"Coincidental" means random, with no causal connection being explicitly claimed. It just means that two things share some characteristic (such as being relatives.) The thing that is coincidental is that the person who founded the company being discussed is also the father of another person who current events have brought into prominence.
It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause.
So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.
what is the relevance to the discussion about journals and peer review is my main question.
if i randomly mentioned that your name appears to be an alternate spelling of a 3-band active EQ guitar pedal, coincidentally sharing all of the letters except one, in my reply to you, most people would be confused. that is how i felt when randomly reading "Ghislaine Maxwell" in this context of journals and peer review.
Most of these people are legitimately stupid. This article is also pretty stupid for focusing on grammar and spelling when the content of these emails is also quite moronic.
I don't think Larry Summers was fired for hanging out with Epstein and talking terribly about women with him; I'm sure plenty of people knew that he was an Epstein-type and hung in Epstein-type circles, and he publicly said horrible things about women's capacities, to people he barely knew.
I think he was fired for sounding like a subnormal reddit dweller. Simply seeming like a mediocre dumb guy. The idea that he was teaching their precious children was simply repellent to Harvard alums. It makes it even more of an obscenity that he was in charge of the government response to the housing bubble, and for running up the stock market in the late 90s. It's so much worse when you confirm the awful acts were done by an actually dumb guy.
You want to fool yourself into thinking that these monsters were trapped by some bad premise within some elaborately reasoned theory or at least unfortunately tripped up by a sign error or a transposed digit buried somewhere. Nope, just a guy whose job is to sit in a chair with a bunch of qualifying paper around his name, and do the things that his backers pay him to do. An elite robosigner. They're not even charming or handsome.
It's funny that for all the complaints people have about the accuracy of The Social Network, the aspect that has aged the worst is that Larry Summers is depicted as clever and witty.
Over some Democratic party campaign wedge issue like illegal immigrants (who I guess are the only people who should be protected from constant surveillance, so special.) They will immediately not care about this at all when they are in charge of ICE, or whatever they rename it. Democrats love Flock (i.e. get paid by Flock.)
> It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly.
It is. You haven't argued it at all, right here. You just asserted it as if it were self-evident, talked about your feelings, then demanded policy.
Your only job here was to convince people to align with you, and you didn't bother. It makes me suspect that you haven't really solidified the argument in your own mind.
What you think is obvious is not obvious. Please make your argument instead of insulting people.
I could guess at arguments but the ones that come to mind are pretty weak. For copyrightability, if half the lines in a FLOSS project are public domain, the license will still be effective. For infringement when training, that's not really the user's problem. For LLMs being proprietary, that doesn't infect the output, also many LLMs are not proprietary. For danger, there's not a lot of that specifically in the code-making context, and I don't see how danger makes something anti-FLOSS either.
I don't understand a lot of the anti-LLM venom within this specific context. Debian doesn't have to worry about stealing GPL code, so the copyright argument is nearly nil. There's still the matter of attribution-ware, but Debian includes tons of attribution and I'm sure would happily include anyone who thinks their OSS might have been trained on.
So leaving that aside, it just seems to be the revulsion that programmers feel towards a lot of LLM slop and the aggravation of getting a lot of slop submissions? Something that seems to be universal in the FOSS social environment, but also seems to be indicative of a boundary issue for me:
The fact that machines have started to write reasonable code doesn't mean that you don't have any responsibility to read or review it before you hand it to someone. You could always write shit code and submit it without debugging it or refactoring it sanely, etc. Projects have always had to deal with this, and I suspect they've dealt with this through limiting the people they talk to to their friends, putting arbitrary barriers in front of people who want to contribute, and just being bitchy. While they were doing this, non-corporate FOSS was stagnating and dying because 1) no one would put up with that without being paid, and/or 2) money could buy your way past barriers and bitchiness.
Projects need to groom contributors, not simply pre-filter contributions by identity in order to cut down on their workload. There has to be an onboarding process, and that onboarding process has to include banning and condemning people that give you unreviewed slop, and spreading their names and accounts to other projects that could be targeted. Zero tolerance for people who send you something to read that they didn't bother to read. If somebody is getting AI to work for them, then trust grows in that person, and their contributions should be valued.
I think the AI part is a distraction. AI is better for Debian that almost anyone else, because Debian is copyleft and avoids the problems that copyleft poses for other software. The problem is that people working within Free Software need some sort of structured social/code interaction where there are reputations to be gained and lost that aren't isolated to single interactions over pull requests, or trying to figure out how and where to submit patches. Where all of the information is in one place about how to contribute, and also about who is contributing.
Priority needs to be placed on making all of this stuff clear. Debian is a massive enough project, basically all-encompassing, where it could actually set up something like this for itself and the rest of FOSS could attach itself later. Why doesn't Debian have a "github" that mirrors all of the software it distributes? Aren't they the perfect place? One of the only good, functional examples of online government?
edit: There's no reason that Debian shouldn't be giving attribution to every online FOSS project that could possibly be run on Linux (it will be run on Debian, and hopefully distributed through apt-get.) Maybe a Debian contributor slash FOSS-in-general social network is the way to do that? Isn't debian.org almost that already?
Before LLM did code, you could at least have assumed that the submitter had written it (at worst, copy-pasted large parts of it), even if they had not read or reviewed it. Furthermore, writing (even copy pasting) is quite labour intensive, so there was that hurdle too.
> Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use.
This is just an assertion that you're making. There's no argument here. I'm aware that this is also an assertion that some judges have made.
My claim is that LLMs are not human, therefore when you apply words like "training" to them, you're only doing it metaphorically. It's no more "training" than copying code to a different hard drive is training that hard drive. And it's no more "transformative" than rar'ing or zipping the code, then unzipping it. I can't sell my jpgs of pngs I downloaded from Getty.
I have no idea how LLMs can be considered transformative work that immunizes me from owing the least bit of respect to the source material, but if I sample 2-6 second snatches from 10 different songs, put them through over 9000 filters and blend them into a new work, I owe money to everyone involved. I might even owe money to the people who wrote the filters, depending on the licensing.
> 98.7% unique.
This doesn't mean anything. This is a meaningless arrangement of words. The way we figure out things are piracy is through provenance, not bizarre ad hoc measurements. If I read a book in Spanish and rewrite it in English, it doesn't suddenly become mine even though it's 96.6492387% unique. Not even if I drop a few chapters, add in a couple of my own, and change the ending.
> This is just an assertion that you're making. There's no argument here.
...OK? Was somebody asking me for an "argument"? I'm just stating how things are currently understood.
> And it's no more "transformative" than rar'ing or zipping the code, then unzipping it.
That's obviously false, so I'm not sure what to tell you.
> but if I sample 2-6 second snatches from 10 different songs, put them through over 9000 filters and blend them into a new work, I owe money to everyone involved
You don't, actually, if they're no longer recognizable -- which they wouldn't be after "9000 filters". I don't know where you got that idea that you'd still owe money. And I've certainly never heard of an audio filter license that was contingent on commerical distribution.
> This doesn't mean anything. This is a meaningless arrangement of words.
Statistics are meaningful. Obviously you need to look at the actual identical lines. But if they're a bunch of trivial things like initializing variables with obvious names, then they don't count for much. And if you're adhering to the same API, you would expect to have some small percentage of lines happen to match. So the fact that this is <2%, as opposed to 40%, is hugely significant as a first step of analysis.
I suggest you might find conversations here on HN more productive if you soften your tone a bit. Saying things like "this is just an assertion that you're making" or "this is a meaningless arrangement of words" is not generally going to make people want to respond to you.
I absolutely think that this is the result of the chaotic formation of a bizarre American religion (that is largely universal among the world's "middle class" now.) It's Silva Mind Control -> Leadership Dynamics -> Holiday Magic, Scientology, Large Group Awareness Training (as you can still see in the Landmark Forum), Synanon, etc.; mixed up in a pot with hippie language/consciousness raising, 70s-80s spiritual self-help Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts/Seth neo-Spiritualism; all banged in with garbled Cybernetics, RAND corporation papers, military operations jargon and the 70s-80s obsession with personal physical fitness and orthorexia.
In the end, you just have this universal language to justify and excuse power and blame victims for being weak enough to be victimized. Powerful people move with the energy flow and direct it, and weak people move against it, twist it, and are twisted by it. Mastery of this makes money and happiness flow towards you, and resistance to it makes money and happiness flow away from you.
Very convenient moral calculus for people who inherited money and hand it to people who do what they say. Convenient justification to do anything that pays, no matter how corrupt and harmful. If it were really harmful, it wouldn't pay in the end. And isn't everything harmful, in a way, to some extent?
In the 80s, you start to see books laying out fairly incoherent systems for total personal, business and societal organization, but the premises are really drawn from all of the previous nonsense. It's easy to say it's stupid, but leading into this time (and dying during this time along with its practitioners) the overwhelmingly dominant psychological theory was the cynical word salad of Freudian psychoanalysis. This stuff was honestly more based in the real world.
> Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication.
This is the time when the terminology was finally settling. There was to be a new priesthood of consultants. Tbh, I don't think that it's designed to be popular, it's designed to supply language to justify predatory acts. This was also the rise of the "think tank," which came to dominate society through writing laws and supplying the language to help politicians deliver for their donors.
I still think that the real harm was done by the popularization of Freud, training the public to speak about the real world in speculative, scientistic, psychological terms. This sort of management language just washes over people trained not to ever verify their theory-theories against any sort of real outcomes (i.e. Freud), other than the post hoc justification of wealth.
My father went into "organizational development" in the late-80s at Allstate Insurance. Bringing this all full-circle, it turned out he was also being trained in crypto-Scientology: https://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate2.html
Sorry about the rant, it might come off as word salad. I wish it was.
It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause.
So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.
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