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jerf 34 days ago [-]
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter.
A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.
This is a big change!
Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
modeless 34 days ago [-]
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
Twey 33 days ago [-]
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
ff317 33 days ago [-]
The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal.
Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.
hamdingers 33 days ago [-]
This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
gbalduzzi 33 days ago [-]
> If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?
Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.
They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.
The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately
godelski 32 days ago [-]
What would really help is for people to understand that that's the "spirit of the law" and the "letter of the law".
People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.
I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.
JambalayaJimbo 30 days ago [-]
>cars have gotten safer
For their inhabitants, maybe not pedestrians though. Speeding laws are in part for protecting pedestrians
godelski 30 days ago [-]
In general cars have also gotten safer for pedestrians[0]. Modern cars are lighter and made of plastic. There's better visibility, sensors, and for most vehicles the shape of the car has improved things.
American trucks are an interesting counter example but that's a more complicated issue. (The source has a comment that you can infer this being a concern with trucks but there's also a lot of sources on this that you can easily find)
^This. A large % of jurisprudence is in just trying to keep up with how tech disrupts society.
randallsquared 33 days ago [-]
The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per day. Something will have to give.
terryf 33 days ago [-]
The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following scenarios is SAFER:
a) I'm driving on the road in a brand new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and brand new tyres. Doing 40mph.
b) I'm driving on the same road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres, in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.
Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
hamdingers 33 days ago [-]
The Cayenne would be safer going 35 instead of 40 regardless of all other variables. It's a trivial physics question, kinetic energy is a function of mass and velocity.
fiddlerwoaroof 33 days ago [-]
The Cayenne would not be safer going 35 instead of 40 "regardless of all other variables": it's statistically safer to go closer to the flow of traffic because you're then "at rest" with respect to other drivers (assuming a controlled access road without pedestrian traffic). If the speed limit is 55 and the flow of traffic is 70–80 (as is the case with the Beltway around DC, despite automated enforcement), then going 55 is more dangerous than "speeding". The issue with 100% enforcement is every law assumes certain circumstances or variables and the real world is infinitely more complex than any set of variables that can reasonably be foreseen by law (and laws that attempt to foresee as many variables as possible are more complicated and, consequently, harder for normal people to apply, which is another reason for latitude in enforcement).
vincnetas 33 days ago [-]
safer for whom? Remember cars are not the only ones participating in traffic.
fiddlerwoaroof 33 days ago [-]
“assuming a controlled access road without pedestrian traffic”
singpolyma3 33 days ago [-]
such roads barely need speed limits. In some places they do not have them
33 days ago [-]
JambalayaJimbo 30 days ago [-]
The problem with your DC beltway example wouldn’t be automated enforcement then, but with the speed limit itself.
A road without pedestrians and intersections in it should have a speed limit that reflects the reality of its use (70-80)
terryf 33 days ago [-]
I meant a 911 but thank you for answering a completely different point than what I was making.
ikr678 33 days ago [-]
The reason we have speed limits isnt due to vehciles being unable to 'handle' certain speeds though, it's to minimise the damage of an incident at that speed, which is entirely a matter of physics.
moron4hire 33 days ago [-]
No, that is not true. I used to work on road signage systems, where we would use test vehicles, sensors, and math to figure out what the correct signage should be for various sections of road. The standards are primarily concerned with maintain a margin of error for the "worst" cars on the road, i.e. the ones that meet only the minimum inspection requirements. What happens once that margin of error is exceeded was anyone's guess, but practically could be wildly different for specific scenarios that had more to do with the off-road environment than the exact parameters of the road. Two roads with identical bends would receive the same signage regardless of whether under steering through the curve would land you on a sidewalk or in a field or over a cliff.
akoboldfrying 33 days ago [-]
AFAICT at least 2 people in this thread don't seem to think that visibility -- a function of, among other things, weather and time of day -- influences driving safety. I find this amazing.
The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.
butlike 33 days ago [-]
"Regardless of all other variables"
Variable 1: The Cayenne is on a train track
Variable 2: The train behind the Cayenne is going 35mph.
You painted with too broad of a brush with that statement.
iso-logi 33 days ago [-]
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dinowars 33 days ago [-]
If there was an accident an officer might give you a fine in both cases where I live. In the Porsche case they can say you broke the law and were speeding that led to the accident. But also in the case of old car for failing to adjust your speed to your skills, the state of your vehicle and conditions of the road and weather regardless of the speed limit.
lan321 33 days ago [-]
The classic. In Bulgaria they used to do that (and maybe still do). Every time there was an accident they'd often write up everyone for "speed not matching the conditions" with the idea that all accidents are avoidable, you just weren't going fast/slow enough so git gud and don't forget to pay in the next 2 weeks to get a discount.
terryf 33 days ago [-]
Yes! This is exactly the point - machinistic enforcement makes no sense in case of speed limits. All laws about driving explicitly say that at the end of the day it's the driver's responsibility to drive safely and if they cause an accident, then they are at fault in some cases even if they followed the speed limit.
The point is that whether you drove dangerously is not a strict, machinistic "if-then" assessment. Automatic enforcement of speeding is ridiculous when viewed in this context.
And the people saying "yes but there is more energy in a faster vehicle" have clearly not felt the difference between driving a car with drum brakes vs modern brakes.
airstrike 33 days ago [-]
A system that solves for absolute compliance in every individual case does not result in the emergence of a fairer society.
There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.
mastermage 33 days ago [-]
exactly what it ends up with is a surveillance state. Looking at you China.
datsci_est_2015 33 days ago [-]
What, do you expect techbros to have media literacy? We wouldn’t be in any of this mess if they did.
cindyllm 33 days ago [-]
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encom 33 days ago [-]
If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.
>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression
That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.
5upplied_demand 33 days ago [-]
> If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.
Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?
> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.
I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.
> If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.
If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit, then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.
encom 33 days ago [-]
Please shred your drivers license immediately, if you at any point in your life have exceeded the speed limit by any amount, or otherwise violated the traffic regulations in any way whatsoever.
no-name-here 33 days ago [-]
Why? 1) If grandparent commenter got a moving violation, shouldn't they just face the corresponding - why posit a made-up penalty for the violation? 2) And if people know there is perfect enforcement, wouldn't they be expected to adjust their behavior going forward, such as driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it?
encom 33 days ago [-]
>driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it
That is precisely why traffic would effectively grind to a halt. Because going even 0,0001 over the limit is so easy, you would have to turtle through traffic to get anywhere while making certain you never go above the limit. 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes you have to accelerate yourself out of a dangerous situation.
Honestly if you are arguing for this idea, I strongly suspect you have no experience driving. I've driven for about 25 years. I've received two speeding tickets. One in Germany (I'm danish), where I got confused due to unfamiliar signage and got dinged for going 112km in a 100km zone. And once here I got a ticket for going 54 in a 50 - my mom was at the hospital, possibly about to die (she didn't). Both of those were speed traps.
no-name-here 32 days ago [-]
How close to your desired speed are you able to maintain?
> 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold.
Is the argument that you and others would be unable to safely achieve the posted speed within the speed limited area? For example, if you feel you can't drive more precisely than 40-50 when you are aiming for 45, in the above scenario, you could start with your goal being 45, then in the 30 zone aim for 25, knowing that you'd be going no faster than 30 when your intend to drive 25.
> 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment.
Should you aim for 55, if for example the most precise you can do is +/- 5? Or adjust correspondingly for how precise you are able to keep within a desired range.
And of course:
* In a world where enforcement was more consistent, we might expect speed limits to eventually be adjusted - i.e. are speed limits currently set lower than what is technically safe because we assume that some portion of people will currently break the law?
* With self-driving, or at least automated speed-keeping (but not steering) there will no longer be the issue of someone having the problem of being unable to stay within x km/h of the speed they're targeting.
encom 32 days ago [-]
I know how to drive a car. I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately. The point in this absurd scenario is that perfect enforcement of the speed limits is asinine, because if you make any mistake at all, no matter how insignificant, you get fined.
>automated speed-keeping
My car displays what it thinks is the speed limit on the dashboard, and it gets it wrong all the time. If I relied on that in this hypothetical, I would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison, after it once said the limit was 110km on a narrow residential street.
no-name-here 32 days ago [-]
Are the scenarios you laid what you honestly expect the world would turn out to be like if the world changed in the coming years so that speed laws are consistently applied? It seems like you believe that if the law was consistently applied, nothing else would change -- not the laws, speed limits, conservative behavior, etc (whether based on lawmakers' actions nor voters' demands) (other than the enforcement/penalty frequency going up to match how often people break the law)?
Isn't that like saying "What would the effects be if time travel existed" but assuming that doesn't then prompt any changes in human behavior, laws, other technologies, etc. from what people were doing everyday and what existed before it? When discussing "What if x changed", I think we need to also take into account the other changes in laws, behaviors, etc. that one expects that to then prompt - whether big or small.
> perfect enforcement
Isn't consistent enforcement of the law far better than the current inconsistent and unequal enforcement, where people already face unequal enforcement for 'driving while black', where if an officer is having a bad day or doesn't like you they can already cite you strictly, and where other people are regularly able to get away with 20 mph over a limit, where every driver and officer guesses/decides for themselves about whether the current limit should be strictly enforced vs allow 5 over, 15 over, etc etc?
> I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately.
So instead of aiming for 33 in a 30 km zone, couldn't you aim for a slightly lower number in order to avoid the scenario you expect for yourself where if the law was consistently applied you would be "would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison"?
lucketone 33 days ago [-]
Everybody going 30km/h does not constitute “halt”
encom 33 days ago [-]
In a literal sense, no. In a practical sense, yes.
lucketone 32 days ago [-]
Exaggeration is the right of a poetic soul.
watwut 33 days ago [-]
That is completely different argument. Yes, I exceeded speed limit here and there. I am not deluded enough to think it was "unavoidable" or "impossible to drive slower".
It is perfectly possible to drive and obey all speed limits. It is even technically easy. Us people choosing not to do so, because we are impatient, feeling competitive against other drivers or because we just think we can get away with it now does not make it impossible.
array_key_first 33 days ago [-]
Laws can't be enforced 100% of the time because many laws require intent, which is unknowable. You have to make an educated guess behind it. Even if someone tells you their intent, straight up, you still don't know their intent. You just know what they want you to think their intent is, which may or may not be the same thing. It's legitimately unknowable.
Ideally, for a lot of things we want to punish people who knowingly do bad stuff, not people who do bad stuff because they thought it was good.
bambax 33 days ago [-]
Very true but not in all cases. In case of speed limit intent does not matter; "I didn't know I was speeding" is no excuse. Same with DUI.
In fact DUI should be a mitigating circumstance, because when you're drunk your ability to make decisions is impaired -- but the opposite happens, DUI is an aggravating circumstance.
efitz 33 days ago [-]
What about drunk driving laws?
emmelaich 33 days ago [-]
Same argument applies. Driving slowly for 1km 0.01 under the speed limit, over legal blood alco limit is safer than driving at the speed limit for 10kms just under the alco limit.
It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.
The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.
That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.
namlem 33 days ago [-]
There is an upside: oppressing people who consistently engage in antisocial behavior is good and necessary.
Geezus_42 33 days ago [-]
The whole point is that only some of those engaging in anti-social behaviour recieve punishment.
namlem 24 days ago [-]
Right. People who only intermittently engage in such behaviors should be treated differently than people who consistently engage in them.
okasaki 33 days ago [-]
Not really? If you're caught with burglary tools on private property that's still illegal even if you only took one step.
Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of whether you actually ever touch them.
etc. Many such cases.
presentation 33 days ago [-]
Actually it does harm people. High speed traffic is noisy and unpleasant, flows unpredictably, and tears up roads faster.
derefr 33 days ago [-]
I think I would expect certain laws that are currently considered statutory / strict-liability laws, to be shifted to instead constitute only "evidence of negligence" and/or act as "aggravating conditions."
So, in the case of speeding:
- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)
- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.
We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.
- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.
This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
---
Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.
aftbit 33 days ago [-]
>(Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
Or perhaps people will not be able to just "not pull over" because the police drones will be given the power to remotely command their car to stop. Heck, why even have the drones? Just require that the car monitor speeding infractions and report them for fines. Serious or repeat offenders can have their throttles locked out to the speed limit of the current road.
derefr 33 days ago [-]
Presumably because non-autonomous vehicles will still exist. Heck, there are moving violations you can perform on foot.
aftbit 32 days ago [-]
Sure, in the same way that vehicles without backup cameras or even airbags still exist. They will become less common over time. Vehicles don't have to be fully autonomous to provide this "service". They just need to have a reliable grasp of which road segment they are on and what the speed limit is. It will take some time but it won't be long before there are no cars left on the road that lack the (at least theoretical) ability to be controlled via cell radio. Heck, even without a police incentive, this will happen just because remotely disabling a car is a great way to simplify repossession.
I personally happen to think this is a terrible idea, just one cyber attack or regime change away from crippling everyday Americans ability to get around and live their lives, but that probably won't stop it from happening.
derefr 32 days ago [-]
I would note that motorcycles, ATVs, tractors, etc. still don't have seatbelts or airbags. And sure, that's partly because, for some combinations of safety feature x vehicle class, they fundamentally can't. But we could have just outlawed public road use by those vehicle classes because of that. We didn't, because the lack of much more basic safety features (e.g. a roll cage) was already "priced in" to our decision to allow those vehicle classes on the road to begin with. These vehicle classes represent different trade-offs in safety-space, that operators of all vehicles sharing the road are highly aware of, maintaining a sort of mutual understanding of vulnerability of the different types of vehicles they're sharing the road with.
(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)
And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.
And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.
aftbit 31 days ago [-]
A guy on a literbike can drive at such stupidly fast speeds that he can't actually be pulled over already. By and large, society continues to function despite the occasional scofflaw doing 180 in a 55. They don't even tend to kill bystanders all that often.
I would imagine that if, say, 95% of vehicles on the road were incapable of speeding, there would be very little reason for the police to attempt to stop the other 5%. You'd probably still have token speed enforcement, but without the revenue raising potential of frequent speed tickets, it would likely make sense to direct enforcement resources elsewhere.
fc417fc802 33 days ago [-]
To wit, in some places you will be issued a DUI (of sorts) for riding a bicycle home from the bar. And it's actually enforced. Talk about the police shooting themselves in the foot.
jll29 33 days ago [-]
> I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge.
Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).
Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.
Twey 32 days ago [-]
They certainly have the right. All laws are (effectively?) public in every country I can think of, even when the law is ‘don't upset the not-so-benevolent dictator’. The problem is that to try to cover all the corner cases the sheer amount of law in effect in rule-of-law countries is too much for any one human to realistically consume, and that's before getting into the various _interpretations_ of the laws given by case law, precedent, etc. Any ‘plain-language’ explanation would be a) still gigantic and b) wrong in new and exciting ways — this is why the entire profession of ‘lawyer’ exists.
To make this more practicable you might be able to drastically narrow the context of the information, e.g. to the current task. So you could have an app that watches everything you do and tells you if you're (possibly) about to break a law. The extreme version of this looks like wearing a body camera at all times and having a little ‘voice of the state’ in your ear that tells you what your legal options are on every circumstance. Maybe a little dystopian, especially if it starts reporting you if you don't follow its guidance.
RobRivera 33 days ago [-]
Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment.
Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.
But this is a feature, not a bug.
c-linkage 33 days ago [-]
Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not possible to precisely define law.
Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.
pc86 33 days ago [-]
"Law is about justice" is one of those things a good professor gets every 1L to raise their hands in agreement to before spending the next semester proving why that's 100% not the case.
Eisenstein 33 days ago [-]
Justice is part of a moral framework. Law is part of a procedural framework. You can structure the law to try to optimize for justice, but the law has never been about morality, the law is about keeping society operating on top of whatever structure is dominant.
Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.
Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
RobRivera 33 days ago [-]
I hold the opinion that law is not about justice.
conductr 33 days ago [-]
I don’t know, law enforcement in the US is already heavy handed in terms of enforcement. Not that it’s done equally, which is your intention, but it’s that the enforcer already thinks they are overly powerful and already commonly oversteps and abuse their power. This pushes further into a police state.
Maybe my YouTube algorithm just shows me a lot of it, but there’s no shortage of cops out there violating people’s rights because they think when they ask for something we have to comply and see anything else as defiant.
I think we need perhaps less laws so people can actually know them all. Also, I think we need clarity as to what they are and it needs to be simple English, dummy’s guide to law type thing. But there’s a lot of issues that simply stem from things like 1) when can a cop ask for your ID? / when do you have the right to say no? 2) similar question as to when do they have a right to enter/trespass onto your property? 3) as every encounter usually involves them asking you questions, even a simple traffic stop, when and how can you refuse to talk to them or even roll down your window or open your car door without them getting offended and refusing to take no as an answer?
I don’t think we generally have any understanding of what our rights actually are in these most likely and most common interactions with law enforcement. However, it’s all cases where I see law enforcement themselves have a poor understanding of what the law and rights are themselves so how are citizens to really know. If they tell you it’s their policy to ID anyone they want without any sort of probable cause then they say you’re obstructing their investigation for not complying or answering their questions or asserting you have to listen to anything they say because it’s a lawful order; it’s just common ways they get people to do what they want, it’s often completely within your right to not comply with a lot of these things though.
briHass 33 days ago [-]
I've always said one of the best non-major-related courses I took in college was Criminal Justice 101, which went through all the most applicable SCOTUS case law for common scenarios. Ignoring the variation in state laws, you could boil it down to about 30 rules of thumb. Many of the most important are covered in the classic YouTube lecture 'Don't talk to the police.'
Teaching this as a requires HS class would be an incredible benefit to society, because, on the flip side, many police encounters escalate to violence because the citizen has an incorrect understanding of where their rights end/don't exist.
The most obvious rule to follow is that you should always assert your rights (correct or incorrect) verbally only, as soon as you involve physical resistance, the situation will deteriorate rapidly (for you.) Any violations of your rights will be argued and dealt with in court, not on the street. Confirm requests/demands from officers are 'lawful orders', and then do them.
RobotToaster 33 days ago [-]
One issue is that imperfect enforcement is often how the momentum to change the law is created.
If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.
hyperjeff 32 days ago [-]
This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.
anovikov 33 days ago [-]
Quite the opposite. A lot of obviously innocent people ending up in jail will have created a massive backlash a lot earlier, helping fixing idiotic legislation.
dsr_ 33 days ago [-]
Only if the legal system allows itself to be changed.
The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.
RobotToaster 33 days ago [-]
For crimes that require intention, people usually only end up in jail because they thought they could get away with it, because of imperfect enforcement.
If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.
SkyBelow 33 days ago [-]
That really depends upon the the reputation. If the police were to arrest a lot of 'very dangerous people', and all you see on the new is that they put the 'very dangerous people' in prison, then that isn't going to cause outrage. What causes outrage is when you know Mark down the street is one of those 'very dangerous people', but he was definitely not someone you gave your those vibes. So you look it up and notice the actual crime, even if it sounds bad on paper, means Mark might not actually be one of those 'very dangerous people'. A single instance isn't much, but across society this leads to questioning a law.
But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.
This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).
Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.
namlem 33 days ago [-]
Imperfect enforcement is a feature as often as it is a bug. You can't make "antisocial behavior" in general illegal but you can make certain behaviors (loitering, public intoxication) illegal and selectively enforce against only those who are behaving in an antisocial manner. Of course the other edge of this sword is using this discretion to blanket discriminate against racial or class groups.
spaqin 33 days ago [-]
Speeding is brought up as an example that most replies refer to, but it really is not limited to that. How about jaywalking? Using the road on a bicycle when there's a bike lane available of varying quality? Or taking a piss in the bushes after a drunken night out? Downloading a 60 year old movie? Besides, perfect enforcement does not work with vague laws. It's not a world I would like to live in, where there is no room for error.
solatic 33 days ago [-]
To add some context -
> Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power
This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.
The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
rrr_oh_man 33 days ago [-]
> The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
I think there’s a difference between the marketing brochure and reality.
beagle3 33 days ago [-]
The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for precise enforcement, often on purpose.
You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.
The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?
singpolyma3 33 days ago [-]
We can fix it by fixing the law. In this case the obvious solution is to abolish copyright (and other IP laws).
beagle3 32 days ago [-]
Good Luck!
vjk800 33 days ago [-]
There can also be an argument that laws are always only an approximation, and they should be broken in corner cases where they clearly don't work as intended.
Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.
nwatson 33 days ago [-]
Enforcement stops completely at around US$1-billion.
wisty 33 days ago [-]
The far left and neoliberals are united on this. Whether it's by malice, self interest or incompetence (or a combination), they end up discriminating against the lower classes.
Neoliberals and the far left, when forced to work in the real world, both tend to prefer putting power into rules, not giving people in authority the power to make decisions.
The upside is there's less misuse of power by authorities, at least in theory. The bad news is, you now need far more detailed rules to allow for the exceptions, common sense, and nuance that are no longer up to authorities.
The worse news is, that the people who benefit from complex rules are the upper classes, and the authorities who know how to manipulate complex rules.
"Don't be evil" requires a leader with the authority to enforce it.
A 500 employee manual will be selectively implemented, and will end up full of exploits, but hey, at least you can pretend you tried to remove human error from the process.
igor47 34 days ago [-]
Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).
But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
codethief 33 days ago [-]
> I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement
As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning democratic society it must always be possible (in principle) to commit a crime and get away.
cortesoft 33 days ago [-]
Yep, not ever being able to break a law means that whatever the current set of laws are will never be able to be changed. If people can't ever push the boundaries of the law, we can never realize that the boundaries are in the wrong place.
Take some examples of laws that have changed over time. Say, interracial marriage. It was illegal in many places to marry someone of a different race. If this had been perfectly enforced, no one would have ever dated or see couples of different races, and people would have had a lot harder of a time exploring and realizing that the law was wrong.
The same thing could be said about marijuana legalization. If enforcement was perfect, no one would have ever tried marijuana, and there would have never been a movement to legalize by people who used it and decided it was not something that should be banned.
We need to be able to push boundaries so they can move when needed.
etothepii 33 days ago [-]
The US has traditionally solved this problem by having dozens of political entities that can compete (at least for elites) and, since the creation of the interstate highway system, the oppressed can flee.
holoduke 33 days ago [-]
The people should always have the opportunity and power to behead the government.
coryrc 33 days ago [-]
That's tautological without the existence of cylons.
palmotea 33 days ago [-]
> Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).
The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.
eru 34 days ago [-]
Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are generally saner than voters.
Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter.
Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.
lupire 33 days ago [-]
Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst excesses".
vkou 33 days ago [-]
They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.
worthless-trash 33 days ago [-]
Its almost like they are sick of people commiting crimes.
wat10000 34 days ago [-]
How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no exception.
sensanaty 34 days ago [-]
This is of course assuming that politicians aren't largely duplicitious and actually believe in a word they say. I grew up in Indonesia, and the number of politicians who were extremely anti-porn getting caught watching porn in parliament is frankly staggering, yet alone the ones who are pro death penalty for drugs caught as being part of massive drug smuggling rings.
throwaway2037 34 days ago [-]
You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 1960s/1970s, Hongkong dramatically increased the pay for civil servants (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It worked, mostly.)
K0balt 33 days ago [-]
I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the person in charge.
Arrowmaster 33 days ago [-]
Part of how the USA got that way is hilariously enough, anti-corruption policies.
throwaway2037 33 days ago [-]
> much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture
I am unsure how to interpret this comment. It is so broad that it dilutes the effect. Are there any wealthy countries that you feel do not suffer from the same issue?
K0balt 32 days ago [-]
Idk, I’ve not lived in any wealthy countries besides the USA.
miki123211 33 days ago [-]
Corruption is eliminated by properly aligning incentives. Capitalism is also all about properly aligning incentives. Moving to a more capitalism-heavy system usually causes countries to get much richer.
Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.
throwaway2037 33 days ago [-]
This is probably the best explanation. I didn't consider that when incentives are better aligned through capitalism, that perceived corruption may naturally fall. Your example of Eastern Europe is a very good one.
mlyle 33 days ago [-]
> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.
We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.
But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.
Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.
(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
miki123211 33 days ago [-]
This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments.
The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
bombcar 33 days ago [-]
The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.
But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
no-name-here 33 days ago [-]
I think their point was that a lot (but not all) of the existing argument boils down to “Well it should be that way because someone decided it hundreds of years ago” so if we are consciously starting again from scratch, ideally that specific argument no longer holds water. (I’d say we should instead use data based approaches, look at what has been successful in other countries, etc, although that’s slightly expanding the current topic.)
andrewaylett 33 days ago [-]
One big difference between the UK's historic constitutionalia and the US is that the UK generally recognises that we only do things a certain way because agreeing how to change them is too hard, while the US appears to think that they do things in their certain way because that's the right way to do them.
Specific examples for the UK: inducting politicians into the Privy Council in order to qualify them for security briefings, Henry VII powers, and ministers' authority deriving from the seal they're given by the sovereign. Which would almost make as much sense if it were a marine mammal as it does being a stamp.
The thing being, they work well enough. And if you want to replace them, you need to work out what to replace them with and how.
bombcar 33 days ago [-]
Modern democracy starts to make a lot more sense when you realize the driving principles are "what works easy enough" and "how do we prevent getting to the point of violent revolution".
tekne 33 days ago [-]
I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.
pocksuppet 33 days ago [-]
Many times when politicians get to suffer the full effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the better.
schoen 33 days ago [-]
There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer
which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.
I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
miki123211 33 days ago [-]
And this goes both ways.
Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.
This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.
LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
cortesoft 33 days ago [-]
I have some lawyer friends, who work as internal council to companies, that are already experiencing this.
People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored.
However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though.
So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one.
The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
tirant 33 days ago [-]
They just need to implement a better LLM that is able to deal with all that crap.
At the end we will just have agents interacting with each other.
cortesoft 33 days ago [-]
The problem is the legal liability is also asymmetrical. If the person making the bogus legal claims with the LLM messes up, the claim will just be dismissed and it isn't a big deal for the person making the claim. If the reading LLM messes up and classifies a real claim with the bogus ones, the company could have a major problem.
Pannoniae 34 days ago [-]
Yup :P
As in their post:
"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."
This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
degamad 33 days ago [-]
If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects?
High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?
I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.
(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
Pannoniae 33 days ago [-]
>If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects?
Because this is satire by FOSS people :)
phlakaton 33 days ago [-]
Agree with all this, but am not sure how it applies to this case. This seems rather the opposite behavior: accelerated bad de facto behavior because de jure enforcement is infeasible.
We are seeing this in the world of digital media, where frivolous DMCA and YouTube takedown reports are used indiscriminately and with seemingly little consequence to the bad actor. Corporations are prematurely complying with bad actors as a risk reduction measure. The de jure avenues to push back on this are weak, slow, expensive, and/or infeasible.
So if you ask me what's the bigger threat right now, stricter or less strict enforcement, I'd argue that it's still generally the latter. Though in the specific case of copyright I'd like to see a bunch of the law junked, and temporal scope greatly reduced (sorry not sorry, Disney and various literary estates), because the de facto effects of it on the digital (and analog!) commons are so insidious.
ndiddy 33 days ago [-]
I'd say it's neither, it's laws failing to keep pace with technological development. All the precedent around clean-room engineering implicitly assumes it'll be painstakingly done by a team of humans taking months or years of work. This means that while there is a way around copyright, the effort it takes to reimplement something poses enough of a barrier that complying with the license is the easier option in most cases. If we treat AI the same way we treat humans here, it means that the barrier is gone. Their blog post brings up the example of Phoenix Software's reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS. It took a team of engineers 4 months to write the initial version of that work. The authors were able to produce their own clean-room PC BIOS with zero human involvement in less than an hour. Currently both of these are treated as being legally equivalent.
tmoravec 33 days ago [-]
Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws were created at the time there was literally a detective listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening. Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude different.
bambax 33 days ago [-]
My mom, who's a lawyer, always told us that laws don't matter, what matter is how hard they're enforced, and we can simply ignore laws that exist but we know for a fact they're not enforced (or not enforceable).
I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal.
Now I'm not sure what to think anymore.
grumbelbart2 33 days ago [-]
Your mother's advice sounds terribly selfish, honestly. Our society is pretty much build on the fact that most people are in some way "good" and will not break laws and rules even if they could get away with it.
There are tons of stuff every day I could steal, knowing that any law I might break would not be enforceable simply because no one knew it was me. Littering in the forest. Dumping toxic materials into rivers.
All that works because most people don't do it, only a few.
bambax 32 days ago [-]
Sure; I was generalizing; my mother never taught us that stealing or killing or even polluting was fine if we would not get caught!
However I don't think I agree with your way of thinking. The reason we have laws is because people will not naturally do the right thing; otherwise laws and police would be entirely unnecessary, no?
Valodim 33 days ago [-]
The argument of your mother does seem to disregard moral aspects of breaking the law.
parpfish 34 days ago [-]
I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition.
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
JackYoustra 34 days ago [-]
The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is.
To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
softgrow 33 days ago [-]
To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as:
* narrow looking roadway
* speed limit signs
* your car has self driving
* what everybody else is doing
* speed limiter on your car
* curvy road
* bad weather
* male or female
* risk appetite
* driving experience
* experience of that route
* perceived risk of getting caught
If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.
LeifCarrotson 34 days ago [-]
Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years.
"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.
But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.
A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.
Speed cameras are another excellent example.
Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
dlenski 33 days ago [-]
> This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
Well said.
I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws.
It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them.
It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.
sweetjuly 33 days ago [-]
This has also been a common theme in recent decades with respect to privacy.
In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
unreal37 33 days ago [-]
I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside.
And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.
It was never designed for this originally.
pfortuny 34 days ago [-]
Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of constructing a new building subject to all the regulations makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries.
(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
cataphract 33 days ago [-]
What's been driving up the cost of construction (it's already up to 2000-2400 eur/m2 for a detached house in Portugal) has been mostly cost of materials and labour.
People complain about the regulations, but they also complain about houses that are structurally unsound, unventilated, flammable, badly isolated acoustically and thermally and so on... I don't think going back is the way to go. It's true that sometimes licensing that too long, though.
pfortuny 33 days ago [-]
Yes, that is also true, of course.
But then again, we have turned "security" into something absurd which only adds costs.
cuu508 34 days ago [-]
> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error
> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
necovek 33 days ago [-]
Any law, including a speed limit, has unforeseen consequences. In my part of the world, there is a 4km stretch of the road with good visibility, low pedestrian traffic, and which takes you either 10 minutes to go through if you follow the limits, or 3 minutes if you drive at +5km/h.
Other than lost time (which compounds, but also increases traffic congestion, so those 10 mins might turn into 20-25), the fuel use and pollution are greatly increased.
Interestingly, there are speed cameras there, and enforcement is not done on these slight violations: without this flexibility, I'd need to ask for traffic lights to be adjusted so they work well for driving under speed limits, and that is slow and an annoying process.
But without an option to "try", I wouldn't even know this is the case, and I wouldn't even be able to offer this as a suggestion.
Whether that accounts for consequences being "grave and terrible", probably not, but very suboptimal for sure.
Otterly99 33 days ago [-]
Not sure how that makes sense, it takes a third of the time, but you're only going 5 km/h faster?
phlakaton 33 days ago [-]
I presume they're beating some ill-timed traffic lights and overstating the savings.
necovek 32 days ago [-]
Yes about traffic lights pattern: 5 traffic lights along the way, each with ~90s wait time or only a zero or a single wait and then riding the "green wave". So not overstating the savings either.
diacritical 33 days ago [-]
> would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot
The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
cuu508 33 days ago [-]
OK, but that would be a consequence of the specific enforcement method, not a consequence the law becoming de facto stricter due to stricter enforcement.
Ntrails 34 days ago [-]
Yeah, I'd have to go slower????
Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.
Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
lupire 33 days ago [-]
For one thing, the speed limit is intentionally set 5-10mph too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
While it is true that many people do speed, that doesn't make their speeding "the real speed limit".
necovek 33 days ago [-]
Speed limit is only a proxy for your braking distance in case of emergency braking (at least in most cases, but also a proxy for bad road conditions in others): the point is to ensure safety, and not a particular speed.
I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25 km/h), whereas I always do even if I am driving at 45km/h because my foot would be hanging over the brake near areas of low visibility (like intersections) or near crosswalks or with pedestrians near the road.
Your braking distance is largely a function of your reaction time (attention + pre-prep + reflexes), and your car performance (tyres, brakes) on top of the speed, and speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver". You obviously have most of those under your control, but the speed is the easiest to measure externally.
The obvious counter is that I could be even safer if I also drove at 25 km/h, but it would take me much longer, I'd hit many more red lights, so I might stop being so attentive because I am going "so slow" and taking so long (maintaining focus is hard the longer you need to do it).
However, measuring individual performance is prohibitively expensive if not impossible (as it also fluctuates for the same person, but also road and car conditions), so we use a proxy like speed limit that is easy to measure.
JoshTriplett 32 days ago [-]
> speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver"
Which is a dangerous line of thinking, as everyone thinks they're above average.
Speed limits are also, to some extent, designed around physics. Higher-speed accidents have more kinetic energy.
necovek 32 days ago [-]
I put the "driver" in quotes: it is not just about ability (let alone perceived ability), but also about equipment (car braking power, tyre quality in relation to road conditions), attention and driving style. You can be reasonably and objectively above average just by having great tyres and strong brakes paired with average attention (which you can control too) and average style/ability.
JoshTriplett 30 days ago [-]
I agree with that. However, by necessity speed limits need to be set, and enforced, based on vehicles and drivers that meet the minimum standards we set for roadworthiness.
Ntrails 29 days ago [-]
Speed limits are a terrible proxy for actual risk, but the only reasonable way a government can implement anything tending towards "ffs stop killing each other whilst driving too fast for the conditions".
seethishat 34 days ago [-]
The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc.
If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.
Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
ahtihn 33 days ago [-]
> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision
I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.
Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.
I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.
The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
tinier_subsets 33 days ago [-]
The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me.
In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes.
In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner.
Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
acuozzo 33 days ago [-]
I live 1.6 miles from my county hospital.
If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an ambulance can reach my house.
As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes to recovery from a stroke.
What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a stroke anyway?
softgrow 33 days ago [-]
If you ring for the ambulance, (Australian context), you will be told what to do! The telephony scripts have first aid baked in. The paramedic will come (not necessarily with an ambulance) and start appropriate definitive treatment as good as what you will get in a hospital. A consequence of a stroke is a cardiac arrest. If you are driving you won't know and won't do CPR.
The 1996 movie Transpotting still gives me shivers up my spine by putting someone in a car and drop at ER rather than calling for help. Too many people die needlessly, even today, when well meaning people load shooting victims, stroke victims and heart attacks etc into their car and drive to ER without asking their local emergency services for advice.
PS. You can't 100% of the time get to ER faster than the ambulance. There are more ambulances than emergency rooms by number. If an ambulance is at the county hospital they'll be faster than you.
tekne 33 days ago [-]
E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting)
Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?
Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
adamweld 33 days ago [-]
No, that's not the reason why people speed. True emergencies are a rounding error.
The real reason is that speed limits are generally lower than the safe speed of traffic, and enforcement begins at about 10mph over the stated limits.
People know they can get away with it.
If limits were raised 15% and strictly enforced, it would probably be better for society. Getting a ticket for a valid emergency would be easy to have reversed.
arcticfox 33 days ago [-]
The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.
Atlas667 33 days ago [-]
Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology.
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
zezeh 32 days ago [-]
I see many comments focusing on whether speed limits (or the law) should or should not be enforced, while the main idea in this post is to say that today any agreement can be measured to the dot.
I agree with the author that we are not prepared for the consequences of such a change and that it can lead to abuse on many instances.
jongjong 33 days ago [-]
The legal system is fundamentally broken. It's not designed to handle the kind of throughput that is required to enforce justice in countries with many millions of inhabitants.
The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.
Thiez 32 days ago [-]
Surely the number of people needed to maintain a reasonable throughput of the legal system scales approximately linearly with the number of offences? I don't see why a country of millions would be unable to have an efficient and functional legal system, even if the US does not.
kibwen 33 days ago [-]
Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking about how laws, in practice, are not actually intended to be perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.
derefr 33 days ago [-]
> There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.)
Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies.
---
Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
jongjong 33 days ago [-]
Yes, with current costs, most people literally cannot afford legal representation, especially in the plaintiff side.
For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.
clickety_clack 34 days ago [-]
De jure, there is no difference between de facto and de jure. De facto there is.
pessimizer 33 days ago [-]
> Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
popalchemist 33 days ago [-]
If you had to put a name to this phenomenon, what would it be?
An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
throwaway555121 33 days ago [-]
> An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter.
Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account.
In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government).
Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands).
Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client.
> And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved.
> Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.
aaron695 33 days ago [-]
[dead]
ks2048 34 days ago [-]
"I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp."
◆
Chad Stockholder
Engineering Director, Profit First LLC
lo_zamoyski 34 days ago [-]
Certain views of OSS and its relation to commercial software always seemed to be fraught with highly voluntarist and moralizing attitudes and an intellectual naivete.
33 days ago [-]
33 days ago [-]
arrsingh 33 days ago [-]
It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
madeofpalk 33 days ago [-]
Being real doesn't make it not satire.
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
Yes but all of the commenters think this is a fake site created ironically. It isn't. It is a company doing the evil thing it is mocking.
nimonian 33 days ago [-]
I consider this a form of performance art. To really expose the absurdity of the system, you can't just point at the cracks; you need to actually stick your fingers in.
Guillaume86 33 days ago [-]
Yes it's even more effective this way IMO, we will probably see some 11/10 mental gymnastics from people condemning this and failing to apply the same standards to billions dollars corps.
def13 33 days ago [-]
Part of the point here is that the systems are fundamentally broken, more broken than they were before when we already thought they were broken.
Some people look at that and think "I suppose we should keep propping this system up as much as possible; the less propping the more immediate harm is caused to people/infrastructure/society".
The people behind this site/talk clearly don't buy into that. The way they see it, a reckoning must come. We might as well get it over with as soon as possible. Rip off the band-aid so to speak. So maybe we should shake the system and show that its falling apart.
Aperocky 33 days ago [-]
If doing evil things satirically with extremely poor result, does that become a positive outcome?
I mean maybe you can pay, it can just use some 8B model to give you unsubstantiated crap.
AmbroseBierce 33 days ago [-]
Sell the same thing you pretend to be satirizing, and HN it's making it go viral for free, real smart move there guys.
Aperocky 33 days ago [-]
The numbers on the front page is for sure a joke.
Unless they already burned 20000% of their runway on tokens.
awwaiid 33 days ago [-]
.... did you give them money? Brave!
exceptione 33 days ago [-]
I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.
killerstorm 33 days ago [-]
You need a legal contract with every contributor to be able to offer dual licensing. That's impractical for some types of projects
bloppe 33 days ago [-]
Not if you have a CLA. I realize that ship has already sailed for just established projects, but still
akoboldfrying 33 days ago [-]
After bogo-sort, it's the most badness-maximising "solution" I've ever come across. Why bother asking for the creator's consent to copy and run the original bytes, when you could instead ask for their consent to have a robot that no one understands and could potentially do anything read a few paragraphs of text describing what those bytes do, imagine how it might work, and try to build something resembling that from scratch, using a trillion or so times more energy.
tripzilch 33 days ago [-]
What about my latest algorithm, VibeSort
// VibeSort
let arr = [51,46,72,32,14,27,88,32];
arr.sort((a,b)=>{
let response = LLM.query(`Which number is larger, number A:${a} or number B:${b}. Answer using "A" or "B" only, if they are equal, say "C".`);
if(response.includes('C')) return 0;
if(response.includes('B')) return -1;
if(response.includes('A')) return 1;
return 0;
});
console.table(arr);
randallsquared 33 days ago [-]
The energy thing won't sail. A backhoe or front-loader uses far more energy than the equivalent human labor, but having higher energy solutions available is what technological civilization does.
Arguably Cowen's "Great Stagnation" was driven primarily by not embracing higher energy provision in the form of fission.
b_kl 33 days ago [-]
[dead]
fundad 33 days ago [-]
I was going to say "this is just a license"
throw2131343 33 days ago [-]
"We offer a commercial license to a worse version of our software that may contain bugs. Enjoy!"
manbash 33 days ago [-]
Copyleft was intended as a principle to keep the software free (as in 'freedom'). Proposing to lock out certain areas of the codebase is directly opposite to this principle.
devy 33 days ago [-]
LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately:
> "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired)
> This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
yonz 33 days ago [-]
I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came back to these comments
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
wjnc 33 days ago [-]
Satire And Performance Art no less.
33 days ago [-]
dworks 33 days ago [-]
This could work out great, because the OSS devs can focus on building their project instead of marketing to businesses, running sales processes, consulting on implementation and supporting the implementation. No need to find corporate sponsors either.
85392_school 33 days ago [-]
If you don't have any contributors, you could just directly relicense without rewriting the whole codebase. If you do, it would be rude to do this.
internet_points 33 days ago [-]
> satire
I'm sure they've already received offers from investors who wish to build the next torment nexus.
presentation 33 days ago [-]
Lol so instead of paying maintainers who already built the thing you want, we instead charge you to use AI to make countless copies of maintainers’ work and direct the profits back to the maintainers? That sounds like true satire.
hmokiguess 34 days ago [-]
The fact that it took me the comments sections to understand this is satire speaks a lot about the current status of where things are going.
EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
Aachen 33 days ago [-]
I didn't see it was satire (having only skimmed the site) until scrolling through the comments and seeing this fake review being quoted. That's when I went "surely not", checked the site, saw it was really there, and was quite relieved this is not yet an actual thing!
comboy 33 days ago [-]
Under this name or not I think it's happening regardless..
overfeed 33 days ago [-]
As any etymology/Latin nerd will tell you, "this name" (MalusCorp) literally translates to EvilCorp, everything about the site is over the top satire. I know Poe's law and all that, but I'm looking askew at commenters in this thread who fail to realize it as either only reading the headline, or are AI-controlled.
Satire points out the absurd
5- 33 days ago [-]
one could say calling a company "palantir" isn't too far off that.
frenchie4111 34 days ago [-]
lol - it's literally called malus but I guess that's only an obvious giveaway in retrospect
hmry 33 days ago [-]
It's perfectly realistic!
E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you while manipulating you by selectively showing some things and not others.
whacko_quacko 33 days ago [-]
Especially given that a popular open source project recently tried to do exactly that.
I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve
JoshTriplett 33 days ago [-]
Not just "tried"; the current state is that they've done so and are ignoring people telling them they cannot. The "destroy as an example to others" phase hasn't finished yet, but hopefully they'll get sufficient backlash from the projects they supposedly did this to work with to deter future attempts. e.g. they supposedly did this in order to make it part of the Python standard library, so hopefully the response from Python is a massive WTF and "nope".
JoshTriplett 33 days ago [-]
In fairness to the original mythos that that particular family of awful companies has misused: the palantiri were in fact designed purely for far-seeing, and Sauron wasn't the creator of them, he just got his hands on one and corrupted it into a tool for manipulation.
fph 32 days ago [-]
Malus is also Latin for "apple tree", coincidentally.
utopiah 34 days ago [-]
Don't believe in hell but I were I hope they'd be a special place for them.
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
zozbot234 34 days ago [-]
This is satire, but the very notion of open source license obligations is meaningless in context. FLOSS licenses do not require you to publish your purely internal changes to the code; any publication happens by your choice, and given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever, publishing your software with a proprietary copyright isn't going to exactly save you either.
eru 34 days ago [-]
No, no, some open source licenses require you to publish internal changes. Eg some are explicitly written that you have to publish even when you 'only' use the changes on your own servers. (Not having to publish that was seen as a loophole for cloud companies to exploit.)
piperswe 33 days ago [-]
Those clauses exclude those licenses from some very important definitions of free/open-source software. For example they would fail the Desert Island Test for the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
pocksuppet 33 days ago [-]
The Debian project guidelines are not the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't free software, they are just some of many useful guidelines to consider. Another useful guideline is that the user shall have freedom.
eru 33 days ago [-]
I'm not quite sure: if you are on a desert island, how are you running a public facing server?
Arch-TK 33 days ago [-]
You are either talking about a license nobody is using (at least I've never heard of it) or misconstruing what the AGPL obligates you to do.
I am going to assume it's the latter.
If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL obligates you to publish the source changes.
In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a paywall and modify it, the only people who the license mandates you to provide the source code for are the people paying.
The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user" broadened to include people interacting with the software over the network.
And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give the source to people paying.
Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person receiving that source code from publishing it under its own terms.
Ethee 33 days ago [-]
The point he's making is that who is going to actually enforce that? If I take something that has that license and make changes to it, who is going to know? That's the underlying premise here.
dymk 33 days ago [-]
The courts?
Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few
Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?
Ethee 33 days ago [-]
Your point is circular, let me bring it all around. If I make a 'clean-room' implementation using an LLM of a software that has a GPL license. How does the court enforce that my black box didn't use the original software in any way if there's no way to know? Does having that software as part of it's training corpus automatically enroll all output as GPL enforceable? This is essentially the question some courts are attempting to answer right now.
eru 33 days ago [-]
LLM doesn't add anything new to the table here in terms of legal arguments. See how people did and do clean room implementations without any AI involved, and what lengths they go to.
pabs3 33 days ago [-]
Which licenses do that?
utopiah 34 days ago [-]
"given that AI can now supposedly engineer a clean-room reimplementation of any published program whatsoever"
I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not all, projects?
bananamogul 33 days ago [-]
If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code.
But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.
If that was the case, the moment any code is written under the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different license.
So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet does. But does that mean that it's impossible to reimplement an idea? I don't think so.
hnlmorg 33 days ago [-]
Normally with clean room reimplementations, you’d have the developer working from a set of requirements which have been gathered by someone else who reverse engineered the process.
Here, neither steps are taken.
If you’re supplying a BOM manifest, rather than software constraints, then the only way to assert those constraints is to directly compare against the original project. It doesn’t matter if it’s AI or a human doing that, because either way it’s not “clean room”.
You can do clean room design with AI via SDD (spec driven development). But that’s not what this service (satire or not) offers.
iwontberude 33 days ago [-]
What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place.
Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.
bananamogul 33 days ago [-]
"Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place."
But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.
iwontberude 33 days ago [-]
Yes the entire enterprise and legal precedent is full of shit with intellectual property law being abused left and right. For example, I don’t think Google should have been able to copy the Java API for Kotlin/Android. Java should have just died and everyone would have been better off. By making copyright more weak, free software reaps what it sews.
I love FOSS but I hate that it’s been used to replicate existing code or serve as a way to outsource corporate tech debt. The shadow of profit looms over it all.
Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?
The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
fmbb 34 days ago [-]
> If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
karel-3d 34 days ago [-]
It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.
fladrif 34 days ago [-]
Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.
It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
mcherm 33 days ago [-]
No one who understands the first thing about this topic could possibly have read that web page and not realized that it was satire.
"Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?"
"Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers."
"For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers."
"Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
pixelatedindex 33 days ago [-]
Maybe I’m missing something but big corps do this, right? I legitimately expect folks like Musk and Zuckerberg to say these things. I get why that’s exactly the reason it’s satire but it’s a little too close to the truth for me to chuckle about it.
fladrif 33 days ago [-]
This is because you're already in that mindset.
Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
darkwater 34 days ago [-]
If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
fladrif 33 days ago [-]
Unfortunately it's not too bad for them, it's too bad for everyone they're around. They aren't the ones that lose out when we start dismantling open source communities.
lupire 33 days ago [-]
PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.
dymk 33 days ago [-]
That wasn’t people weaponizing satire, that was people just making weapons
svnt 33 days ago [-]
There is an overlay of smeared poop on one of the license files… is that something you are seeing on typical tech company landing pages?
The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
kpcyrd 33 days ago [-]
I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real):
It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
torginus 33 days ago [-]
This comes with the uncomfortable implication that its impossible to tell actually to what extent are LLMs pulling together snippets of GPLd code, and to what extent is that legally acceptable.
pera 33 days ago [-]
There are a lot of examples like that since the first announcement of GitHub Copilot in 2021, search for (copying) "verbatim" in this submission:
Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a court that you have never heard this song, not even in the background somewhere".
LLMs having been trained on all software they could get their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the "they learn just like humans" which is both false and irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.
De-facto though, things are different. The technical details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass laws legalizing their copyright infringement.
There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their economies.
codethief 33 days ago [-]
Wow, I did not expect such perfect reproduction. Link to the actual source code (before being rewritten):
Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times:
It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".
Wow. The guy who’s been thanklessly maintaining the project for 10+ years, with very little help, went way out of his way to produce a zero-reuse, ground-up reimplementation so that it could be MIT licensed... and the very-online copyleft crowd is crucifying him for it and telling him to kick rocks.
Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.
aeyes 33 days ago [-]
Mark Pilgrim isn't even the original author, he just ported the C version to Python and contributed nothing to it for the last 10 years.
If you take 5 minutes to look at the code you'll see that v7 works in a completely different way, it mostly uses machine learning models instead of heuristics. Even if you compare the UTF8 or UTF16 detection code you'll see that they have absolutely nothing in common.
Its just API compatible and the API is basically 3 functions.
If he had published this under a different name nobody would have challenged it.
marxisttemp 33 days ago [-]
Nothing to help out a thankless maintainer like allowing companies to use his work wholesale while contributing nothing back! Enjoy your nice things
0x500x79 34 days ago [-]
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.*
I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
kypro 34 days ago [-]
The satire is A-grade.
On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.
Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
gault8121 33 days ago [-]
So this site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
glenstein 34 days ago [-]
I first encountered the concept of "clean room" in the context of Sean Lahman's free baseball stats database. While technically baseball stats are free, their compiling and manner of presentation in any given format may be claimed as proprietary by any particular provider. And so there's an extensive volunteer effort from baseball fans to "clean room" source them from independent sources such that they are verifying the stats independently of their provenance as a legally permitted basis for building out the database.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
tavavex 34 days ago [-]
This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?
ash_091 33 days ago [-]
What would be the incentive for someone to do this for real?
We all have access to SOTA LLMs. If I want a "clean room" implementation of some OSS library, and I can choose between paying a third party to run a script to have AI rebuild the whole library for me and just asking Claude to generate the bits of the library I need, why would I choose to pay?
I think this argument applies to most straightforward "AI generated product" business ideas. Any dev can access a SOTA coding model for $20p/m. The value-add isn't "we used AI to do the thing fast", it's the wrapping around it.
Maybe in this case the "wrapping" is that some other company is taking on the legal risk?
hombre_fatal 33 days ago [-]
What do you mean nobody has done it?
It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.
Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.
You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.
Aachen 33 days ago [-]
There's a lot of things you could do to be malicious towards other people with minimal effort, yet strangely few people do it. Virtually everyone has morals, and most people's are quite compatible with society (hence we have a society) even if small perturbations in foundational morals sometimes lead to seemingly large discrepancies in resultant actions
You need the right kind of person, in the right life circumstances, to have this idea before it happens for real. By having publicity, it becomes vastly more likely that it finds someone who meets the former two criteria, like how it works with other crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime). So thanks, Malus :P
CobrastanJorji 33 days ago [-]
Also, there's a difference between "willing to do a bad thing for money" and "actively searching out a bad thing, then proactively building a whole company out of it in the hopes of making money."
It's the difference between a developer taking a job at Palantir out of college because nobody had a better offer, and a guy spending years in his basement designing "Immigrant Spotter+" in the hopes of selling it to the government. Sure, they're both evil, but lots of people pick the first thing, and hardly anybody does the second.
microflash 33 days ago [-]
At some level people are already doing this through LLMs. But large orgs are extremely risk averse to do such things. There’s a reason why we have “security audits” and “compliance certifications”. It’s not like organizations are not capable of securing or standardizing their systems, just they do want to point fingers to somebody when legal proceedings happens.
bob1029 33 days ago [-]
The bottleneck is trust and security. I'd rather defenestrate 3rd party libraries with a local instance of copilot than send all my secret sauce to some cloud/SaaS system.
Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.
imiric 34 days ago [-]
> why hasn't anyone done this for real?
WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
tavavex 33 days ago [-]
Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?
imiric 33 days ago [-]
Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of which is open source.
sdwr 33 days ago [-]
And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and type definitions"?
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
It's described on the web page but it's by having 2 agents. One has access to the code and one doesn't.
fmbb 33 days ago [-]
Are they the same model?
Not that it matters, I just think the joke is more fun if they are different.
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
It depends. Although they always have entirely separate contexts.
dymk 33 days ago [-]
The joke is that you don’t.
preisschild 33 days ago [-]
not a lot of code is public domain and thus not a lot of training data is available
phyzome 33 days ago [-]
For each project you want to rip off, you'd have to first train an entirely new LLM on all sources except for the target project. Prohibitively expensive.
Barrin92 33 days ago [-]
>why hasn't anyone done this for real?
because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.
ameliaquining 34 days ago [-]
Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
Habgdnv 34 days ago [-]
At least you think that this is satire, until the author receives a DMCA from one of the big corps saying that he leaked the transcript of their last meeting
TimTheTinker 34 days ago [-]
I don't know - if you upload a package.json with any dependencies that map to real npmjs.com packages, it does lead you to a Stripe payment page which appears to be real... and it appears you'd be sending real money.
Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
kifler 34 days ago [-]
Too late. Someone's senior executive management has probably already seen it and spinning up a new project to implement it.
civvv 34 days ago [-]
Luckily LLM’s are nowhere near capable enough to pull this off for anything other than the likes of isEven()
Lalabadie 34 days ago [-]
The situation is a bit too Torment Nexus-y for my comfort, thank you very much
chilipepperhott 34 days ago [-]
Yeah, thank you. I was starting to get a little heated.
embedding-shape 34 days ago [-]
Same, I got as far as "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations." until I went back to the comments.
frizlab 34 days ago [-]
haha did the same. that being said I’m convinced some people do think AI reimplementation actually means cleanroom…
lo_zamoyski 34 days ago [-]
W.r.t. intent, yes. But w.r.t. content, we are long past a situation where it is unrealistic enough to function as satire.
While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
zozbot234 34 days ago [-]
It would also entirely obviate the need for those very same OSS licenses, if LLMs can simply do a clean-room reimplementation of any copywritten software whatsoever.
donkeybeer 33 days ago [-]
Thats a bit more difficult as you have to somehow leak or hack the proprietary code first to train the initial llm.
kshacker 34 days ago [-]
It will be like Galaxy Quest - they saw the historical records, copied them and then ... still needed humans to help them :)
andriy_koval 33 days ago [-]
its partial satire. I kinda believe Claude/Codex spill lots of OSS code without license attribution for many millions of devs already.
tonyedgecombe 33 days ago [-]
It wouldn't be funny if it wasn't close to the truth.
schmeichel 34 days ago [-]
Thank you for pointing that out, I genuinely was scratching my head and questioning if this site was serious.
scatbot 33 days ago [-]
I know this is satire, but I would wish to see something like this for liberating proprietary & closed-source hardware drivers.
dcchambers 34 days ago [-]
For now...
tgtweak 34 days ago [-]
The best satire is that which becomes reality.
TehCorwiz 34 days ago [-]
I would posit that the best satire is that which holds a clear enough mirror to society that people choose for it to not come to pass.
intrasight 34 days ago [-]
Best comment here!
jajuuka 34 days ago [-]
I was wondering. I had heard chardet story and wouldn't be surprised to see others moving into that same space.
adampunk 34 days ago [-]
For now
bananzamba 33 days ago [-]
Malus Corporation = EvilCorp
Robdel12 34 days ago [-]
It legit got me. An actual "whaaaaaatttt?" out loud and then I had to figure out why it was the top of HN haha.
0xWTF 34 days ago [-]
There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
etchalon 34 days ago [-]
The Torment Nexus must be built, because someone wants a lambo.
phpnode 33 days ago [-]
it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago, https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but you can't escape that anymore)
phyzome 33 days ago [-]
Well, that's not what the page describes. You'd have to train an LLM on everything except tldraw, then use that LLM for code generation.
p0w3n3d 33 days ago [-]
I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit from open source code in training data, actually the most of the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then free? Or at least open weight?
mushufasa 34 days ago [-]
"Change all your core software library dependencies to be unmaintained ripoff copies of those libraries." Sounds wise.....¡¡
roughly 34 days ago [-]
Sounds like my CTO. Overuse of LLMs in c-suites is like overuse of weed by teenagers - it may not cause delusions, but it sure seems to make them worse.
jakeydus 34 days ago [-]
Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.
bigfishrunning 33 days ago [-]
I just hope we realize it before it's too late.
dullcrisp 33 days ago [-]
Guaranteed CVE-free at time of delivery!
fabioborellini 33 days ago [-]
Actually I have been told that replacements to (restricted subsets of) open source libraries, generated by LLM’s, vendored next to our code using the dependency, cannot be vulnerable since they don’t have cve’s, and therefore they don’t ever have to be maintained.
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
Pannoniae 34 days ago [-]
This is satire but this is where things are heading. The impact on the OSS ecosystem is probably not a net positive overall, but don't forget that this also applies to commercial software as well.
There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
34 days ago [-]
OkayPhysicist 34 days ago [-]
This is going to bring back software patents.
intrasight 34 days ago [-]
I was discussing that very point yesterday with a colleague after telling him of recent events. I pointed out that leaning on copyright/copyleft for software has always been a risky move.
piperswe 33 days ago [-]
Considering my name's on a software patent submitted just last year, I don't think software patents have gone anywhere...
marxisttemp 33 days ago [-]
What did you patent
piperswe 33 days ago [-]
The patent application hasn't been published yet so I can't link it, but it's the integration of a bot management system with a queuing system (think, preventing bots from taking space in the line waiting to buy tickets from Ticketmaster when everyone's in the waiting room)
OJFord 34 days ago [-]
Where did they go?
SuaveSteve 28 days ago [-]
While it is satire, it is also appears to be "real satire" as gault8121 has been trying to tell us. ThePrimeagen paid them to do the node package "is-number".
I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet.
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
ekidd 34 days ago [-]
I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
nivethan 34 days ago [-]
I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it in the right direction.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
ensemblehq 34 days ago [-]
Interested to keep updated on this point. As a consultant, I've worked on transformation of legacy applications so this would help me greatly as well. We've worked on pretty archaic systems where no one knows how the system works even if we have the source code.
Traubenfuchs 34 days ago [-]
Well, what kind of desktop apps?
Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
mcherm 33 days ago [-]
The post claims (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that their customer owns the resulting code.
But that's not true!
According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!
I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
metalcrow 33 days ago [-]
This is a misreading of the law. Court cases say that AI cannot own copyright, not that AI output cannot be copyrighted.
aero_code 33 days ago [-]
No, according to everything I've read before, the parent post was correct and you're not. This article clearly says "art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law":
Reading the linked Court of Appeals document in that post, the question is posted in the opening: "Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?", which it then answers as no. It doesn't mention elsewhere that i can see that this means the output of the tool itself is not copyrightable. I would not trust the Reuters interpretation without a direct reference to a court document.
ryoshoe 33 days ago [-]
Could the prompt used to generate the art be considered human input, or is it that a human must to make some contribution to the art for it to be copyrightable?
gassi 33 days ago [-]
The prompt itself is copyrightable but not the art/code generated from it.
semiquaver 33 days ago [-]
If you’re referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, that is not binding precedent nationwide, only in courts under the D.C. Circuit. And it only applies to “pure” AI-generated works; it did not address AI-assisted works, which seem very likely to be copyrightable.
bananamogul 33 days ago [-]
Though here, the purpose is still served.
If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
scblock 34 days ago [-]
Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
logdahl 34 days ago [-]
Haha, was extremely rage-baited by this. Thanks.
alemwjsl 33 days ago [-]
You can also use this to say copy proprietary software, and make it open source GPL.
RandomGerm4n 34 days ago [-]
This time it's satire, but I bet someone will offer exactly that for real in the next few days. The idea is unethical but far too lucrative from a business perspective.
Maxion 34 days ago [-]
Often OSS is used not because you want the software, but the software and the upkeep. So even with such a service, you're now just taking code in-house that you have to maintain as well.
Spoom 33 days ago [-]
Realistically, if it in fact did take 5 minutes to do the cleanroom reimplementation, you could just process updates from the OSS source in realtime.
33 days ago [-]
tetraca 34 days ago [-]
The people that will take this as a good thing unironically will just have their personal Yes Man do that work internally.
gorgoiler 34 days ago [-]
…scanning… …fuming… …blood pressure rising… sees a quote attributed to “Chad Stockholder
Engineering Director, Profit First LLC” …oh phew, thank god for that. I actually believed this could be real for a moment!
forvelin 34 days ago [-]
they really had an entertaining presentation in fosdem 2026 about this. bit too noisy for my taste but regardless:
I was on this talk expecting to hear about MongoDB abusing open source (as you could guess from my profile, that’s a topic dear to my heart). Instead, I saw the most entertaining talk in my life.
e12e 33 days ago [-]
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.
For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
rhoopr 34 days ago [-]
> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane.
Funny but true.
einpoklum 34 days ago [-]
It's not true (and also not funny):
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
eru 34 days ago [-]
> * Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
Well, it's one thing to read licenses as a human and another to read them as a lawyer.
That's why it's useful to pick one of the standard licenses that lawyers have already combed over, even if it's a long one like the GPL.
efreak 33 days ago [-]
Where do you see this? It doesn't appear to be in the website (if it's in the video, I didn't watch it but it's not in the subtitle file)
inetknght 33 days ago [-]
It's not on the main page. Click the top link to the blog [0].
It's funny that humans working together for mutual benefit via any other mechanism than regimented corporate slavery is considered insane.
boondongle 34 days ago [-]
The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential.
Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?
Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.
teachrdan 33 days ago [-]
It's not clear to me what your argument has to do with the license laundering service that Malus (Malice?) is offering. Their stealing from the digital commons does nothing to address paying Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians.
boondongle 33 days ago [-]
It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious, monetized satire.
Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.
"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.
Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.
superxpro12 33 days ago [-]
The value from FOSS is the collaboration between all parties.
There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in this open space?" And everyone wins.
There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these large open source programs. And this is basically an attack by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.
It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any immorality hazards a LONG time ago.
designerarvid 34 days ago [-]
Easily explained by the fact that writing some types of software and seeing people using it is fun. Some people take photos for free also.
Doesn’t apply everywhere though.
tavavex 34 days ago [-]
What's this 'fun' you mention? As far as the incentives in our systems are concerned, anything that's not done in pursuit of monetary gain is certifiably insane. What really matters in life is using all the tricks, manipulation, abuse and loopholes to attain the biggest number in your asset counter. Anyone who doesn't follow the only thing that matters in life is alien, inhuman even. How do they not see it?
eru 34 days ago [-]
The quote above didn't mention corporations at all.
saulpw 34 days ago [-]
"nobody technically employs" strongly implies that this is not a corporate organization.
jedberg 34 days ago [-]
" maintained by people that nobody technically employs"
aprdm 34 days ago [-]
Isn't that the premise of Fallout ?
dmbche 34 days ago [-]
Nope!
TheMiddleMan 33 days ago [-]
Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?
fallingmeat 34 days ago [-]
Love the product link in footer to "Emergency AGPL Removal"
sigmar 34 days ago [-]
>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch.
Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
chii 34 days ago [-]
> observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
iepathos 34 days ago [-]
This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights.
In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
john_strinlai 33 days ago [-]
>The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because [...]
it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
melvinram 33 days ago [-]
This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
:)
lofaszvanitt 33 days ago [-]
"Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?"
gwern 33 days ago [-]
The solution here seems to be to impose some constraint or requirement which means that literal copying is impossible (remember, copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms - that would be 'patents', which essentially no open source software has) or where any 'copying' from vaguely remembered pretraining code is on such an abstract indirect level that it is 'transformative' and thus safe.
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
pron 33 days ago [-]
> copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms
The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The copyright applies to some fixed media (text in this case) rather than the idea expressed, but the protections extend well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations and translations.
If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it) I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a single sentence were copied verbatim.
briandw 33 days ago [-]
Obviously satire, but it will clearly be what happens in the future (predicting here, I'm not endorsing this practice). We can scratch train a new LLM on code generated from "contaminated" LLMs. We can then audit all the training data used and demonstrate that the original source wasn't in the training data. Therefore the cleanroom implementation holds. Current LLM training is relying less and less on human generated code. Just look at the open source models from China. They rely heavily on distilling from other models. One additional point. Exposure to the original source isn't enough to show infringement. Linus looked at UNIX source before writing linux.
neilv 33 days ago [-]
I think this site is either satire, or serious but with a certain kind of humor in which both they and the reader know they're lying (but it's in everyone's interest to play along).
They do say this:
> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.
Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.
littlestymaar 33 days ago [-]
This is definitely a parody though, not a real service.
superxpro12 33 days ago [-]
This site is an obvious parody, but like most comedy these days it betrays the severity of the issues happening today.
ActivePattern 34 days ago [-]
[flagged]
badrequest 33 days ago [-]
Ah, it really wouldn't be HN without baselessly accusing other posters you disagree with.
john_strinlai 33 days ago [-]
i mean... the site is very clearly satire and the comment is clearly responding as if it is a real service.
i do not necessarily agree with the phrasing of
ActivePatterns comment, but i also raised an eyebrow at iepathos' comment.
svnt 33 days ago [-]
The pathos paradox: the more times a person introduces the word pathos in casual conversation the less likely they are to recognize humor/satire.
seanrrr 22 days ago [-]
This is quite sad to see but important to point out.
RobertoG 33 days ago [-]
That's funny.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
alsetmusic 34 days ago [-]
This is brilliant satire. Wonderful response to the “rewrite” of chardet.
^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
w10-1 33 days ago [-]
Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance...
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
ragazzina 33 days ago [-]
Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia?
You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.
EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
b3n 33 days ago [-]
This was already done, see: Grokipedia.
453yuh46 33 days ago [-]
Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating.
Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.
If this site actually connects to Stripe, it's much more than just satire. It's a honeypot :D
alansaber 33 days ago [-]
Partly hard to judge as satire because this is significantly better than most SAAS websites.
tripdout 34 days ago [-]
The joke is that the models have already seen the source code of said packages regardless, right?
Guillaume86 34 days ago [-]
Yeah it's just a slightly more honest and simplified presentation of what LLMs providers do IMO.
observationist 34 days ago [-]
Not sure their attempted point lands the way they think it will. I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing. Open the floodgates. Break the system.
I'd cheer for a company like this.
It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
amiga386 34 days ago [-]
> I view this as an unmitigated good.
Then I don't think you've thought it through.
This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.
If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.
You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")
I mean in the context of AI - we're already seeing the conflagration of SAAS, and software jobs are going kaput. It's my deeply considered opinion that the faster this happens, the better, because it'll force a reckoning with impending AI job loss across the board.
We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.
Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.
amiga386 34 days ago [-]
It sounds like you'd advocate for accelerationism (by which I mean "to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it")
The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.
But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.
observationist 34 days ago [-]
It's not naked accelerationism, I just don't want to see years and years of suffering and exploitation and chaos giving a permanent advantage to those already in a position to take that advantage. One significant industry is all it will take; light a fire under the ass of congress and the general public, get people motivated to start taking sensible steps to move towards UBI or some sort of Coasean scheme with nationalized shares distributed to people, or whatever. Doing anything is extraordinarily more effective than doing nothing as this plays out.
DrammBA 34 days ago [-]
> I view this as an unmitigated good. Open source every damn thing.
Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.
slopinthebag 34 days ago [-]
Open source is good, washing open source licences is very bad.
I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.
34 days ago [-]
hrmtst93837 33 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dakolli 34 days ago [-]
I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software.
The frustrating thing is I also thought about this as a natural conclusion - but as a natural workflow that corporations will do when they see AGPL dependencies they want to use. (I also think there's a world where we start tightening our software bill of materials anyway.)
I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
temp123789246 33 days ago [-]
Theory:
Any system, legal or otherwise, that denies the Axioms of Reality, will eventually fail.
Axiom of Reality:
“Intellectual Property” does not exist.
flammafex 33 days ago [-]
[dead]
999900000999 34 days ago [-]
As a hypothetical.
Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons.
Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects.
So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”.
How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
kvgr 34 days ago [-]
If the AI could do good refactor of OS project, remove unused code/features and make the code more efficient. Than we really would be out of jobs :D
comrade1234 34 days ago [-]
So they recreate the open source project by using an llm that was trained in the open source project's source code.
noemit 34 days ago [-]
is the motto, "Don't be good?"
psychoslave 34 days ago [-]
"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" and their seal is ⍼.
I did try to upload a requirements.txt with "chardet < 7.0" in it ("Copyright (C) 2024 Dan Blanchard"? I don't think so buddy, it's mine now), but despite claiming otherwise, the satirical site only takes package.json so I uploaded the one from https://github.com/prokopschield/require-gpl/
It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
nathancroissant 33 days ago [-]
Well I didn't understand it was satire at first glance which tells a lot about the state of our industry...
sigbottle 33 days ago [-]
I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues.
Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
KronisLV 33 days ago [-]
I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to second guess whether someone would actually build something like this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would be doing this, and proudly.
mikelitoris 33 days ago [-]
Clean room was a poor choice of words… I thought it was an actual clean room for semiconductor devices :(
Good idea, but as several comments here suggest, the time when this sort of thing could be taken as satire is gone. I promise you there are multiple people here thinking that this is a good idea. I predict that within a year we will see a service that does exactly this.
teeray 33 days ago [-]
The law should be updated to limit clean room reimplementation to a strictly human endeavor. Person, in a faraday cage room, with a machine that is too underpowered to run local LLMs. Reference material (stack overflow archives, language docs, specs, etc) are permitted.
izucken 34 days ago [-]
Some parties wouldn't be thrilled about their "source available" getting cleaned this way. So when this gets completed it would only "clean" real open source that can't afford legal trouble. Satirically structured LLM text is not a defence.
ivanjermakov 34 days ago [-]
First I thought this is about manufacturing. Like semiconductor fabs requirement for room cleanness.
sam0x17 34 days ago [-]
Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy
Flemlord 33 days ago [-]
Was hoping this was a service that cleaned actual rooms, combining organizing and cleaning. :-(
jackhalford 31 days ago [-]
> Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers.
Took me a minute to recognize the satyre, good one boys.
mapcars 34 days ago [-]
Heh, why don't you do the opposite - recreate proprietary software with open source license
intrasight 34 days ago [-]
I expect that thousands of people are now doing just that. Most proprietary software is just a shiny UI in front of a crappy database schema.
boje 34 days ago [-]
Today's satire is tomorrow's reality, if the last 50 or so years is anything to go by.
tekawade 33 days ago [-]
How is this legal. Unless it’s trained excluding *all* open source code it’s not legal.
Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose.
Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”.
Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.
Thrymr 33 days ago [-]
You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:
> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
throwaway290 33 days ago [-]
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.
Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
torginus 34 days ago [-]
I have to admit It took me an unconfortably long amount of time to realize this was fake-
giancarlostoro 33 days ago [-]
Its not just doing this to open source GPL software. I have seen friends disassemble code in archaic languages, and have Claude translate the Assembly back to the original language, and churn on it until it compiles. It worked.
neya 34 days ago [-]
You know the satire is so good that people actually confused this for something real:))
tombert 33 days ago [-]
I was really hoping that this was just a service that would literally clean my room.
34 days ago [-]
may13noon 32 days ago [-]
Personally, I think it's a brilliant idea that the service charges for whole dependency by package.json instead of each single package. This is the approach that corporations like
fraywing 33 days ago [-]
The smells suspiciously like a well positioned gag that is secretly seeking VC attention. The emotional reaction turned attention seeking feels a bit like having ulterior motives... or maybe Moltbook has made me paranoid?
fuddle 33 days ago [-]
> MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. is not responsible for any moral implications, existential crises, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from the use of our services.
I think they should take some responsibility!
rgilton 34 days ago [-]
It's interesting that the focus is just on open source licenses. If one can strip licenses from source code using LLMs, then surely a Microsoft employee could do the same with the Windows source code!
Perz1val 33 days ago [-]
I'd have mined the copied libraries with something that makes it possible to later change terms and extract fees, as it'd be expected that nobody reads the terms for such service
lambdaone 33 days ago [-]
Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.
phpnode 34 days ago [-]
This is satire, but I actually have built something that can do this extremely well as an unintentional side effect. I will not be building my business around this capability however
gaigalas 33 days ago [-]
Why would I pay for this? Makes no sense.
It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
sharpshadow 33 days ago [-]
As if the models have not seen the open source software before. That should be considered in the upcoming ruling. Technically the models are trained on exactly that.
api 33 days ago [-]
This could also be done with a fair amount of commercial software, especially anything that's basically a wrapper around APIs, databases, etc.
pradn 33 days ago [-]
Is AI-driven clean room implementation a wild west at the moment? I suppose there haven't yet been any cases to test this out in real life?
slopinthebag 34 days ago [-]
The irony of course is that this service already exists. It's called Claude Code (or Codex, etc...) and it costs $200 / month.
spudlyo 34 days ago [-]
malus, mala, malum ADJ
bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;
It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
mikepurvis 34 days ago [-]
Homonym of "malice" too. Honestly kind of a brilliant name.
lelandfe 34 days ago [-]
Mal: us
33 days ago [-]
33 days ago [-]
copperx 33 days ago [-]
Are licenses even enforceable now? Given that the law is not being followed in the United States anymore?
pocksuppet 33 days ago [-]
Everything is enforceable by the rich, nothing is enforceable by the poor
asimpletune 34 days ago [-]
This is an art project right? …right?
unselect5917 33 days ago [-]
very bottom of the page: "This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
bingemaker 34 days ago [-]
It will be nice to know how many legal personnel fell for this trip. Maybe a leaderboard :D
34 days ago [-]
duiker101 34 days ago [-]
Let's not give anyone ideas!
33 days ago [-]
agile-gift0262 34 days ago [-]
if it were true that indeed was legal to rewrite and relicense open source code, would that also be true for non-open source code? as in, could someone do a similar rewrite of their employers proprietary code and release it publicly?
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
Yes. Provided you had access to the original source code. Pheonix technologies did this with the IBM bios.
v9v 34 days ago [-]
Thought this was about semiconductor cleanrooms at first. Any startups doing that?
m3kw9 33 days ago [-]
It will soon not be a joke, and it reminds me of these crypto bitcoin tumblers
33 days ago [-]
danorama 34 days ago [-]
Poe's Law just smacked me upside the head on this one. Hard.
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
It makes me really happy to see this comment :)
incognos 33 days ago [-]
I predict that licenses will adapt to close this loophole...
entropi 33 days ago [-]
I think the problem will be with enforcement. To be honest I don't see any way to stop this kind of thing from happening. I predict the slow decline of open source projects, sadly.
keeda 34 days ago [-]
The name was too much of a giveaway. I just hope that somebody who inevitably builds this for real is self-aware enough to name themselves so transparently.
About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version?
I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
headgasket 33 days ago [-]
interesting name. The opposite of a bonus. So what is, the fact that your fork looses the thousands of eyes (meat and ai) that spot and fix bugs and security leaks?
Jerry2 33 days ago [-]
From their front page:
>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*
Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:
1. You contract them.
2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.
3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.
4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"
...
5. Profit.
This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.
The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.
The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...
This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").
The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
detaro 33 days ago [-]
whoosh
floathub 33 days ago [-]
Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!
33 days ago [-]
yomismoaqui 34 days ago [-]
I bet someone has already made this service for real.
slopinthebag 34 days ago [-]
It exists! It's called Claude Code.
OJFord 34 days ago [-]
A lot of people, including perhaps the creator of this, feel that LLMs themselves are this service.
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
What makes this service not real?
parksb 33 days ago [-]
I think it should have been launched on April 1st.
jdlyga 33 days ago [-]
Just give it 2 years and this will exist for real.
pringk02 34 days ago [-]
> per package = max( $0.01, size_kb × $0.01 )
> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )
> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.
Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
sourcegrift 34 days ago [-]
Amazon getting all excited hoping it's real.
dspillett 33 days ago [-]
Amazon C*s calling Amazon Legal to ask if they could get away with implementing something like this internally, more like.
34 days ago [-]
jabedude 33 days ago [-]
This is quite literally the end of open source. projects will find themselves in the position of making their test suites private to avoid being sherlocked like this
ChrisMarshallNY 33 days ago [-]
Hope they have very good lawyers...
m3kw9 33 days ago [-]
With the classic Claude colors and fonts
harvie 33 days ago [-]
Can't wait to see GPL2 ZFS :-)
cloverich 34 days ago [-]
1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it. Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means in a thoughtful way.
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
lxe 34 days ago [-]
Distinguished staff level trolling
moralestapia 34 days ago [-]
Oof, this is unironically amazing!
33 days ago [-]
ericzundel 33 days ago [-]
Of course, it's a serious issue, but I love the sense of humor here, buried deep down:
Full legal indemnification*
Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
...
The MalusCorp Guarantee™
If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
*This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.
groby_b 33 days ago [-]
I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
This is a good idea. Do you have a package in mind?
groby_b 32 days ago [-]
Depends on the size you want to tackle. Let's shoot for MIT licensed or similar, so we don't have to do the unethical thing.
ESLint or Webpack would probably be attempts that are decently sized for a challenge.
Cheerio would be a bit smaller.
Chalk is probably close to the absolute lower bound of what's even meaningful. (You'd likely just regenerate a package that size from scratch instead of wondering about compat)
casey2 33 days ago [-]
It's not april 1st yet
agys 33 days ago [-]
The name gives it away :)
himata4113 33 days ago [-]
Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait it's REAL?
jaredchung 33 days ago [-]
Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing?
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
Is it satire? Or is it a warning?
jaredchung 33 days ago [-]
If it's a warning, it's a warning that also delivers the thing it's warning about.
34 days ago [-]
badrequest 33 days ago [-]
Was malice.sh taken?
eranation 33 days ago [-]
A LOT of people are taking this seriously and not getting the (no so?) subtle satire in this. I fell for it at first glance too, had to do a double take. Some of the smartest people I know asked me for my thoughts on this.
The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
Goofy_Coyote 34 days ago [-]
It took me too long to understand it’s satire. BP went through stratosphere before I noticed.
Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage.
(I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
hdivider 33 days ago [-]
I saw "cleanroom as a service" and thought great! Don't need to build a facility to do materials science or photonics or certain aerospace R&D...but nope, not that kind of cleanroom. :)
ultratalk 33 days ago [-]
Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was about physical clean-rooms?
jollyllama 33 days ago [-]
No
neonstatic 33 days ago [-]
> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room
> 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service
> 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity
tonymet 33 days ago [-]
edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in 6 months.
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
RobLach 33 days ago [-]
Excellent
abrookewood 33 days ago [-]
I hate to say it, but if you dropped the sarcasm and I think you'd have a viable business ... Truly a bizarre place we find ourselves in.
bensyverson 34 days ago [-]
Oh no… VCs will see this and take it seriously
akovaski 34 days ago [-]
I think we've already seen this with "AI writes a web-browser" type PR. I guess we can still look forward to when they make license evasion an explicit part of their marketing. Then I can wryly laugh when somebody robo-whitewashes leaked commercial software, knowing that they'll get sued anyways.
33 days ago [-]
gmerc 33 days ago [-]
See also: claw-guard.org/adnet, ai-ceo.org and ai-chro.org in this category
33 days ago [-]
ge96 34 days ago [-]
turd.png classy
p_j_w 33 days ago [-]
I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags out there ideas.
petterroea 34 days ago [-]
Now this is a conversation piece
ramon156 34 days ago [-]
blegh, i like the motivation but why again and again do you need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that cannot capture it?
neutrinobro 33 days ago [-]
Ah yes, how apropos, a "modest proposal" for a new AI era.
hirako2000 34 days ago [-]
In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.
ChrisArchitect 33 days ago [-]
New_projectname
Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
bhanuhai 33 days ago [-]
Interesting
aussieguy1234 33 days ago [-]
Is this a joke, or is it the real deal?
Nolski 33 days ago [-]
Upload your manifest and find out! :)
ftumminello 33 days ago [-]
Bruh this feels evil hahaha
n0r0n1n 34 days ago [-]
Can we stop with the AI slop here?
Last chance then I have to look elsewhere for real content.
33 days ago [-]
ceayo 34 days ago [-]
yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
aaron695 34 days ago [-]
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ohgeekz_com 33 days ago [-]
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robutsume 34 days ago [-]
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jerf 34 days ago [-]
I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and complicated, and until their code has been tested by the real world you can't really trust it. (Even if we get superhuman AIs in the future, we have the same superhuman AIs producing superhuman amounts of new code in the world that your AI will have to interact with, and a single AI won't be able to overpower all the superhuman output in that world without testing.)
In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive.
When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
Guillaume86 34 days ago [-]
Eh I think part of the joke is that LLMs have gobbled up the original source code, and if you help them enough (identical type signatures and specs), they will output the same code, it's the copyright laundering problem.
Maxion 34 days ago [-]
Let's not spam HN with AI slop please.
CodeCompost 34 days ago [-]
I know this is satire but we're in the process of rewriting the .NET Mediatr library because ... it's nothing but a simple design pattern packaged as a paid nuget package. We don't even need LLMs to reprogram it.
So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
jhatemyjob 33 days ago [-]
I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves."
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
throwaway2037 34 days ago [-]
I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361
In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.
A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.
This is a big change!
Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.
And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.
If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?
Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.
They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.
The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately
People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.
I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.
For their inhabitants, maybe not pedestrians though. Speeding laws are in part for protecting pedestrians
American trucks are an interesting counter example but that's a more complicated issue. (The source has a comment that you can infer this being a concern with trucks but there's also a lot of sources on this that you can easily find)
[0] https://www.fox7austin.com/news/data-40-year-high-auto-ped-d...
Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.
A road without pedestrians and intersections in it should have a speed limit that reflects the reality of its use (70-80)
The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.
Variable 1: The Cayenne is on a train track
Variable 2: The train behind the Cayenne is going 35mph.
You painted with too broad of a brush with that statement.
The point is that whether you drove dangerously is not a strict, machinistic "if-then" assessment. Automatic enforcement of speeding is ridiculous when viewed in this context.
And the people saying "yes but there is more energy in a faster vehicle" have clearly not felt the difference between driving a car with drum brakes vs modern brakes.
There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.
>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression
That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.
Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?
> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.
I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.
[0] https://www.aclu-il.org/press-releases/black-and-latino-moto...
[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...
If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit, then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.
That is precisely why traffic would effectively grind to a halt. Because going even 0,0001 over the limit is so easy, you would have to turtle through traffic to get anywhere while making certain you never go above the limit. 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes you have to accelerate yourself out of a dangerous situation.
Honestly if you are arguing for this idea, I strongly suspect you have no experience driving. I've driven for about 25 years. I've received two speeding tickets. One in Germany (I'm danish), where I got confused due to unfamiliar signage and got dinged for going 112km in a 100km zone. And once here I got a ticket for going 54 in a 50 - my mom was at the hospital, possibly about to die (she didn't). Both of those were speed traps.
> 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold.
Is the argument that you and others would be unable to safely achieve the posted speed within the speed limited area? For example, if you feel you can't drive more precisely than 40-50 when you are aiming for 45, in the above scenario, you could start with your goal being 45, then in the 30 zone aim for 25, knowing that you'd be going no faster than 30 when your intend to drive 25.
> 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment.
Should you aim for 55, if for example the most precise you can do is +/- 5? Or adjust correspondingly for how precise you are able to keep within a desired range.
And of course:
* In a world where enforcement was more consistent, we might expect speed limits to eventually be adjusted - i.e. are speed limits currently set lower than what is technically safe because we assume that some portion of people will currently break the law?
* With self-driving, or at least automated speed-keeping (but not steering) there will no longer be the issue of someone having the problem of being unable to stay within x km/h of the speed they're targeting.
>automated speed-keeping
My car displays what it thinks is the speed limit on the dashboard, and it gets it wrong all the time. If I relied on that in this hypothetical, I would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison, after it once said the limit was 110km on a narrow residential street.
Isn't that like saying "What would the effects be if time travel existed" but assuming that doesn't then prompt any changes in human behavior, laws, other technologies, etc. from what people were doing everyday and what existed before it? When discussing "What if x changed", I think we need to also take into account the other changes in laws, behaviors, etc. that one expects that to then prompt - whether big or small.
> perfect enforcement
Isn't consistent enforcement of the law far better than the current inconsistent and unequal enforcement, where people already face unequal enforcement for 'driving while black', where if an officer is having a bad day or doesn't like you they can already cite you strictly, and where other people are regularly able to get away with 20 mph over a limit, where every driver and officer guesses/decides for themselves about whether the current limit should be strictly enforced vs allow 5 over, 15 over, etc etc?
> I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately.
So instead of aiming for 33 in a 30 km zone, couldn't you aim for a slightly lower number in order to avoid the scenario you expect for yourself where if the law was consistently applied you would be "would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison"?
It is perfectly possible to drive and obey all speed limits. It is even technically easy. Us people choosing not to do so, because we are impatient, feeling competitive against other drivers or because we just think we can get away with it now does not make it impossible.
Ideally, for a lot of things we want to punish people who knowingly do bad stuff, not people who do bad stuff because they thought it was good.
In fact DUI should be a mitigating circumstance, because when you're drunk your ability to make decisions is impaired -- but the opposite happens, DUI is an aggravating circumstance.
It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.
The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.
That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of whether you actually ever touch them.
etc. Many such cases.
So, in the case of speeding:
- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)
- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.
We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.
- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.
This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
---
Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.
Or perhaps people will not be able to just "not pull over" because the police drones will be given the power to remotely command their car to stop. Heck, why even have the drones? Just require that the car monitor speeding infractions and report them for fines. Serious or repeat offenders can have their throttles locked out to the speed limit of the current road.
I personally happen to think this is a terrible idea, just one cyber attack or regime change away from crippling everyday Americans ability to get around and live their lives, but that probably won't stop it from happening.
(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)
And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.
And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.
I would imagine that if, say, 95% of vehicles on the road were incapable of speeding, there would be very little reason for the police to attempt to stop the other 5%. You'd probably still have token speed enforcement, but without the revenue raising potential of frequent speed tickets, it would likely make sense to direct enforcement resources elsewhere.
Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).
Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.
To make this more practicable you might be able to drastically narrow the context of the information, e.g. to the current task. So you could have an app that watches everything you do and tells you if you're (possibly) about to break a law. The extreme version of this looks like wearing a body camera at all times and having a little ‘voice of the state’ in your ear that tells you what your legal options are on every circumstance. Maybe a little dystopian, especially if it starts reporting you if you don't follow its guidance.
Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.
But this is a feature, not a bug.
https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks...
Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.
Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.
Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
Maybe my YouTube algorithm just shows me a lot of it, but there’s no shortage of cops out there violating people’s rights because they think when they ask for something we have to comply and see anything else as defiant.
I think we need perhaps less laws so people can actually know them all. Also, I think we need clarity as to what they are and it needs to be simple English, dummy’s guide to law type thing. But there’s a lot of issues that simply stem from things like 1) when can a cop ask for your ID? / when do you have the right to say no? 2) similar question as to when do they have a right to enter/trespass onto your property? 3) as every encounter usually involves them asking you questions, even a simple traffic stop, when and how can you refuse to talk to them or even roll down your window or open your car door without them getting offended and refusing to take no as an answer?
I don’t think we generally have any understanding of what our rights actually are in these most likely and most common interactions with law enforcement. However, it’s all cases where I see law enforcement themselves have a poor understanding of what the law and rights are themselves so how are citizens to really know. If they tell you it’s their policy to ID anyone they want without any sort of probable cause then they say you’re obstructing their investigation for not complying or answering their questions or asserting you have to listen to anything they say because it’s a lawful order; it’s just common ways they get people to do what they want, it’s often completely within your right to not comply with a lot of these things though.
Teaching this as a requires HS class would be an incredible benefit to society, because, on the flip side, many police encounters escalate to violence because the citizen has an incorrect understanding of where their rights end/don't exist.
The most obvious rule to follow is that you should always assert your rights (correct or incorrect) verbally only, as soon as you involve physical resistance, the situation will deteriorate rapidly (for you.) Any violations of your rights will be argued and dealt with in court, not on the street. Confirm requests/demands from officers are 'lawful orders', and then do them.
If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.
The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.
If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.
But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.
This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).
Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.
> Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power
This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.
The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.
I think there’s a difference between the marketing brochure and reality.
You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.
The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?
Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.
Neoliberals and the far left, when forced to work in the real world, both tend to prefer putting power into rules, not giving people in authority the power to make decisions.
The upside is there's less misuse of power by authorities, at least in theory. The bad news is, you now need far more detailed rules to allow for the exceptions, common sense, and nuance that are no longer up to authorities.
The worse news is, that the people who benefit from complex rules are the upper classes, and the authorities who know how to manipulate complex rules.
"Don't be evil" requires a leader with the authority to enforce it.
A 500 employee manual will be selectively implemented, and will end up full of exploits, but hey, at least you can pretend you tried to remove human error from the process.
But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning democratic society it must always be possible (in principle) to commit a crime and get away.
Take some examples of laws that have changed over time. Say, interracial marriage. It was illegal in many places to marry someone of a different race. If this had been perfectly enforced, no one would have ever dated or see couples of different races, and people would have had a lot harder of a time exploring and realizing that the law was wrong.
The same thing could be said about marijuana legalization. If enforcement was perfect, no one would have ever tried marijuana, and there would have never been a movement to legalize by people who used it and decided it was not something that should be banned.
We need to be able to push boundaries so they can move when needed.
The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.
Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter.
Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.
Eastern Europe went through a similar transition. Before the iron curtain fell, the eastern bloc operated on favors more than it operated on money. This definitely isn't the case any more.
Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.
We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.
But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.
Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.
(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
Specific examples for the UK: inducting politicians into the Privy Council in order to qualify them for security briefings, Henry VII powers, and ministers' authority deriving from the seal they're given by the sovereign. Which would almost make as much sense if it were a marine mammal as it does being a stamp.
The thing being, they work well enough. And if you want to replace them, you need to work out what to replace them with and how.
https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf
which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.
I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.
This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.
LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored.
However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though.
So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one.
The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
At the end we will just have agents interacting with each other.
As in their post:
"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."
This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market?
I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued.
(I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
Because this is satire by FOSS people :)
We are seeing this in the world of digital media, where frivolous DMCA and YouTube takedown reports are used indiscriminately and with seemingly little consequence to the bad actor. Corporations are prematurely complying with bad actors as a risk reduction measure. The de jure avenues to push back on this are weak, slow, expensive, and/or infeasible.
So if you ask me what's the bigger threat right now, stricter or less strict enforcement, I'd argue that it's still generally the latter. Though in the specific case of copyright I'd like to see a bunch of the law junked, and temporal scope greatly reduced (sorry not sorry, Disney and various literary estates), because the de facto effects of it on the digital (and analog!) commons are so insidious.
I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal.
Now I'm not sure what to think anymore.
There are tons of stuff every day I could steal, knowing that any law I might break would not be enforceable simply because no one knew it was me. Littering in the forest. Dumping toxic materials into rivers.
All that works because most people don't do it, only a few.
However I don't think I agree with your way of thinking. The reason we have laws is because people will not naturally do the right thing; otherwise laws and police would be entirely unnecessary, no?
There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.
The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
* narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught
If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.
"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.
But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.
A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.
Speed cameras are another excellent example.
Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
Well said.
I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws.
It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them.
It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.
In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.
It was never designed for this originally.
(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
People complain about the regulations, but they also complain about houses that are structurally unsound, unventilated, flammable, badly isolated acoustically and thermally and so on... I don't think going back is the way to go. It's true that sometimes licensing that too long, though.
But then again, we have turned "security" into something absurd which only adds costs.
> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
Other than lost time (which compounds, but also increases traffic congestion, so those 10 mins might turn into 20-25), the fuel use and pollution are greatly increased.
Interestingly, there are speed cameras there, and enforcement is not done on these slight violations: without this flexibility, I'd need to ask for traffic lights to be adjusted so they work well for driving under speed limits, and that is slow and an annoying process.
But without an option to "try", I wouldn't even know this is the case, and I wouldn't even be able to offer this as a suggestion.
Whether that accounts for consequences being "grave and terrible", probably not, but very suboptimal for sure.
The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.
Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
While it is true that many people do speed, that doesn't make their speeding "the real speed limit".
I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25 km/h), whereas I always do even if I am driving at 45km/h because my foot would be hanging over the brake near areas of low visibility (like intersections) or near crosswalks or with pedestrians near the road.
Your braking distance is largely a function of your reaction time (attention + pre-prep + reflexes), and your car performance (tyres, brakes) on top of the speed, and speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver". You obviously have most of those under your control, but the speed is the easiest to measure externally.
The obvious counter is that I could be even safer if I also drove at 25 km/h, but it would take me much longer, I'd hit many more red lights, so I might stop being so attentive because I am going "so slow" and taking so long (maintaining focus is hard the longer you need to do it).
However, measuring individual performance is prohibitively expensive if not impossible (as it also fluctuates for the same person, but also road and car conditions), so we use a proxy like speed limit that is easy to measure.
Which is a dangerous line of thinking, as everyone thinks they're above average.
Speed limits are also, to some extent, designed around physics. Higher-speed accidents have more kinetic energy.
If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.
Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.
Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.
I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.
The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes.
In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner.
Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an ambulance can reach my house.
As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes to recovery from a stroke.
What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a stroke anyway?
The 1996 movie Transpotting still gives me shivers up my spine by putting someone in a car and drop at ER rather than calling for help. Too many people die needlessly, even today, when well meaning people load shooting victims, stroke victims and heart attacks etc into their car and drive to ER without asking their local emergency services for advice.
PS. You can't 100% of the time get to ER faster than the ambulance. There are more ambulances than emergency rooms by number. If an ambulance is at the county hospital they'll be faster than you.
Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$?
Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
The real reason is that speed limits are generally lower than the safe speed of traffic, and enforcement begins at about 10mph over the stated limits.
People know they can get away with it.
If limits were raised 15% and strictly enforced, it would probably be better for society. Getting a ticket for a valid emergency would be easy to have reversed.
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
I agree with the author that we are not prepared for the consequences of such a change and that it can lead to abuse on many instances.
The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.
...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.)
Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies.
---
Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account.
In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government).
Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands).
Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client.
> And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.
Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved.
> Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
The courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.
What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay-me-to-implement.com. Companies that want to use that package go get their own custom implementation that is under a license strictly for that company and the OSS maintainer gets paid.
I wonder what the MVP for such a thing would look like.
The people behind this site/talk clearly don't buy into that. The way they see it, a reckoning must come. We might as well get it over with as soon as possible. Rip off the band-aid so to speak. So maybe we should shake the system and show that its falling apart.
I mean maybe you can pay, it can just use some 8B model to give you unsubstantiated crap.
Unless they already burned 20000% of their runway on tokens.
Arguably Cowen's "Great Stagnation" was driven primarily by not embracing higher energy provision in the form of fission.
> "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired)
> © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD].
> This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services.
I'm sure they've already received offers from investors who wish to build the next torment nexus.
EDIT: Reading it again its quite obvious, I was just skimming at first, but still damn. Hilarious
Satire points out the absurd
E.g. Palantir, the surveillance analytics company named after the magic orb that purports to let you remotely view anything you want, but actually allows its creator to view you while manipulating you by selectively showing some things and not others.
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
I really got fooled here for a second, but the unfortunate reality is that people will try this soon, and someone will have to litigate this, if open source is to survive, which will take years and millions of dollars to resolve
It's like... revert patent troll? I'm not even sure I get it but the wording "liberation from open source license obligations." just wants to make me puke. I also doubt it's legit but I'm not a lawyer. I hope somebody at the FSF or Apache foundation or ... whomever who is though will clarify.
"Our proprietary AI systems have never seen" how can they prove that? Independent audit? Whom? How often?
Satire... yes but my blood pressure?!
I am going to assume it's the latter.
If you in your house take an AGPL program, host it for yourself, and use it yourself, nothing in the AGPL obligates you to publish the source changes.
In fact, even if you take AGPL software and put it behind a paywall and modify it, the only people who the license mandates you to provide the source code for are the people paying.
The AGPL is basically the GPL with the definition of "user" broadened to include people interacting with the software over the network.
And the GPL, again, only requires you to provide the source code, upon request, to users. If you only distribute GPL software behind a paywall, you personally only need to give the source to people paying.
Although in both these cases, nothing stops the person receiving that source code from publishing it under its own terms.
Google “examples of GPL enforced in court” for a few
Yeah it requires finding out, but how do you prove a whistleblower broke their NDA?
I'm missing something there, that's precisely what I'm arguing again. How can it do a clean-room reimplementation when the open source code is most likely in the training data? That only works if you would train on everything BUT the implementation you want. It's definitely feasible but wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive for most, if not all, projects?
But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certainly possible to clone GNU grep without copying any code and I don't think it would fail any copyright claims just because the GNU grep code is in the wild.
If that was the case, the moment any code is written under the GPL, it could never be reimplemented with a different license.
So instead of a human cloner, I use AI. Sure, the AI has access to the GPL code - every intelligence on the planet does. But does that mean that it's impossible to reimplement an idea? I don't think so.
Here, neither steps are taken.
If you’re supplying a BOM manifest, rather than software constraints, then the only way to assert those constraints is to directly compare against the original project. It doesn’t matter if it’s AI or a human doing that, because either way it’s not “clean room”.
You can do clean room design with AI via SDD (spec driven development). But that’s not what this service (satire or not) offers.
Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and codify. Mens rea really does matter when we are talking about defrauding intellectual property holders and stealing their opportunity.
But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.
I love FOSS but I hate that it’s been used to replicate existing code or serve as a way to outsource corporate tech debt. The shadow of profit looms over it all.
The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).
If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?
At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
"Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?"
"Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers."
"For the first time, a way to avoid giving that pesky credit to maintainers."
"Full legal indemnification [...] through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright"
Try to take the stance of someone who doesn't really know too much about open source other than it's a nuisance to use, this is a great idea! I wanted to use this tool that corporate said we couldn't touch, but now I can!
The company is literally named “bad/evil.”
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266
Here is a more recent example I found in Cursor's browser experiment from January:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661236
De-jure, not at all.
Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a court that you have never heard this song, not even in the background somewhere".
LLMs having been trained on all software they could get their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the "they learn just like humans" which is both false and irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.
De-facto though, things are different. The technical details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass laws legalizing their copyright infringement.
There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their economies.
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.
If you take 5 minutes to look at the code you'll see that v7 works in a completely different way, it mostly uses machine learning models instead of heuristics. Even if you compare the UTF8 or UTF16 detection code you'll see that they have absolutely nothing in common.
Its just API compatible and the API is basically 3 functions.
If he had published this under a different name nobody would have challenged it.
I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.
On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.
Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.
I even recall Baseball Mogul relied on the Lahman DB for a period of time. It does make me wonder if we'll see more of that.
We all have access to SOTA LLMs. If I want a "clean room" implementation of some OSS library, and I can choose between paying a third party to run a script to have AI rebuild the whole library for me and just asking Claude to generate the bits of the library I need, why would I choose to pay?
I think this argument applies to most straightforward "AI generated product" business ideas. Any dev can access a SOTA coding model for $20p/m. The value-add isn't "we used AI to do the thing fast", it's the wrapping around it.
Maybe in this case the "wrapping" is that some other company is taking on the legal risk?
It's an inevitable outcome of automatic code generation that people will do this all the time without thinking about it.
Example: you want a feature in your project, and you know this github repo implements it, so you tell an AI agent to implement the feature and link to the github repo just for reference.
You didn't tell the agent to maliciously reimplement it, but the end result might be the same - you just did it earnestly.
You need the right kind of person, in the right life circumstances, to have this idea before it happens for real. By having publicity, it becomes vastly more likely that it finds someone who meets the former two criteria, like how it works with other crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime). So thanks, Malus :P
It's the difference between a developer taking a job at Palantir out of college because nobody had a better offer, and a guy spending years in his basement designing "Immigrant Spotter+" in the hopes of selling it to the government. Sure, they're both evil, but lots of people pick the first thing, and hardly anybody does the second.
Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.
WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.
Not that it matters, I just think the joke is more fun if they are different.
because LLMs can't program anything of non-trivial complexity despite the persistent delusions from its advocates, same reason the lovers of OSS haven't magically fixed every bug in open source software.
Maybe that's part of the joke, though :)
While such tactics would render certain OSS software licenses absurd, the tactic itself, as a means to get around them, is entirely sound. It just reveals the flawed presupposition of such licenses. And I'm not sure there is really any way to patch them up now.
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
There will be many questions asked, like why buy some SaaS with way too many features when you can just reimplement the parts you need? Why buy some expensive software package when you can point the LLM into the binary with Ghidra or IDA or whatever then spend a few weeks to reverse it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
Unless obfuscated C# desktop apps are pretty friendly to decompile.
But that's not true!
According to binding precedent, works created by an AI are not protected by copyright. NO ONE OWNS THEM!!!
I think maybe this is a good thing, but honestly, it's hard to tell.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...
If I want to clone some GPL clone into a MIT license, if it ends up in the public domain because it can't be copyrighted, what do I care? I've still got the code I want without the GPL.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...
For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
Funny but true.
* Many of the people maintaining FOSS are paid to do so; and if we counted 'significance' of maintained FOSS, I would not be surprised if most FOSS of critical significance is maintained for-pay (although I'm not sure).
* Publishing software without a restrictive license is not 'generous', it's the trivial and obvious thing to do. It is the restriction of copying and of source access that is convoluted, anti-social, and if you will, "insane".
* Similarly, FOSS is not a "miracle" of human cooperation, and it what you get when it is difficult to sabotage human cooperation. The situation with physical objects - machines, consumables - is more of a nightmare than the FOSS situation is a miracle. (IIRC, an economist named Veblen wrote about the sabotaging role of pecuniary interests on collaborative industrial processes, about a century ago; but I'm not sure about the details.)
* Many people read licenses, and for the short, paragraph-long licenses, I would even say that most developers read them.
* It is not insane to use FOSS from a "fiduciary standpoint".
Well, it's one thing to read licenses as a human and another to read them as a lawyer.
That's why it's useful to pick one of the standard licenses that lawyers have already combed over, even if it's a long one like the GPL.
[0]: https://malus.sh/blog.html
Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?
Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.
Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.
"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.
Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.
There is a mutual agreement between all collaborating parties that "hey we ALL need these core fundamental building blocks of software. why dont we all collaborate in this open space?" And everyone wins.
There is tremendous value in the Linux kernel, and these large open source programs. And this is basically an attack by corporations to attempt to privatize it all.
It's nothing new. This is simply the latest example of capitalist "growth at any cost". We sailed past any immorality hazards a LONG time ago.
Doesn’t apply everywhere though.
Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.
In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
it is an illusion because this is a satire site.
:)
For example, the Anthropic Rust C compiler could hardly have copied GCC or any of the many C compilers it surely trained on, because then it wouldn't have spat out reasonably idiomatic and natural looking Rust in a differently organized codebase.
Good news for Rust and Lean, I guess, as it seems like everyone these days is looking for an excuse to rewrite everything into those for either speed or safety or both.
The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The copyright applies to some fixed media (text in this case) rather than the idea expressed, but the protections extend well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations and translations.
If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it) I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a single sentence were copied verbatim.
They do say this:
> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.
Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.
i do not necessarily agree with the phrasing of ActivePatterns comment, but i also raised an eyebrow at iepathos' comment.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
^ For those who haven’t been keeping up on the debacle.
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month.
EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.
I'd cheer for a company like this.
It seems to dance just on the other side of what's legal, though.
Then I don't think you've thought it through.
This entire software ecosystem depends on volunteering and cooperation. It demands respect of the people doing the work. Adhering to their licensing terms is the payment they demand for the work they do.
If you steal their social currency, they may just walk away for good, and nobody will pick up the slack for you. And if you're a whole society of greedy little thieves, the future of software will be everyone preciously guarding and hiding their changes to the last open versions of software from some decades ago.
You should read Bruce Perens' testimony in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case that explained all this (and determined that licensing terms are enforceable, and you can't just say "his is open mine is open what's the difference?")
https://web.archive.org/web/20100331083827/http://perens.com...
We need to deal with the issues now. The worst possible outcome is a gradual drip-drip-drip of incremental job losses, people shuffling from job to job, taking financial hits, some companies pretending everything is fine, other companies embracing full-bore zero employee work. The longer it goes on, the more wealth and power gets siphoned up by corporations and individuals who already have significant wealth, the bigger the inequality, and the bigger the social turmoil.
Software, graphics design, music, and video (even studio level movies) should cope with this now. It's not going to stop, AI isn't going to get worse, there's not going to be some special human only domain carved out. The sooner we cope with this the better, because it'll set the foundation for the rest of the job loss barreling down on us like the Chicxulub asteroid.
The end result could well be the people bringing out the guillotines for tech executives, or even the Butlerian Jihad.
But I'm not sure everyone would agree we need to race to those dystopian futures. They might prefer a more conservative future where they nip the scamming / copyright infringement at scale / "disruption" in the bud.
The trouble seems to revolve mainly around money. Give enough of it to someone, or even promise it, and so many people just lose their minds and their moral backbone. Politicians in charge of regulating these shenanigans especially so, I'm not sure they had moral backbones to begin with.
Agree, I said this in another comment, AI-generated anything should be public domain. Public data in, public domain out.
This train wreck in slow motion of AI slowly eroding the open web is no good, let's rip the bandaid.
I publish under AGPL and if someone ever took my project and washed it to MIT I would probably just take all my code offline forever. Fuck that.
See: https://deploycel.org/
I do not believe it will ever again make sense to build open source for business. the era of OSS as a business model will be very limited going forward. As sad and frustrating as it is, we did it to ourselves.
Axiom of Reality: “Intellectual Property” does not exist.
Let’s say instead it consolidated a few packages into 1. This might even be a good idea for security reasons.
Then it offered a mandatory 15% revenue tip to the original projects.
So far GPL enforcement usually comes down to “umm, try and sue us lol”.
How much human intervention is needed for it to be a real innovation and not llm generated. Can I someone to watch Claude do its thing and press enter 3 times ?
https://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/solemnly-swear-no-good/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329605
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2606:_Weird_Unico...
It does actually generate a price (which is suspiciously like a fixed rate of $1 per megabyte), and does actually lead you to Stripe. What happens if someone actually pays? Are they going to be refunding everything, or are they actually going to file the serial numbers off for you?
Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
But I love it! The perfect response to the "clean room" AI re-implementation and re-licensing of whatever that library is called.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
Took me a minute to recognize the satyre, good one boys.
Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose.
Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”.
Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.
> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries
Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
I think they should take some responsibility!
It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
bad, evil, wicked; ugly; unlucky;
It's an interesting word in Latin, because depending on the phonetic length of the vowel and gender it vary greatly in meaning. The word 'malus' (short a, masculine adjective) means wicked, the word 'mālus' (long ā, feminine noun) means apple tree, and 'mālus' (long ā, masculine noun) means the mast of a ship.
About the only reason nobody would actually build this is there's no money in it. Who'd pay for a CRaaS version when they're not even paying for the original open source version?
I do think somebody will eventually vibe-code it for the lulz.
>*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright*
Heh, ok. So, the thinking is:
1. You contract them.
2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company.
3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary.
4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!"
...
5. Profit.
This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code.
The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established.
The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness...
This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating").
The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )
> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.
Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?
Full legal indemnification* Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright
...
The MalusCorp Guarantee™ If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.
*This has never happened because it legally cannot happen. Trust us.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
ESLint or Webpack would probably be attempts that are decently sized for a challenge.
Cheerio would be a bit smaller.
Chalk is probably close to the absolute lower bound of what's even meaningful. (You'd likely just regenerate a package that size from scratch instead of wondering about compat)
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage.
(I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
In practice even with much better AIs this would still be a pretty big risk. The testing you'd need would be extensive.
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.
So the need is real, at least for enshittified libraries.
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.