Rubenerd

Back in January I introduced my LLM Licence. For the cost of a donation to one of a few different technical foundations in which I harbour a keen interest and admiration, the licence would grant you permission to use an LLM trained on my works for a query.

It was tongue-in-cheek, but it did generate a surprising amount of feedback. This was among the most common responses:

How would you enforce it?

It’s a fascinating question; not for what it’s asking per se, but what it reveals about how we approach everything in this brave new world. The tl;dr is: it’s an honour system built on trust. And it should sound familiar.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

I don’t want to get into a debate over the merits of permissive, copyleft, and commercial software licences here, not least because I’ll have my head chewed off, and I’m rather attached to it. Haiyo.

But licences dictate the terms under which you can purchase, distribute, and/or modify the software, and how to acknowledge and grant sufficient credit to the source. Unless a program and its source have been released into the public domain (which may not always be feasible or possible depending on the jurisdiction), it almost certainly has a licence attached.

Commercial software often requires digital restrictions management (DRM), “activation”, serial numbers, licencing servers, indentured servitude, and other infrastructure to register, maintain, and enforce licencing terms. Ask me how I know! Even some freeware still requires this, because while they may not cost any money to buy, the owners of software prefer to be like those people crowding around the mustard dispenser at IKEA and keep the source to themselves. I joke, but people have every right to release their own creative works as they see fit.

Open software, by comparison, rarely has such distribution enforcement. Some hat-based software houses may inject their own trademarks or copyright in other ways to limit wholesale distribution, but otherwise most such software comes with the source, and perhaps even some pre-compiled binaries for our joy and convenience. It’s up to you to be responsible and to enact what’s required in exchange for the goods.

Taking responsibility… wait, what!?

This is a critical difference to understand. There is no licencing server phoning home to make sure my use of NetBSD is compliant with the 2-clause BSD licence. Alpine Linux doesn’t require me to install Client Access Licences for every SSH connection to my Xen host. At least, I hope not. And when even the whiff of passive telemetry is introduced into an open source package, let alone an overt rug pull, it causes such an uproar as to result in a hard fork.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

This is what makes the discussion around liability language models (LLMs) contributions to open software so surreal. Having spent decades teaching the industry about how permissive and copyleft licencing works, everyone seemingly forgot as soon as their stochastic parrots enter the picture. Maybe they used a chatbot to do their assignments.

The reason this is coming up now is due to more projects restricting or banning LLM-derived contributions. If they deem slop doesn’t meet their quality, authenticity, or licencing requirements, or they introduce legal liability, or they increase the workload for already tired reviewers, project maintainers have every right to deny such code. If you don’t like it, fork it.

(As an aside, they should absolutely do that! A forked project with LLM or “vibed” contributions that overtakes the original in performance, features, and security would surely present quantitative, irrefutable validation of the hype).

But this leads to that question people asked me at the start:

How would you enforce it?

The same way every other requirement is enforced: with a social contract. Projects have terms and policies in place under which they’ll accept contributions. LLM restrictions are another of these, with the same “enforcement” mechanism.

That’s it. There’s no silver bullet here. You can hoard changes to your GPL’d code and not submit them upstream. You can lift and submit code from somewhere you’re not allowed. You can also contribute slop that you’ve attempted to pass off as your own. I don’t know how else to say this, but maliciously working around contribution requirements is on you. I almost wrote that as ewe for some reason, so have this emoji of a sheep. 🐑

Licences are, sadly, only worth the amount people are willing to enforce them. But broadly speaking, that’s how open source software communities work. There’s a degree of trust that you’ll take responsibility and do the right thing. I know right, what a concept!

Clara and I like going to charity/op shops around Sydney looking for books and music. CDs are great because they can be shucked and put in folders, so they don’t take up additional space. Books can also be read, and then put in those street libraries for others to enjoy.

Last weekend I managed to find all these, for less than $5 total. We have Motocross Madness from 1998, Dangerous Creatures from 1994, and a blank DVD-RW in its original shrinkwrap.

I originally thought Motocross Madness came on two discs, but no, I just managed to buy two identical copies in the one CD sleeve. Huh! For someone who doesn’t drive iRL, it’s funny how racing games are my favourite. There’s also something about late 1990s CD-ROM games with DirectX that I absolutely love; the graphics do the same thing to me that Voodoo cards do for early DOS 3D fans.

Dangerous Creatures was one of Microsoft Home’s multimedia CD-ROMs, in a similar vain to Encarta, Bookshelf, and Explorapedia. It was ostensibly a reference guide for wildlife, but it had minigames and a surprisingly engaging design that my cousins and I loved exploring when we’d visit my grandad in northern New South Wales. I do have a copy of this already, but it was such a fun memory I’m glad to have a backup. That deserves its own post at some point.

As for the DVD-RW, this could be the first one I’ve ever owned? Our family was firmly in the DVD+R/RW camp, despite our Pioneer DVD burner supporting both. We had been told the + variant was “better”, and the media was usually the same price at Sim Lim Square and Funan Centre in Singapore, so we opted for it over DVD-R/RW. It was such a strange format war which, unlike something like Betamax/VHS/V2000, ended in stalemate.

That’s it for today. Well, last Sunday. I wonder what other random treasures are lurking around this area?

This is another inside baseball post, as my American friends say. But despite outward appearances, I didn’t write four posts on Monday, and none on Tuesday. I used to write half a dozen posts a day at uni, but I got more than a few comments from people at the time saying I was spamming their RSS reader. Then again, I’ll bet John Walkenbach had a similar issue with the late J-Walk Blog, a site I miss every day.

I wish I had a more exciting reason. I tend to have very busy Tuesdays, so I’ll often write posts for that in advance. I guess I forgot to update the timestamps. My deception was unveiled!

The irony hasn’t been lost on me that I’ve now spent a few dozen words, and an entire post, explaining why I’ve spammed people. I can’t even write two regular posts today, because one has been taken up by this. I blame it on the fact it’s early in the morning and the first coffee has yet to arrive.

I’ll be having one of those birthdays this year I feel like should be a big deal, but I suspect will feel like any other. That’s the hope, at least. More than anything, I feel lucky (and frankly privileged) to be around.

Around…

And then it hit me. Reel to reel tape machines. Around, and around, and around. On a 7-inch reel, to another 7-inch reel. Or maybe 10-inch. Or something more portable. Mesmerising. High fidelity. A complex piece of kit blending engineering and art.

Uh oh.

My long-running interest in reel to reel tape machines was piqued again in the last few years thanks to people like Mat from Techmoan. Cassettes were my preferred medium for listing to music when I was a kid, even though CDs were infinitely better in every respect, and I even had a damned Panasonic SD-card music player, an iPod, and a CD burner. Tape made absolutely no sense! But it all came down to being able to watch the tiny tape spools spin and gather their ribbons of music in a player. I obsessed over spec sheets, tape formulations, and noise reduction tech. It’s like I have a predilection towards old stuff.

Whoa, I think I just psychoanalysed myself. And I didn’t like it.

Anyway, while music was highly entertaining, the genesis (the Phil Collins, you could say… AAAAAAH!) came much earlier and from a different domain. I’m talking of course of those massive reel to reel tape storage mechanisms you’d see in old mainframe computer systems; the ones pictured alongside hard drives the size of washing machines, operated by smart people with Mary Tyler Moore and James Bond haircuts.

I often lament the fact I was born too late for the 16-bit graphical computer era (let alone 8-bit home computers), but I would have been just as enthralled and interested being around these reel to reel machines too. I know, I’m sure in operation they were far less glamorous and interesting, and almost certainly required frustrating amounts of maintenance. But the aesthetic alone of operating in a room with these reels would have been incredible. Well, until the novelty wore off I suppose.

It’s unlikely I’ll have a DEC reel to reel data tape machine spinning in our apartment any time soon (cough), but I’m fascinated with residential reel to reel audio machines. I wouldn’t even need a 10-inch unit; a smart 7-inch one with dual capstans, beautiful VU meters, and a cabinet with a mix of silver and black would look very smart in our loungeroom. It’d also be older than me, which would help with this crushing feeling of being an old man now.

Right?

…

Wait, where are you going?

As I say, it’s a big year for me. Or it’s supposed to be. Is this the silly midlife crisis device I save up for and buy? It’s safer than a motorbike, though I suppose it’d be capable of making just as much noise. Also tracks. Spin spin! I’d say I’m a lost cause, but I’d know exactly where the tape leader is.

I’m a couple of days late, but I thought it was worth sharing a story where this man (mild gender dysphoria notwithstanding!) learned something.

For a while I’ve had a set of rules and filters on my social media accounts, email, and so on that match on certain key phrases. These include, not exhaustively:

• Actually,
• For what it’s worth,
• In all fairness,
• No offence,
• To be fair,

You would not be surprised to hear this catches a bunch of comment spam from people replying in bad faith, or in a way that indicates they didn’t read what I wrote. The email folder these redirected to had 143 messages since I implemented this back in June last year, and a quick skim confirmed they were all exactly the kind of people you’d expect.

But it could have backfired. Last year I posted this list to Mastodon, and had private replies from two women asking me to reconsider my position. They both, independently, talked about the fragile line they have to walk talking with men online. Too reserved, and they’re walked all over by men eager to explain in patronising detail the comments they made. Too assertive, and they’re immediately branded difficult, “a bitch”, or worse. In their words, qualifying statements like these (besides perhaps “actually”) are a frustrating necessity in online discourse, and that I’d have to be prepared to filter them out if I maintained such a list. For all I know on social media, I may already have.

I got this wrong, apologise, and thought it was worth sharing!

I’ve had this little orb here since 2006. This most recent version has the original gradient again, and a teal colour to match the current theme. This should now be in the favicon, header, and other places if you clear your cache.

I’ve started using the Thunderbird email client for reading RSS feeds again, and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post.

I’ve gone through a bunch of self-hosted web RSS clients. They had the advantage of being accessible across multiple devices, including my various smartphones. But I try to avoid using phones thesedays if I can avoid it, and that includes scrolling RSS feeds.

Thunderbird runs locally on my personal machines, but it works. I already have my email, newsgroups, mailing lists, calendars, and notes in it, so having RSS feels like a natural extension. That said, it did require a bit of scaffolding.

First, I like Dave Winer’s river of news idea, as opposed to treating RSS feeds like unread email. Even former “completionists” like me don’t bother reading every single social media post anymore, so why should it be the same for all RSS feeds? Fortunately, Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as “read”. Done!

It’s not immediately obvious from the UI, but you can also assign feeds to folders. If you create a “Feeds” account, then create the folders you want under this, you can then assign feeds to those folders.

I’d still say NetNewsWire is the best RSS client available today, especially if you’re on the Mac. If you need something cross platform though, Thunderbird fits the bill great for me right now.

Update: I’ve decided to redact much of this post.

I maintain my reservations on security and ethical grounds with the inclusion of slop in software, but I also drew comparisons about the use of these tools that I think were in poor taste. To be transparent, the feedback I received overnight was positive; the decision to redact this post was a decision I made myself.

I’ve decided to retain my comments about burnout and open source software development though, which I still strongly believe is the root cause of so much of this. Thanks.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

I take the point about maintainer burnout in that thread; I’ve definitely been feeling that from the sheer volume of slop I’ve had to deal with in my jobs of late. Insofar as someone has to feel like they need a stochastic parrot to keep on top of work is a grim indictment of industry, and how we treat open source projects. One can feel compassion for someone’s circumstances, while acknowledging [the severe externalities, costs, and risks using these tools]. We have utterly failed in our duty of care to the people who make the software upon which our industry relies, while big businesses continue to rake in billions for sitting on top.

#hugops.

We have a new friend! His name is Super Peter, for family folklore reasons. He’s also on the wiki now.

He was found alongside some discarded computer components and furniture for a council cleanup. Clara cleaned up some marks and put him through the wash, and he came out looking fresh and brand new.

Super Peter is what they call a “weighted plushie”, a category with which I was unfamilar. He’s quite substantial for his size, perhaps owing to a higher than average amount of awesomeness.

Australia Post offers a free Parcel Locker service, which operates exactly as you’d expect. You register for an account, and you’re given a virtual address at your local post office from which you can accept deliveries. Smashing!

The Parcel Locker address looks, a little something, like this:

Ruben "That BSD Guy" Schade
Parcel Locker 88888 88888
1 Post Office Street
Sydney NSW 2000

This is how it works. The post office staff accept the incoming parcel on your behalf, even signing for it if necessary. They then file the parcel in one of the lockers outside, then uses your unique Parcel Locker code to notify you. You arrive with your QR code, and the locker pops open to reveal your parcel.

I illustrated doing this in my recent post about accepting my childhood 486 motherboard:

Parcel lockers aren’t a novel concept, but it’s great to have one operated by the national postal service. This means you can send anything you want to it, rather than just parcels from $WEBSITE that want to lock you into their specific retail service. Australia Post literally have my post anyway, so it’s not much of a stretch to have them “deliver” the mail to a secured box rather than my home.

This all sounds a bit complicated, so naturally the question arises why one would want to go through this in the first place? That’s an excellent, and dare I say handsome, question. The most obvious benefit is that you don’t have to be home to accept a delivery. Australian apartment buildings generally don’t have a good way to accept and store parcels, meaning they’re often relegated to sitting in the lobby that anyone can walk past. Theft or loss hasn’t been an issue since we’ve been here, but it’s always a possibility.

(Our last rental in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood had a Singaporean-style lobby with a front desk staffed 24/7. I didn’t realise how much I’d come to rely on this for deliveries)!

Alas, the system isn’t foolproof, though in my experience this has more to do with senders. People routinely leave names, or the Parcel Locker number off their postage, meaning the post office staff don’t know how to sort it when they receive it. I’ll check the tracking for a package and see it’s been “delivered”, but will never receive the requisite Parcel Locker unlock code. I’ve been able to sort this out by going to the post office and giving them the tracking information, which lets them go out the back and find it. But this sucks when it’s a Friday evening and I have to wait until Monday for a part I’d been hoping to install that weekend.

The other issue is that many sellers don’t seem to know what a Parcel Locker is. I’ll go to the checkout and enter my details, and the system will error out with something like this:

The seller does not deliver to PO boxes. Please update your address.

I don’t know why they’re telling me this, given a Parcel Locker isn’t a PO box! A Post Office box is a permanently reserved letterbox you rent from the post office that, yes, would be too small to fit any of the stuff I’d be buying. By contrast, a Parcel Locker is temporary, and always sized to fit the specific item. I expect the form is set to filter on words like “locker”, and assume this is a PO Box. And you know what they say about assumptions.

There are two fallback methods here. The first is I’ll close the tab and shop elsewhere. If there’s a feedback form, I’ll mention that I’ve taken my business elsewhere because they don’t accept deliveries to Parcel Lockers. They may have their reasons why not, but I have my reasons too.

Australia Post also has a fallback in the form of Parcel Collect. This operates the same as Parcel Lockers, in that you send your mail to the post office with a unique code that identifies you. In this case however, you collect from the post office counter. This isn’t as convenient as Parcel Lockers, given you have to queue with other post customers. They’re also only open during business hours. But we used it when we lived in North Sydney, and it was just as reliable as the Lockers.

The great news is your address for Parcel Collect and Parcel Lockers are just about the same, with the same unique ID. To use our earlier example:

Ruben "That BSD Guy" Schade
Parcel Collect 88888 88888
1 Post Office Street
Sydney NSW 2000

I’ve found that forms with regex that choke on any mention of “lockers” have no trouble accepting Parcel Collect addresses, even large American retailers I reluctantly purchase from when no other options are available. Yay!

Anyway, this concludes my longwinded post for a single-word change to get some forms to accept your Parcel Locker address. Tune in next week when we spend far too much time explaining the operation of door handles.