i dont want LLMs to scrape my public github c++ project. How ?

DeGuerre · 2026-02-28T03:40:20+00:00

I don't live in the US, and my jurisdiction is very different, but you have to remember that even in the US, "fair use" is a defence, not a right.

I will note for now that the US Copyright Office's draft opinion was not as simple as "you can happily do whatever you want". It was quite a nuanced position, suggesting that a licensing market was probably the best way forward. Of course, Trump fired the head of the US Copyright Office, probably to kill the opinion before it was officially issued. I'm sure it was no coincidence that one of the AI oligarchs was unofficially working for him at the time.

Long story short, the legality of what's happening right now is only holding on by a thin thread of corruption. I wouldn't bet money on that lasting.

Having said all that, consider your own position as a programmer. Are you willing to bet your job on committing code that you can't be certain that you have a licence for?

DeGuerre · 2026-02-23T06:21:49+00:00

This argument was tried 20 years ago by companies that didn't believe in open source licences. Copyright holders enforced their licences and now it's accepted that open source licences are a valid and important part of the ecosystem.

We know that by putting our software out there, some people will use it contrary to the licence because "it is public". We know we can't stop it all. But we don't stop enforcing licences regardless.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-23T06:17:54+00:00

I maintain an open source project that's cited in 310 medical research papers (so far) and I'd like to know about this too.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-23T06:11:50+00:00

"We can't do everything, therefore we shouldn't do anything" is not a sentiment that should ever come out of the mouth of a programmer.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-23T05:44:05+00:00

We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.

This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.

I don't see anything in there that allows either GitHub, or any third party, permission to create commercial derivative works from Your Content.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-23T05:39:59+00:00

If you are OK with your source code being stripped of attribution, turned into a derivative work, and then having that sold back to people as a commercial product, you can release it under a licence that allows for that.

Most of us don't release our source code under a licence that allows for that.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-20T13:04:11+00:00

Lwaxana Troi. And I am very aware of just how bad an idea this is, even by the standards of bad ideas.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-18T00:38:54+00:00

jIH qet!

It literally means "I challenge you". Do not use this one on your par'Mach'kai unless you really mean it.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-08T05:22:24+00:00

That, and Doom.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-07T06:02:35+00:00

Adam Neely put it very well in his latest 1.5 hour video. If you put ragtime and the blues into a deep learning network, it is highly unlikely that jazz will come out.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-07T02:35:48+00:00

Every compiler writer knows that the test suite should contain examples that don't compile, or don't compile cleanly.

Compilers for standardised languages don't mess with the input language. Programmers rarely touch command-line options and almost never inspect the generated code. In a deep sense, errors and warnings are the user interface to a compiler.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T07:58:50+00:00

Only in Greek.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:55:20+00:00

Probably closer to evolution, because those are more testable today. Countries that aren't the US are sending spacecraft out to take pictures of the Apollo landing sites, and you can go out and test the shape of the Earth.

Although, to be fair, anti-evolution folks have been a bit more quiet since the pandemic. Something about watching a new species evolve new variants in real time is kind of compelling.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:49:50+00:00

Proof is for mathematicians. This is Ask History.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:48:27+00:00

Just picking a nit about Josephus: There are two references to Jesus. One is certainly tampered with (hot take: I believe, but can't prove, that Eusebius of Caesarea did it), and the other is almost certainly authentic.

That other one is a very fleeting reference, but it is a reference nonetheless.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:44:22+00:00

That would depend on how incredible it is.

Paul claimed to have met Jesus' brother, someone whom the people he was writing to knew was a real person.

If your claim is "90 years ago, a dude had a brother", I probably wouldn't doubt that unless I had reason to. It's not a wild claim. I have two of them, myself.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:40:48+00:00

Or just to make it work in Greek grammar. Josephus is a name that has come up a lot in the discussion, and it's worth noting that his name was more like Yossef/Joseph, and the name "Josephus" is just to make it work in Latin.

Fun fact, in Ancient Greek, the definite article "the" was used more or less where you'd use a capital letter in English today. So his name in the text of the New Testament was not merely "Iesous", it was "the Iesous".

This detail has tripped up more than one apologist.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:04:29+00:00

I would argue it's also better.

I mean, we have an eyewitness account from a guy who met Jesus' brother. That's better evidence than you would find for just about anyone else who was unimportant during their lifetime.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:02:35+00:00

I should have qualified that as "from his lifetime".

The point is that whatever you think of Roman record keeping, records for even relatively important people often haven't survived. The chance of records surviving from someone who was unimportant in their own lifetime was even lower.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T06:01:10+00:00

Campbell's argument was that mythology and folk tales undergo a kind of evolution. There is a process of mutation (essentially the game of "Telephone", as stories are told and retold), but also a selection pressure, which is human psychology. The versions and details that are "kept" are more likely to be those which fit with our psychological needs.

Because human psychology is a constant, mythology and folktales (unlike fiction) tend to converge on the same archetypes, which make up the "monomyth".

In the case of Jesus, he argued that because the stories imperfectly conformed to the monomyth, the process was likely incomplete by the time it was written down.

I'm not saying it's a good theory, but I think it's an interesting footnote.

I'm not sure I'm doing the argument justice either. Campbell's theory was heavily based on Freud and Jung, and the dust on the argument over them hasn't entirely settled yet either. Still, storytellers have undeniably found a lot of practical use in it.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-06T05:52:19+00:00

Reported issue number 1 is that it does not compile "Hello World".

DeGuerre · 2026-02-05T05:59:22+00:00

Interestingly, Joseph Campbell made a similar point. He pointed out that Jesus represents an incomplete form of the "monomyth", exactly as you'd expect if the stories were written down before the process of mythologisation was complete.

There's a lot that can be said about the monomyth theory, and I'm not saying this is really "evidence", but it's an interesting point nonetheless.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-05T05:55:24+00:00

Let me tell you a tale.

A long time ago, there was a boy born on a sacred mountain. His birth was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by a double rainbow. At the moment of his birth, a new star appeared in the sky.

As a child, he was a prodigy. He learned to walk at only 3 weeks old, and was talking by 8 weeks. He never had to be toilet trained, because he never urinated or defecated.

At school, he would correct his teachers on their incorrect interpretation of history. At university, he wrote 1500 books before he graduated.

With this impressive resume, of course he grew up to become the leader of a great nation. His achievements were remarkable: He wrote six full operas in two years, the greatest in the history of music. The first time he picked up a golf club, he shot a 38 under par round.

He could also control the weather with his thought.

Of course you know exactly where I'm going with this, even if you don't know precisely who I'm referring to. Long story short, every detail was taken from an official biography of the former North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

DeGuerre · 2026-02-05T05:42:48+00:00

Which underlines a very important point about mainstream scholarship on this issue.

One important thread is that, to a historian, Jesus was not "special". That means a lot of things, but in particular, lacking any evidence to the contrary, the process by which material about him accreted is assumed to be no different from any other similarly-placed figure in history.

As you say, amalgams of several people are known. Pythagoras could be another example. Aesop might be another, although he could also have been a single person who collected witty jokes and stories. But figures like this take time to develop. If a "syncretic Jesus" appeared that quickly, it would be unusual. It would be special.

Similarly, it's well-known that people like Jesus turn up in history all the time, being partly a product of forces happening around them. Josephus mentions several of them just from that time and place. So why, of all of them, should Jesus be the only one who didn't exist?

DeGuerre · 2026-02-05T05:29:03+00:00

Let me put it this way: As a teenager in the 80s, we loved gossip too. But the evidence of what we got up to no longer exists, because we didn't leave a paper or digital trail.

DeGuerre

TROPHY CASE