Then what did you mean when you said:

the output will always be in the public domain

It seems to me like a pretty clear statement.

I’m saying that the rewrite of chardet infringes on the copyright of the original work. That is neither MIT licensed nor public domain. It’s illegally reproduced and distributed copyrighted work.

That I never disputed, I'm not interested about chardet or whatever happened here, I'm interested about your comment that LLM output is always public domain, and if so, whether it could be used to achieve the goal of reimplementing a library so that it achieves the same purpose but isn't bound by the original license, if you do it without infringing on the copyright of the original work.

That all makes sense to me, all I meant is that you are answering the relicense question literally, which I don't think actually matters. The situation we are pondering is that someone wants to free a project from it's original license.

They are claiming they did a magic trick with an LLM and now the project is MIT licensed. And you are saying that it's not, it's public domain. But the distinction is immaterial to the person's goal. Whether the author is right or you are right, the project is no longer under its original license, and whether that is something that can happen is the actual question here, regardless if the resulting output can be licensed or not.

That's not the same at all though. Complaining about AI "features" being shoved down users throat, and AI being used by developers are very different things.

Both can be complained about, absolutely, but they are completely different things.

If Microsoft was using all artisanal human written code to deliver all the AI crap, I wouldn't be complaining about it any less.

Yes, but what does that have to do with LLM output being not copyrightable?

So you are agreeing using the LLM worked? Because that's what the author wanted: generate a freely usable version that is no longer bound by copyright or the original license.

Compared to what's going on on Windows these are such non issues, and yet people are so dramatic about it. I installed Kubuntu almost 15 years ago and I'm on the same install still (going through several PCs with the same disk/image). Disabling snap took me 5 minutes many years ago and was never an issue, another 2 minutes for disabling the Ubuntu Pro message.

Would it be better if these didn't exist? Of course. But when comparing distros, this wouldn't even be worth putting on a list of pros and cons. Is another distro better for your needs? Great. Is Ubuntu better for your needs? Also great, and surely if it is, then it taking 7 minutes longer to setup is not even a factor worth considering?

If a friend had needs that I know Ubuntu fits best, I wouldn't "not let them do it" for some ideological reasons, I'd just tell them to disable snap if they are not aware of it.

This is the silly distro infighting that makes people avoid Linux.

"Friends don't let friends install hyped flavor of the week distros like CachyOS, popOS and Bazzite that will be out of the vogue in 3 years, instead of something that just works" is what I could've said just as well, but how about let people use what they want?

Well, I agree with you, the only way to not do anything unethical is to do nothing. So my point is that it's not really useful to deal in absolutes, it's impossible to take a stance on everything. You don't like AI and avoid it, that's a respectable position. Someone else is vegan and calls you an asshole for causing the suffering of animals instead (if for the sake of the argument I assume you aren't vegan). That doesn't help anyone. Set your own moral compass and follow your own principles, but I don't think it's useful to hound other people, because there will always be reasons to do so.

And why is that a problem?

Google searches also usually generate mostly useless results, which is impossible to combat. Thankfully the person doing the search knows what they are looking for, can try different solutions, and learn from multiple results to get to a working solution.

Why do you consider AI different? Nobody is expecting it always give correct solutions, just like nobody is expecting Googling something to always give the correct solution.

I'm not saying AI is useful, but I'm saying that a tool being fallible doesn't make it useless. So I'm wondering why do you consider AI different? If Googling is fine even though you need to checks multiple results before finding something useful, why is searching with AI held to a higher standard? Genuine question. Because I agree with your critique of AI, I just don't agree the critique means no one should ever use it. There are much less reliable tools than AI, that are still useful at times.

I get your argument, you consider AI bad and require the use of it to be disclosed so that you can avoid it - reasonable take.

My question is, do you avoid projects that use GitHub for hosting? Because that's supporting Microsoft, which is helping ICE kill people. So the ethical thing to do is to boycott GitHub and projects that use it.

Do you require open source projects to disclose that they use any US-made hardware or software in their development? Because taxes from the sale of them fund missiles that kill children in Iran.

What is the list of things in your mind, that a maintainer has to disclose in order for you to not consider him an asshole for not disclosing it? Surely not just AI use?

That seems a little disingenuous. Just because email can't be protected well in most cases, doesn't mean you can't have a service that cares about privacy and does whatever is possible.

Google can train AI on your email, and then when I go make an alternative that doesn't do that, you will say I don't care about privacy? What is that, no true Scotsman? Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Even with all these issues, Proton is more private than Gmail.

How dare you. If it's your last thought then you are clearly not answering the question and thinking about how you can do better afterwards!

Why do you say it's an amazing project? Looks to me like someone copied vim, and according to the commits did nothing useful other than changing some text in a few files. The author's comments are all about coming up with a cool name for it, and what "cool" new features to add. I don't see any plan on actually making this a viable competing project. I don't see the author having much credentials in leading a project of this caliber either.

Before anyone misunderstands my comment, yes anyone not liking AI should stop using vim, I very much agree. And there are two viable ways forward:

• Switch to a different editor
• Talk to the maintainers of vim to remove AI

This project is not one of them.

Where is the author's plan to tackle the 1600 issues that vim has open? How do they address the fact that vim has hundreds of commits each month, and literally had 68 contributors in just the last month? In the past month they closed 66 issues with vim. Half of vim's codebase is written in vimscript, and the other half in C. The new lead maintainer, I quote: "thankfully i know some C, but not vimscript". They know some C and no vimscript? So how do they plan to develop this project?!

Another quote: "removing old targets, stripping away graphical stuff (who uses this in graphical mode anyways? everyone uses it in the CLI...", and they already plan to drop Windows support. Already ignoring user's needs and removing functionality. Now, they are perfectly entitled to do whatever in their fork. But how is it a viable competitor to vim in any way?

Even assuming the worst case scenario on what damage AI can do to the progress of vim's development, who can seriously suggest that 1 person who doesn't even know the relevant programming langagues can make a better project than hundreds of experienced contributors that are doing it for years, AI or not?

And again, all the power to them, they can have some fun with their fork. But it's ridicoulus to suggest it as an alternative. Two years from now, vim will have fixed ~1500 issues at the current rate. And will have a bunch of new ones due to AI. Meanwhile this project will be dead, and the latest version will have 1500 unfixed issues that are all fixed in vim.

Taking a stance again AI in vim? Do it, campaign for it, talk to the maintainers, effect change, review PRs and comment about the AI mistakes you see, submit bug reports for bugs caused by AI and make a case for forbidding it's use. You have my full support. This fork? It's obviously going nowhere, it's a waste of effort that could be used to actually stop AI.