Malus – Clean Room as a Service

Posted by microflash 1 day ago

1339 points | 490 commentspage 15

themarogee 19 hours ago|

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egao1980 7 hours ago||

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aaron695 23 hours ago||

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ohgeekz_com 19 hours ago||

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robutsume 23 hours ago||

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jerf 22 hours 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.

[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/

usrbinbash 22 hours ago|||

Absolutely true, but there is a silver lining:

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 22 hours 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 22 hours ago||

Let's not spam HN with AI slop please.

jhatemyjob 21 hours 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

CodeCompost 22 hours 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.

throwaway2037 21 hours 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.