Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 100 Posts
- 323 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleftEnglish
1·2 days agoFYI, the day after you published this blog post, a spam blog posted… their AI reimplementation of it 🤦
details:
here is a snapshot of (maybe?) the “original” slop post borrowing from your title; i first saw it reposted on this slightly-more-credible-looking (at least if you haven’t seen it in previous search results and already realized it is spam) page:

i tried to archive that page with the repost of it, to avoid directly linking to spam from this comment, but it crashes archive.org’s browser:

i also was curious to see if this spam is in search engines, so i searched for AI reimplementation, and… well, the good news is that your blog post is the first hit and the above-linked spam blog is pretty far down in the results list.
The bad news is that the second hit is to yet another piece of slop/spam evidently also “inspired” by your post:

Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleftEnglish
6·5 days agoNice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).
A couple of minor corrections to your text:
Blanchard’s account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.
Blanchard doesn’t say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version’s implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn’t prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude’s training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).
The GPL’s conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.
The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL’s obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It’s the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service…)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Firefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla is working on a big Firefox redesign, here is what it looks likeEnglish
1·6 days agoSparkles? (bookmark groups?)
Sparkles icon means stochastic parrot (already in current Firefox)

Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
2·7 days agoNice, thanks.
It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.
re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/
imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.
are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
9·7 days agoFull-page machine translations are disabled
Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).
Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Technology@lemmy.ml•"No right to relicense this project" - on changing the license of Mark Pilgrim's chardet from LGPL to MIT after a vibe-coded rewriteEnglish
4·8 days agoIt’s a library for detecting which character encoding a string is encoded with.
Here are the docs for the vibe-coded rewrite, and here is the version before it.
The new vibe-coded version also adds language detection; it isn’t clear to me why the current version of the readme shows it classifying the string
"It’s a lovely day — let’s grab coffee."as Spanish with 99% confidence, without any comment in the docs about that being a misclassification, but I guess that if the LLM-authored program says it is then that must be one of those phrases that looks the same in Spanish as in English 👀
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•Tesla is exiting consumer space because Self-Driving has hit the same fundamental limits as LLMsEnglish
12·11 days agoThis post caused me to look up what changed: sadly they aren’t exiting the consumer space but rather are just ceasing to include lane-keeping in their basic package to instead require new customers who want it to pay a monthly subscription fee for what they amusingly call “Full Self Driving (Supervised)”.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
linuxmemes@lemmy.world•...wasn't it supposed to be other way around?English
4·11 days agois it time for a Windows edition of the classic Jamiroquai sound meme?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowedEnglish
151·12 days agoIf you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn’t be bigoted, I don’t know what to tell you.
it’s not that people can’t, but spaces which have unlimited tolerance for sealions suggesting that it’s necessary to argue about that are likely to have less interesting discussions than spaces which do not 🙄
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowedEnglish
51·13 days agoBut don’t call it an anarchist space
tell me you’ve never been in a non-internet anarchist space without telling me 😂
(hint: offline anarchist bars tend not to tolerate fascists either)
rules of anarchism
😭
(this is a bit, right?)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowedEnglish
2·13 days agoIt’s ironic you state it like this, since we are an explicitly anarchist server ;)
it’s not really ironic as i am well aware that you are and i appreciate you for that :)
what i’m saying is that i’m glad that, despite obviously being a (fellow!) proponent of freedom of expression, you haven’t fallen victim to the childish line of thought which leads some people to let their spaces become nazi bars. so: thanks!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowedEnglish
3914·13 days agounmoderated internet spaces are quickly overrun with bigotry, csam, and spam.
if, in the name of “free speech”, you only moderate the csam and spam, the space will be primarily occupied by people looking for a forum that welcomes bigotry.
respect to @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com for rm’ing bigotry and not letting childish anarchist free speech ideals cause lemmy.dbzer0.com to be a nazi bar 🥂
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Europe@lemmy.ml•Europe doesn't condemn Israeli aggressionEnglish
35·14 days agoAlso the President of Spain says (firefox translated) “We reject the unilateral military action of the U.S. and Israel, which is an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.” but then goes on to also reject Iran’s (unspecified) actions.
Like Finland’s it’s a pretty tame condemnation, but noteworthy coming from NATO member states.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Europe@lemmy.ml•Europe doesn't condemn Israeli aggressionEnglish
47·14 days agoThe President of Finland actually went a little off script
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Curious about the relationship between Red Hat and FedoraEnglish
12·14 days agocould Red Hat eventually take control of the project
Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.
Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.
It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.
Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.
If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.
Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.





















You’re correct on both points (🤦♂️ indeed).
I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.