I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
unlike most Asian countries, individual freedom is the foundation on which American society has been built; it's why many people migrated to the US over the past 250 years
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
Because we in america tend to value individual liberties in a way that others don't. And yes of course LPR is mass surveillance. Cars should not even have to be registered.
maybe we didn't care as much because we didn't have gangs of armed Gestapo-like thugs roaming the streets and abusing or killing people, ripping families apart, unaccountable to the law, and spending billions to build new concentration camps; with this camera data being sold to said secret police.
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
I've found ai really good at the rare problems. The code hangs 1 out of 200 times - it spends half an hour and finds a race condition and a proposed fix - something complex that is really difficult for humans to figure out. Now grated the above problem took a dozen rounds over a couple days to completly solve (and it happend more often than every two weeks), but it was able to find an answer given symptoms.
I've thought for a while now that we'll end up moving to stricter languages that have safer concurrency, etc, partly for this reason. The most prominent resistance against such languages was the learning curve, but humans like OP aren't looking at the code now.
I wouldn't call this "clean-room". The models were trained on all available open source, including that exact original Linux driver. Splitting sessions saves you from direct copy-paste in the current context window, but the weights themselves remember the internal code structure perfectly well. Lawyers still have to rack their brains over this, but for now, it looks more like license laundering through the neural net's latent space than true reverse engineering
You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.
This is speculation, but I suspect the training data argument is going to be a real loser in the courtroom. We’re getting out of the region where memorization is a big failure mode for frontier models. They are also increasingly trained on synthetic text, whose copyright is very difficult to determine.
We also so far have yet to see anyone successfully sue over software copyright with LLMs—-this is a bit redundant, but we’ve also not seen a user of one of these models be sued for output.
Maybe we converge on the view of the US copyright office which is that none of this can be protected.
I kind of like that one as a future for software engineers, because it forces them all at long last to become rules lawyers. If we disallow all copyright protection for machine generated code, there might be a cottage industry of folks who provide a reliably human layer that is copyrightable. Like Boeing, they will have to write to the regulator and not to the spec. I feel that’s a suitable destination for a discipline. That’s had it too good for too long.
Okay, so will companies now vibe-code a Linux-like license-washed kernel, to get rid of the GPL?
> The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Yes, and? Isn't Stallmans first freedom the "freedom to study the source code" (FSF Freedom I)? Where does it say I have to be a human to study it? If you argue "oh but you may only read / train on the source code if you are intending to write / generate GPL code", then you're admitting that the GPL effectively is only meant for "libre" programmers in their "libre" universe and it might as well be closed-source. If a human may study the code to extract the logic (the "idea") without infringing on the expression, why is it called "laundering" if a machine does it?
Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extreme: If I read some GPL code and a year later I implement a program that roughly resembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".
In German copyright law, there is a concept of a "fading formula": if the creative features of the original work "fade away" behind the independent content of the new work to the point of being unrecognizable, it constitutes a new work, not a derivative, so the input license doesn't matter. So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
> Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extrtsembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".
It's entirely dependent on how similar the code you write is to the licensed code that you saw, and what could be proved about what you saw, but potentially yes: if you study GPL code, and then write code that is very uniquely similar to it, you may have infringed on the author's copyright. US courts have made some rulings which say that the substantial similarity standard does apply to software, although pretty much every ruling for these cases ends up in the defendant's favor (the one who allegedly "copied" some software).
> So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
Sure, but that doesn't apply to this instance. This is implementing a BSD driver based on a Linux driver for that hardware. I'm not making the general case that LLMs are committing copyright infringement on a grand scale. I'm saying that giving GPL code to an LLM (in this case the GPL code was input to the model, which seems much more egregious than it being in the training data) and having the LLM generate that code ported to a new platform feels slimy. If we can do this, then copyleft licenses will become pretty much meaningless. I gather some people would consider that a win.
DJB, like RMS, has proven over decades that he is swayed only by principles. When these people sound the alarm, you should listen. Even if they are nerdy folks.
The 10k-foot view is that you pick the random numbers involved in the TLS handshake in a deterministic way, much like how zk proofs use the Fiat-Shamir transform. In other words, instead of using true randomness, you use some hash of the transcript of the handshake so far (sort of). Since TLS doesn't do client authentication the DH exchange involves randomness from the client.
For all the blockchain haters out there: cryptocurrency is the reason this technology exists. Be thankful.
This is exactly the kind of challenge I would want to judge AI systems based on. It required ten bleeding-edge-research mathematicians to publish a problem they've solved but hold back the answer. I appreciate the huge amount of social capital and coordination that must have taken.
Of course it isn't made the front page. If something is promising they hunt it down, and when conquered they post about it. Lot of times the new category has much better results, than the default HN view.
Unfortunately that's ending with mandatory-BYOK from the model vendors. They're starting to require that you BYOK to force you through their arbitrary+capricious onboarding process.
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