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.)
Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-speaking, not English-native.
Pretending that it's English-native is why there's unspoken incentives to sound more "native", and thus use these grammar-correcting tools.
Some of the intelligent comments on here come from people who learned English in recent months or years, rather than in childhood.
Their English isn't always fluent or well-structured. If they rely slightly more heavily on suggested-next-word tools or AI translations, is that a reason to exclude them from the conversation?
Conversely, many English learning resources for non-native speakers focus on strict formal language, similar to AI-generated text. Do we risk excluding people who have learned a style more formal than we're used to?
One physical robot with four wheels, a camera, and a 101 up/down "fingers" to match the keyboard can roll between physical machines and type on mechanical hardware keyboards. This brings the ceiling of how many accounts you can control down to the number of computers you have, but that's not a high price to pay.
It doesn’t stop people posting AI slop, it stops people from posting AI slop more than once. If you ban somebody for spamming today, they just create a new account and keep on spamming. If you can determine they are the same person you banned before using verifiable credentials, it makes the ban actually effective.
Layer on captchas. It won't completely stop slop but it's an incentive against slop flooding. And I mean, nothing is stopping a human from just going into ChatGPT by hand and asking for output and copy/pasting that into an HN post box.
> If someone used the car without permission, they are guilty of theft.
Sure, but I still don't know who they are, so I can't give their name over for either investigating the theft or reassigning the speeding/red light/parking fine.
We have a long tradition of asking each other riddles. A classic one asks, "A plane crashes on the border between France and Germany. Where do they bury the survivors?"
Riddles are such a big part of the human experience that we have whole books of collections of them, and even a Batman villain named after them.
Because for a long time, on most computers, the telnet client was the closest thing to an "open a tcp socket to this ip/port and connect the i/o from it to stdin/stdout" application you can get without installing something or coding it up yourself.
These days we have netcat/socat and others, but they're not reliably installed, while telnet used to be generally available because telnetting to another machine was more common.
These days, the answer would be to use a netcat variant. In the past, telnet was the best we could be confident would be there.
In corporate environments, netcat was often banned as it was seen as a "hacking" tool. Having it installed would sometimes get the attention of the security folks, depending how tightly they controlled things.
But there's the rub. If you found the code on Github, you would have seen the "simple licence" which required you to either give an attribution, release your code under a specific licence, seek an alternative licence, or perform some other appropriate action.
But if the LLM generates the code for you, you don't know the conditions of the "simple license" in order to follow them. So you are probably violating the conditions of the original license, but because someone can try to say "I didn't copy that code, I just generated some new code using an LLM", they try to ignore the fact that it's based on some other code in a Github somewhere.
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.)
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