Comment by Muromec
2 days ago
Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.
2 days ago
Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.
Curious about your comment on two counts (genuinely, not being argumentative):
1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.
(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)
>in what cases is this illegal for governments to do?
It's legal certainty principle and equality before the law principle and also prohibition of discrimination principle.
For the law to be lawful (weird, but it's a thing, right) it should satisfy certain criteria. Me, being subject to the law should be able to predict whether my actions are allowed or not when I plan to do or not do them. If I can't predict the outcome of my actions, the law isn't valid. One of the outcomes of it is being able to read the law -- it's published and it's comprehensible, it has advance notice, etc.
If the rule says "don't host LLM generated code", but everybody hosts LLM generated code and then I say mean things about one of the people providing the hosting and suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego. Or being part of a specific group. You are often explicitly prohibited to make certain decisions based on belonging to a certain group (religious, ethnic, sexual, trade union, health, criminal record based), but it could happen that somehow the outcome of the shadow policy correlates with those. Since we don't know the shadow policy and the stated policy doesn't seem to be applied equally, this is not great.
See example about weed in a different comment.
>how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
They look silly for stating it and not following (loss of credibility), then once they suddenly start following it, there will be different interpretations, including "I'm banned because I'm $protected_thing_that_you_should_not_be_banned_for", which is bad press.
> suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego
This is ultimately a matter of framing though. You can equally argue that (a) that person shouldn't be deplatformed because others' LLM use is tolerated or (b) all of them should be deplatformed including that person. In the latter case (b) the person who said mean things still experiences the same outcome, but by your logic this is just. Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
> > how is this bad
> they look silly
> bad press
This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
2 replies →
Governments have a lot of laws that they don't enforce, or enforce only lightly. For example, weed is still illegal in Netherland, despite many decades of tolerating its use.
I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.
It's illegal but you can't be prosecuted for usage or possession (unless you do it in a blowverbod area in front of a village cop that is having a bad day) -- the judge will ask why this person specifically is prosecuted if everybody around is smoking and will throw it away. It already happened in fact.
Yes, and they only drag those laws out when they need to take down an inconvenient person. That’s a bad thing.