From his website stallman.org:

Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.

Recent video of him speaking at GNU 40 Hacker Meeting. Screenshots of video stream.

  • MaxHardwood@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think we’re too far away from AI’s that can refactor compiled code into any language of your choice; then all software will be open source.

    Edit: lul; at least 50 people are butt hurt over the idea that an AI can decipher assembler in 5-10 years

      • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        GPT, for example, fails in calculation with problems like knapsack, adjacency matrix, Huffman tree, etc.

        it starts giving garbled output.

          • lloram239@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            The current LLMs can’t loop and can’t see individual digits, so their failure at seemingly simple math problems is not terrible surprising. For some problems it can help to rephrase the question in such a way that the LLM goes through the individual steps of the calculation, instead of telling you the result directly.

            And more generally, LLMs aren’t exactly the best way to do math anyway. Human’s aren’t any good at it either, that’s why we invented calculators, which can do the same task with a lot less computing power and a lot more reliably. LLMs that can interact with external systems are already available behind paywall.

              • lloram239@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                Humans are wrong all the time and confidently so. And it’s an apples and oranges competition anyway, as ChatGPT has to cover essentially all human knowledge, while a single human only knows a tiny subset of it. Nobody expects a human to know everything ChatGPT knows in the first place. A human put into ChatGPTs place would not perform well at all.

                Humans make the mistake that they overestimate their own capabilities because they can find mistakes the AI makes, when they themselves wouldn’t be able to perform any better, at best they’d make different mistakes.

                • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  So same way it may not be able to code if it can’t do math. All i see it having is profound english knowledge, and the data inputted.

                  Human knowledge is limited, i agree. But more knowledge is different from the ability to so called ‘think’. Maybe it can be done with a different type of neural network and usage of logical gates seperate from the neural networks

      • Communist@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode

        People overestimate how much it matters that ai “doesn’t have the capacity to understand it’s output”

        Even if it doesn’t, is that a massive problem to overcome? There’s studies showing that if you have an ai list the potential problems with an output and then apply them to its own output it performs significantly better. Perhaps we’re just a recursive algorithm away from that.

    • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      stop getting all your info about AI and it’s current/upcoming capabilities from mainstream news media my dude lol

      We’re nowhere close to what you describe, and even we were, that wouldn’t be the same thing as “open source”, since you could only do it to code you have access to. You couldn’t - for example, use it to get a copy of the Reddit/Facebook server-side source code

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      You should know the difference between free software, open source software and source-visible software.

      I rank it Free>opensource>source availiable

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Downvoted because phrased as a technical solution. There might be a technical solution one day but until then, if it ever happens, it’s a moral problem. By phrasing it otherwise we diminish the value and efforts of countless people, including RMS, who did invest their time in FLOSS for an ideal. Again it might happen but until then we must bet on what is right, not an idealized future that prompts idleness because it is genuinely dangerous.

    • WuTang @lemmy.ninja
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      1 year ago

      even if LLM were capable of this, don’t expect it to be any open. like everything we saw these last 25y, it starts free, it captivates you and you have to pay for. paying for is not a problem in general but the conditions how they delivers the service to you might be problematic.

      we don’t need AI for code, we need frugality and scope bounds.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think we still have a long way to go before this is equivalent to “the preferred form for modification”. I’d give it at least 5 more years. It would be really cool if you could just say “Hello AI, please remove all ad code from Windows”. But I think it is going to be a long time until we get there.

      Also as this gets closer companies will get more defensive. It will become an arms race of obfuscating the code vs the AI understanding it.

      And still, free software that can be modified and the copies can be redistributed is a world away from being able to ask your AI to try and make these modifications yourself.

      On top of all of that don’t forget about DMCA where circumventing digital protections is a crime, even if you don’t commit any other crime.

    • notsharp@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      if AI can create code by its own, then that’s the day when every white collar jobs will be replaced by AI.

    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Someone still has to know how to query the AI for it to spit out the code that actually does what we want it to.

      The only way current AI models would gain the abilities you described in any practical sense is if they joined forces with the neuroscientists to invent a brain implant that would allow a human brain to exploit the advantages of human intelligence and artificial intelligence models while shoring up the weaknesses of both.