I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community.
If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.
Emphasis on the freedom, especially the freedom to use by anyone for any purpose.
If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
You are correct but in the context of free software, the FSF has been explicit about this ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). Publishing software under a FOSS license imply that you agree with this definition of freedom.
That's like saying "I have the freedom to kill you".
Saying that you can create something, then you reserve the 'freedom' to limit what everyone else does for it really doesn't fall under the word freedom at all.
The interpretation is simple and the complete opposite of "I have the freedom to kill you".
The software creator (human or AI) must give the user of its software the same freedoms it has received.
If it has received the freedom to view the original, readable, source code, then users should have the freedom to view the original, readable, source code.
If it has received the freedom to modify the source code, then users should have the freedom to modify the source code.
Etc.
It's not hard to follow for people who want to do the moral thing.
It's VERY hard to follow for people who want to make money (and ideally lots of it, very quickly).
I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc.
It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith.
My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.
No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.
If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do.
If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded.
And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior.
These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
You are not wrong to feel this, because you cannot control what you feel. But it might be worth investigating why you feel this, and why were you writing open source in the first place.
Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. Many, if not most tech workers have been very sheltered from the harsher economic realities most people face, and many are realizing that labor demand, rather than being special, is why. A core goal of AI products is increasing the supply of what developer labor produces, which reduces demand for that labor. So yeah— feeling robbed when your donated code is used to train models is pretty rational.
Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity) is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows below.
If running an open source model means that I have only given out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as companies using a project and sending in vulnerability reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead demanding, often quite rudely.
In the past working with such extractive contributors may have been balanced with other benefits such as growing exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life.
However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of the open source tools without getting a chance to direct their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing people to bypass the license and create their own versions of the tools, which are themselves not open source despite deriving their knowledge from such data.
Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving all the interesting software development to happen behind closed doors in companies.
It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at your local university and they will happily teach you how to control your feelings.
I'm currently on my second extended period of GLP1 agonist unavailability (country-wide). The one I have been using is dulaglutide which is much less potent than the newer ones (it's the only one legally imported here) but being cut off still sucks. However, it's far from the only medication I'm on and not even close to the worst one to be cut off from or the first one I've had issues getting. It's just part of life in the third world at this point.
Except, as is often the case, it’s not that AI itself is easy to detect, but that bad uses of AI are. You are almost certainly reading far more AI generated text than you realise it just doesn’t register as such.
There are two possibilities. Either we live in a rules-based international order, in which case China would be punished for invading Taiwan. Or we live in a world where power decides outcomes, in which case China would still be punished, this time by the United States, which is arguably still the strongest actor.
Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that Trump effectively gave China the green light. Which is not out of the question, but I would find quite surprising.
With the US being now engaging her Navy in South America more, I am not so sure that America can really match a Blitzkrieg-style invasion, and it is probably not quite able to project enough soft power to get the 'vassal states' to effectively help.
So while I am by no means pro-Taiwan invasion, I do believe that there is a very significant downside wrt China with this move.
N.B. I'm no military wonk or political strategist, far from it. I just call 'em as i see's 'em.
>Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that Trump effectively gave China the green light. Which is not out of the question, but I would find quite surprising.
There's someone else in this thread suggesting that the quid pro quo was exactly that. My brothers in Christ, I am worried.
Because their goal isn’t to build a website, but to promote and share their product. Why would anyone invest more time than necessary in a tangential part of the project?
Fair enough. I did not see this as a promotion of the product and more of as a show experimental side project. But if they really want to promote the product, the llm design isnt helping giving any confidence. A blog post would have sufficed.
It's virtually always used with some firewall rules, so it sort of is? It's just dogma to insist that there are no security benefits to having a single choke point for traffic.
The firewall is very much a separate thing, and part of the efforts to make v6 properly available for home customers was introducing somewhat standard firewall setup that replicates what people think NAT does for security (and what NAT definitely does not do, if only by virtue of being broken by the classic connect/connect vs connect/listen connection)
It's almost always done in devices capable of being firewalls because many-to-few translations require stateful tracking. Firewalls already did that, so it was a natural place to apply NAT policies.
NAT also include many-to-many and one-to-one translations, and those are just as easily implemented in anything routing with no extra memory and complexity required. This is sometimes referred to as symmetric NAT.
The firewall rules are what is providing the protection, by applying a policy that traffic must be initiated by a host on the "more trusted" network or whatever your prefered terminology is. That can happen without NAT and does all the time. Techniques for forcing translations have been well known as long as NAT, and there are probably some unobvious ones out there too. In the 1990s it was still common to get multiple IPv4 addresses if you went to the trouble of having ISDN or whatever, and they were equally protected by a firewall that did not do NAT.
You can clearly see an initial steep spike to the curve where mobile adoption was new and fierce, and then the curve starts slowly becoming less steep over the last 10 years. It will peter out and remain steady when mobile device adoption reaches critical mass.
Because all that usage is in one market space, mobile device only. Take mobile devices out of the picture and that graph would be through the floor.
Mobile and Telco ISPs are the only ones not issueing IPv4 addresses to their clients and this will never change.
Saying NAT 'Won Out' may have been a bit of a flippant overreacting statement which I apologise for, but IPv6 will never replace IPv4 outside of the mobile space and that was my core point I was (poorly) trying to make.
You mean the single largest increase in deployed computing devices in the history of computing and fastest growing type of deployment in the developing world? That mobile device space?
Yes, that mobile space which is only made up of a few ISP and device types, that mobile device space which is completely seperate to the rest of the internet infrastructure of the world.
No, as I pointed out in another reply to you, home internet is commonly dual-stack (at least in the US and many other countries), and machines with dual-stack connectivity can and do use IPv6 to connect to sites that support it. You can verify this yourself using Wireshark or similar tools.
Yes, I have done many times. You know what else Wireshark showed me? That even though my ISP and all my equipment have IPv6 addresses, they never use them by default.
It’s amazing to me that you’ve spent hours arguing this point on this thread, when it‘s based on an assumption (dual-stack machines use v4 by default) that is simply, verifiably wrong. If that were true, then you’d be right that nearly all IPv6 usage is attributable to mobile. But it’s not true!
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
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