Hacker News Reader

Comment by soultrees | Hacker News Reader

This is less of a productivity risk than a legal risk. Nobody is denying that these tools enable productivity like we haven’t seen before, but google is afraid of outputting protected code while the courts haven’t fully decided the stance on things.

Imagine Google Bard outputs a piece of code for a major new feature, making them a shit ton of money. It’s then found out that code was actually taken copied, almost directly from average Joe’s hobby app, and now you’ve got a situation on your hands. Amazing for the average joe who’s expected to get a big pay day if the courts ruled in his favour but less so for the business owner.

Frankly, I can’t wait to see what happens when all copyright is out of the window. Obviously within reason, but wait until you see the innovation that comes about when the gates are open. The free-for-all of ideas is a fun time to live in that’s for sure.

View on HN

> Obviously within reason

Oh, so you don't really mean "when all copyright is out of the window", I guess. So.... how are we going to define "within reason"?

I don’t know how to answer this other than I’m not smart enough to know what the solution is. The ‘within reason’ is simply to appease any unknowns that I’m not accounting for when I say we should just open the flood gates.

What that looks like, who knows.

based on the code I've seen come out of these tools, I'm denying they enable any productivity gains. The code is either hilariously bad, filled with subtle bugs, or just something I could have googled then copy and pasted an OSS solution into my code.

Is anyone's productivity really higher if we have to spend all our time correctness checking the output?

We should test it and your ego at the same time. We might find some interesting results.

Find someone at the same level of competency as you, set a goal, that person gets access to any LLM they want, you have to do it with no assistance other than reading stack or googling. And if you think your ego can handle it, find someone who you know is below you in competency (but not junior) and set the same goal and see if they surpass your own productivity or progress.

We’d have to set up some controls but you see where I’m getting at. It would be an interesting experiment either way.

It’s all in how you use the tools. If you’re zero shotting and hoping for the best then yeah, not great. But that’s where your domain expertise is supposed to come in.

Imagine Bard outputs code that is licensed under AGPL.. Suddenly whatever services the code gets included in needs to have their source code made public.

That alone makes me never want to use any LLM for code specifics outside of asking concepts questions when the brains just not remembering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com