I'm missing a good way to turn on/off plugins and settings depending on the directory. Eg turning off rust-analyzer on some projects, or using pyright instead of mypy as the LSP.
Same experience. At first I really didn’t get it and now I could never go back. The ease of rebasing, renaming, reordering, splitting, etc. Has drastically changed the way I work. My PRs are undoubtably much better now, and I am never afraid of messing up thanks to jj undo and the op log in general
Do you have a public example of an open source project that you are using that showcases those features?
In your opinion, is jj losing steam? How do you feel about it requiring a CLA to contribute to, which would enable the developers to go closed-source and keep all the contributions of the community? Are you afraid of vendor lock-in?
> a public example of an open source project that you are using that showcases those features?
IMO that's almost fundamentally impossible. The whole point is that it makes maintaining a "clean" linear commit history easier than git, so by the time you push anything the observable differences are already gone. At best you just see a repo without any WIP-style commits, which can be done using more effort and git alone.
There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code.
LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a clean-room design. There isn't enough general removal from the original subject matter.
Specifically about "humans": my understanding is that Clean-room design is not a requirement and the "Case law" section on your Wikipedia link explains that and has examples.
How and whether the same principles can be applied to LLMs, I have no idea. I imagine it would involve discussions about creativity, for example.
The thing that happened with "clean-room design" is that one company did it and the court said it was allowed. Companies are risk averse. Once they know one thing is yes and something else is maybe, they go with the yes, right? With the result that the supply of court cases where something other than that happened tends to dry up, leaving the other alternatives to stay as maybe.
If some people have now decided they're not going to blink in the face of a risk, we might get to find out whether some of the maybes turn out to be a yes or a no.
I have done this. Despite using Fable for the spec, and having it double-check the spec a couple of times, it still wasn't airtight. And at some point, the implementing LLM accessed one file of the original code on the Web.
I have by now deviated quite a bit from the original (well, original...) spec.
Not content to destroy one potential competitor, USL also seeks to keep a stranglehold on the entire market by claiming that everyone who has had ever had access to UNIX source code a group that include~ most experienced programmers in the industry is "mentally contaminated" and may not develop any functionally similar product, without first purchasing an exorbitantly expensive license from USL. In accordance with this argument, USL requests this Court to prohibit BSDI from hiring anyone who has had access to UNIX source code. USL's request would not only require BSDI to fire all of its current employees, but would make it difficult to find any qualified replacements. Having chosen to widely disseminate its source code in order to build a market for its product and having succeeded in making it an industry standard, USL cannot now claim that everyone with knowledge of it is restricted from developing competing products.
In my opinion yes. Just like if you watch a Bob Ross episode and copy all his brushstrokes, you have made a derivative (in the literal sense of the word) of his painting.
Would have to be proven in court. Look up history of cases and settlements for GPL violations and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s relatively toothless and mostly license theater.
Mechanical transformation is always considered derived.
The difference is that if humans do it, there's plausible deniability that it is derived.
I mean, even when humans do it, we still do clean room engineering.
It goes further though: LLMs are just a tool, and tools don't get rights, humans do.
Humans having the right to learn from a few dozen books and projects is not the same as a tool that infers output using all copyrighted works know to man.
Yeah, absolutely. The defense there is "clean room reimplementation ". If anything, the use of an LLM would be stronger than a human doing the copying. (Assuming American jurisdiction!)
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