- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
You must log in or # to comment.
I never used the platform but this are the decisions that probably will get me to use it. We need more sites in the internet that work like this
If you want to skip to the changes.
I think this is a really solid LLM policy for a platform like SourceHut. Since they rely on a policy that’s deliberately open to interpretation to allow for reasonable discretion, and rely upon the honour system for enforcement/adherence, I don’t think we should necessarily be telling larger projects to adopt the same policy because this becomes untenable for big projects or platforms. But it’s still good to see policies in this spirit being adopted. The only change I’d like to see is explicitly allowing AI translation for non-code, like comments and emails. It reduces the barrier of entry for ESOL contributors. If there’s concern about the accuracy of translations, they can always include the original alongside the machine translation.
Well, if you don’t skip to the changes, you can see that they say: “the rationale is more about politics and ethics than anything else”
And LLM translations have all the same political and ethical issues as coding, so I don’t think thats gonna be allowed.
And LLM translations have all the same political and ethical as coding
No, they don’t. As I said, machine translations make contributions more accessible to ESOL speakers (ie global majority populations) and can help reduce Eurocentrism. The reason why I said I think an exception should be made is specifically for ethical and political reasons.
We’re talking past each other so let me point your attention to what I mean by exaggerating a bit:
You’re saying it’s ok to burn the world (which is one of the ethical problems with llms) so that a small fraction of hairless apes feels better.
A small fraction? I’m talking about the majority of people on Earth who are disadvantaged by English centrism.
And where did I say “it’s ok to burn the world”? I never specified any position on technology, but to be clear, I am a luddite, I don’t think modern tech is ecologically justifiable, and is built upon a foundation of slavery and ecological destruction. It is a separate question of a policy of a small software forge (which already runs on ecologically destructive hardware; the vast majority of emissions for modern tech come from the manufacture of the devices we’re using to talk now, from your own client device to the devices being used as servers to relay our messages) to allow or disallow AI translations. I do not think that our energy use is justifiable. Now LLMs use a comparable amount of energy to, say, AAA video games. I think this is a bad thing and video games should be more computationally efficient. Does that mean I support banning people from playing AAA video games? No, I don’t think that’s the way to address this problem. Questions of policy are separate questions to questions of technology; a technology can be bad without the solution being to ban it, because the effects of a ban are different to just getting rid of the banned technology.
where did I say
Do you understand the meaning of the word “exaggeration”?
To recap:
I said: “LLM translations have all the same political and ethical issues as coding”
And you replied “No they don’t”
But then you went ahead writing paragraphs on their impact on the environment… which is THE ethical issue, regardless of the copyright issues or the potential benefits.
luddite
mmmmh suuuureee
Yes, I said “no they don’t” because translation has the ethical implications of global inequality. Which, btw, climate change greatly exacerbates. I never said that LLMs don’t have environmental impacts if used for translation; I said they have additional ethical implications when used for machine translation. Which is true. I have my doubts that you are particularly concerned with tech ethics and global inequality given how flippant you have been about the real issue of exclusion of global majority populations just from things as simple as language choices.
Reasonable. I would most vibe coders are just on GitHub because they don’t understand git in general.
That’s an example of a good LLM policy, especially for projects like forgejo / sourcehut / codeberg. Happy to see this approach is getting adopted more and more. (The main Rust repo recently also got a similar policy, although a bit weaker still.)
Here: https://ser1.net/img/human-made.svg
Edit: whelp, I guess þat answers a question I had about embedding SVG images in posts.
This is a bit heavy handed I think. This also forbids AI assisted code review and lots of other things. Perhaps they should have defined it a bit more focussed on getting rid of vibecoded spam instead of forcing a specific developing format for their whole platform.
One of the things they want to highlight is that AI is associated with increase in energy usage, which will speed up climate change. It’s not merely about “stop DDoSing us with AI-generated code”, it feels more of a political statement “let’s try to do better than just put fossil on fire so we can save X minutes writing code and thinking”
For some reason this gets swept under the rug in the software space, even the FOSS world. AI coding, code reviews, etc, are no different at all than AI “art” or chatbots or whatever. People will try to claim that it’s no different than going to Stackoverflow or whatever, but these tools still utilize a fuckton of resources accelerating climate change, are built on mountains of stolen data, and Claude/ChatGPT/Github all line the pockets of fascists. The CEOs of all of these companies should legitimately be rotting in cells right now.
There’s absolute 0 ethical use of this stuff. The closest you can get is an on-device model that runs offline on local hardware, but even those are trained on absurdly massive amounts of stolen data - sure you might not be using destructive resources to run it, but it wouldn’t exist without that.
As far as I am aware nothing has been “stolen”, merely downloaded. Downloading is not theft; when a file is downloaded from a web server, the original copy remains as-is. If I steal your car you no longer have a car; if I download your car, I have an exact copy of your car and you still have a car.
I do not believe the ideology of “intellectual property” to be ethical, in fact I think it’s directly opposed to software freedom and users’ rights.
Edit: The usual disclaimer, this is not a defense of proprietary “AI” companies, nor an endorsement of “vibe coding” or slop slinging in general.
This also forbids AI assisted code review
It’s worded in a convoluted way, but they explicitly allow it. In the chapter A matter of interpretation they say:
“Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.”
The way I interpret it is that offline code review is fine. However, online AI-made comments or code suggestions on the platform are explicitly not allowed.
A policy I find very reasonable for projects like forgejo / sourcehut / codeberg.
