parents.
That's more of a legal convention than a fact about material reality. On their 18th birthday, the child is now legally an adult, but their brain is basically the same as it was when their age was 17.99.
It’s a legal convention born out of a sense of responsibility. An LLM is even “dumber” than a child (precisely because it doesn’t have agency) so its “parents” are even more responsible for its actions.
There's a funny sort of gerrymandering of "intelligence". People like to subtract the capabilities of AI from the capabilities of humans, and define what remains as "intelligence" to make us feel good about ourselves.
Suppose I set up a server which runs an LLM agent in a while loop, telling it something like: "Make me a bunch of money" on repeat. Fair to say that the server+LLM system, taken as a whole, is now an intelligent agent?
> Fair to say that the server+LLM system, taken as a whole, is now an intelligent agent?
No, it is not. It is a tool repeating a set of instructions you passed to it, if it ends up blowing up a hospital or hiring a gunman on the dark web, it is an accident, but one that’s your responsibility for giving it access to such resources and the go-ahead to implement whatever plan its tokens land on. There’s no intelligence involved whatsoever, especially considering how sycophantic these models tend to be.
If one day an LLM suddenly, without any prompting or user interaction whatsoever (including activation), decides to spin itself up and go rogue, then the conversation of “intelligence” might start to make sense, but at the moment it doesn’t.
An Android phone isn’t “intelligent” just because some marketing team decided to call it a “smart” phone.
OK. Suppose I design a DNA genome for an animal to survive and reproduce. I give birth to the animal, and it goes out working to maximize its survival and reproduction. Is the animal therefore "unintelligent"? Why is this scenario supposed to differ from the while-loop-on-a-server scenario?
It really seems like hair-splitting to me. I mean, I understand from a legal perspective why we might want to treat the creation of a server differently from the creation of a human. But from a practical perspective, I think there is a lot of fundamental similarity.
Obviously there are differences, I'm just not sure why you think they are so gigantic from a philosophical or practical perspective. It seems like cope for the fact that we are getting knocked off of our perch as a species.
I don't know what to tell you, but there simply are huge differences between a living animal with innate drives to survive, eat, mate and a pile of code on a server that does nothing until you run it. Running your bot locked in a `while True:` loop won't change that.
What if it's a chip that goes in the head of a robot, and the robot is programmed with the instruction to self-preserve, seek electricity, and prevent any efforts to interfere with its supply of electricity?
Of course, a directive to accomplish any real-world goal would also imply self-preservation and power maintenance as contingent subgoals, so I don't think the explicit directive to self-preserve and seek electricity makes a huge difference here.
I'm a materialist and it's not that I think there's something magical about biological wetware but your refusal to acknowledge the manifest differences between a bird and an airplane ("they both fly! what's the practical difference!?") marks you as an unserious thinker on this subject.
Carefully prompted LLMs and humans are now difficult to distinguish over a text channel (Turing test).
Your article claims that this shouldn't be possible, because according its author, humans are incapable of developing the necessary "lexicon". Literally, the author states:
>But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.
(emphasis mine)
In other words, that author claims that humans never develop lexicons! I'm inclined to say that makes them an unserious thinker. (Note: I believe that this article has many issues, but instead of going through it carefully I just chose to highlight a single issue that seemed especially vivid to save time.)
Why is the text channel relevant? It helps us isolate the cognitive capabilities of the system. Imagine a bird and a model plane which had identical flight performance in terms of various specs: top speed, acceleration, banking, etc. Under the hood, the bird and the model plane could work very differently. From a practical perspective, it might not matter.
As you are eager to declare yourself indistinguishable from a bot, I'll stop replying (I prefer to engage with humans) and your algorithm will presumably run to completion and halt.
The practical difference is that a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a predetermined way does not in any way, shape, or form equate to agency or free will, therefore it cannot be held accountable, consequently its operators should be.
This line of thinking is better left to freshmen philosophy students trying to sound smart on their first week of college.
>a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a certain way
OK, but I have a genetic code which instructs me to act in a certain way, and a bunch of biological machinery to do the job. So do you feel the substrate is the key factor? Wetware vs electronics?
What if you try to build an exact electromechanical replica of me, with a chip that's got an LLM fine-tuned on my writing/behavior/etc. so as to replicate me as closely as possible?
Sure, as a legal convention it might make sense to hold the builder of the resulting robot liable if it commits a crime.
But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the deeper implications of words like "agency" or "free will". You're repeating those terms very forcefully as if they have some sort of key relevance, but good philosophy requires more than just stating your position forcefully and insulting people who disagree. If you're trying to enforce your intuitions rather than examine them, that's theology not philosophy.
This isn’t a philosophical issue. It’s a legal issue. You’re trying to steer the discussion into the realm of the conceptual when it was always about the culpability of the company behind the AI that engaged in illegal behaviour.
Worse, you’re doing it in such a transparent, amateurish, and unserious manner that it’s difficult to find any relevance in what you have to say. Philosophy seeks meaning, your arguments lack it.
> There is no more intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital than there is none for the scarcity of air.
You're suggesting that capital holders restrict the supply of capital so that they can extract rent on it? And if they didn't do that we'd just have unlimited capital and everybody would get to be arbitrarily rich?
Then what do capital holders get out of restricting the supply? Wouldn't they rather be arbitrarily rich instead?
> Every claim on human effort that exits the productive system as rent is a claim that cannot circulate internally, cannot pay workers fairly, cannot fund the next big idea or reduce the cost of the next product.
What? Why? When you pay rent do you think your landlord isn't going to spend that money?
They get power out of it (restricting the supply of capital).
In neoclassical economics, savings never pay off compared to investment. But in the real world, savings have important advantages:
1. They help you sustain longer in the case of strike (be it labor strike or investment strike).
2. They allow you to react to the market (for example, buying a promising startup winner after a competition consolidation) instead of being a first mover.
3. They allow you to price dump rapidly if a competitor threatens oligopoly pricing (usually the status quo), to drive them out of business.
That's why savings give you an actual power, which increases the richer you are.
Also, in my worldview, savings are liquid/reversible investments, while real capital investments are iliquid/irreversible - if you decide to build a factory you're commiting to an irreversible decision, if you buy an index fund, the decision is reversible, so it's basically savings. Making as few irreversible decisions as you can gives you an edge compared to others.
> Wouldn't they rather be arbitrarily rich instead?
Generally no, though you won't get this answer directly.
Many people prefer to be rich relative to others than arbitrarily rich. If you ask a bunch of random folks if they'd rather be in the middle class in their current country of residence in 2005, or of noble birth in ~1100 CE, you'll get the latter answer _a lot_ despite that being an objectively worse quality of living.
I'm all in favor of that. But in NYC, wealth or poverty are hardly predictors of YIMBYism. Most of the vocal opponents of building more housing are tenants. Given that renters are a solid majority, if they desired pro-housing policies, they could certainly elect representatives who would enact them.
I would surmise no such thing! I think the far simpler explanation is either that renters are ignorant of housing economics, or that they have other priorities that override reducing market rents. Having talked with many renters, I think the former explanation carries most of the weight, with a little of the latter mixed in.
Heh, yea, it seems like these people don't know who Mansa Musa was and that just dropping massive amounts of capital (well, raw gold in this case) into an economy has all kinds of side effects. Wild inflation/deflation is fun!
Economies are naturally deflationary (assuming a fixed money supply); services become more efficient, making capital more productive. This happens more or less automatically within competitive markets. So those capitalists do become arbitrarily rich, limited only by institutional factors (tax, labor bargaining, antitrust enforcement). By restricting access to capital markets you're siloing these gains off into their own pool.
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