Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects 45
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Hackaday: Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other 'AI' tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.
In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only "license whitewashing," but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding 'AI' datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized. Also covered is the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies.
In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only "license whitewashing," but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding 'AI' datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized. Also covered is the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies.
Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Always good to see that there are still people with intact wits in this whole sea of crazy we have today.
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Enforcement may be tricky.
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Yes. But I have noticed that the incompetent AI "coders" like to brag.
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I think it even starts with code-size. Apparently, LLMs typically generate code much larger than needed for the problem, because they essentially glue together fragments in an insightless way. Hence LoC statistics may already be enough to identify most LLM code.
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Again with the no-clue "moderators" moderating down factually correct statements. Probably some dumb asshole weaponizing moderation again.
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Try "There are *currently* many telltale". Things have been changing quite rapidly, and will probably continue to do so for quite awhile. (And many poor coders also have bad habits.)
Much better would be to exclude bad, sloppy, and repetitive code...but nobody sees that as applying to their own work.
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What makes you think that some technology is worth protecting just by virtue of existing?
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Indeed. A competent society recognizes worthless crap and discards or ignores it. The mere continued existence of crapto at its current scale already conclusively proves that we do not have a competent society.
This fake argument is essentially a pseudo-sophisticated version of the non-argument "You are a hater!".
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Some people think that actual skills and insights are overrated and public posturing is all that matters. My personal take is that these people are just wasting their lives. They for sure are making the world a worse place on top of that.
That's why I am careful with such projects (Score:5, Insightful)
GitHub is evil? Maybe a bit. Use codeberg! Codewho?
The problem is not that the project was not sympathetic, but that it has a small and opinionated governing. GitHub will somehow need to appease the general consensus or get a huge shitstorm. That makes your project relatively save, because they cannot be that arbitrary in their decisions. Codeberg, on the other hand, can decide within a few days to ban LLM-Code.
If you migrated your project there because GitHub is evil and used LLM since some time, you would now have to move again. Where? Either GitHub that won't surprise you too much, or the next small code hoster that tries their best, but may make arbitrary decisions to your disfavor. That's not easy to solve (except for complete self hosting) as you always either have the large corporate monolith that tends to get enshittified, or the opinionated half-private projects that arbitrarily fuck over you when they decide that they do not longer like projects that have an "e" in their name, possibly with the majority of the (small) population being okay with it, because they never liked the letter "e" anway.
Re: That's why I am careful with such projects (Score:2)
I'm thinking of moving off Github and maintaining a legacy account for verification purposes. I quit LinkedIn when MSFT bought it and debated about Github when it was bought Thinking about new Buzz platform from Dorsey. I think banning LLM code is suicide but it's not my problem.
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We'll have to talk alot of LLMs down off bridges now.
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GitHub has deleted projects because it didn't like them too or considered them too much of a hot potato. Try safely hosting an emulator on there for an older games console or something similar. The only difference is corpo-bias in things to remove vs moral bias.
You can self host if you have real concerns - most people have at least some idea of whether their project is controversial or not. Anyone using LLMs to code right now knows full well that 90% of actual people in computing, as opposed to corporation
Emulators on GitHub (Score:2)
GitHub has deleted projects because it didn't like them too or considered them too much of a hot potato. Try safely hosting an emulator on there for an older games console or something similar.
My own NES emulator is on Codeberg, but there are well over a dozen emulators on GitHub. Start here:
- LIJI32/SameBoy (Game Boy)
- TASEmulators/fceux (NES)
- mgba-emu/mgba (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance)
- nesdev-org/MesenCE (NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, PC Engine, Master System/Game Gear, WonderSwan)
- jsgroth/jgenesis (Mega Drive/Mega CD, Super NES, Master System/Game Gear)
- dolphin-emu/dolphin (GameCube, Wii)
- stenzek/duckstation (PlayStation)
- ares-emulator/ares (numerous)
- Dwedit/PocketNES (Pock
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How about an emulator for just about everything [github.com]? And that project has special privileges and routinely exceeds resource limits that get other people banned. GitHub seems to like emulators.
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I'm quite ignorant about codeberg except for looking through the code of a project or two.
I was curious because I hear people speaking about it in cult-like terms. I thought that just meant they liked it a lot but according to this article there's a herd mentality about excommunicating apostates.
Yikes.
Reminds me of when I was really interested in the Bluesky protocol before it got swarmed with ideology.
It never used to be like this. We used to make fun of Apple for their "no nuclear end use" license in the
Crypto maybe, LLM-Generated Code Good Luck! (Score:3)
No use trying to add guardrails now! Mountains of slop are upon us!
The End of the Age of Masonry (Score:2)
A history lesson: "the "age of masonry" ended around 1870 to 1890. This period marked the shift from heavy, load-bearing stone and brick walls to the mass-production of rolled steel I-beams and skeleton frame construction. Steel frames took the structural weight off walls, transforming masonry into a mere exterior veneer."
I've been expecting this period for 15 years.
Most code egotists won't last long.
https://www.scry.llc/2014/05/1... [scry.llc]
"a classic example is the American car industry, which went from 1500 compa
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link resource allocation to community size (Score:2)
from the article:
"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or e
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It's almost like you have to do resource management if you don't want randoms to cost you shitloads of money on a cloud-based platform.
Who knew?
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Their reasoning is a bit off (One of the things about LLM is, that you you run larger projects without having to find a large community of contributors first), but I also don't see why they should allocate CI resources at all. I am even surprised when GitHub sponsors such resources (and when projects accept the gift instead of being independent) but why should Codeberg pay for other people's package builds? For storage and traffic I don't see a real problem (given we're talking about code without large blob
I was resently searching for hosting (Score:2)
In the last year I deleted all of my old open source projects. I'm doing some closed source work now on an app that isn't releases... and everything is yelling AI at you from GitHub to Gitlab. I may open source parts of this library at some point if they mature.
I'm begrudgingly on Bitbucket, but mentally ready to move if I find something new. Maybe I should take a look at codeberg again if I am ready to post a mix of open source and closed source. For those who don't know, Godeberg is a fork of Gitea af
Re: I was resently searching for hosting (Score:2)
Who? (Score:2)
Guess everyone needs a place.
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As long as humans check it thoroughly!
But they don't. The "AI Coders" do nothing but brag about their productivity, producing 50,000 lines of code in a day. You will never convince me that they're reading all of that.
Code size (Score:2)
To be honest, there are very few scenarios where 50k lines of code have anything to do with productivity. Complexity in software is spent, not produced. If you have to much complexity in your project, it will collapse... and many projects have already collapsed under their own complexity.
However LLMs do not necessarily cause complexity. I have been experimenting with it regarding telefacsimile. That's when you have a sort of copier that works over the telephone line. Thrilling stuff, but few people care abo
artform (Score:2)
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Yes, but to play devil's advocate here for a moment, is it really?
Isn't much of programming more or less just writing instructions for your computer. Looking up instruction codes in the hand-book isn't particularly creative, that's why people made assemblers and even compilers where you, essentially just type in your idea in a human-like language like COBOL or C and the instructions come out of the compiler.
Again, yes, it can be fun, but so can prompting also be. It can free you from things like having to l
It's fine... and if you don't like it... (Score:2)
... feel free to copy Codeberg's model. Just start your own organization providing hosting and run it based on donations. Since hosting isn't terribly expensive, you could even start in your own home, you can scale that up as you gain more donations.
Codeberg is essentially a piece of the Internet that feels as if it came from the 1990s before it got broken. It is a donation-based service, everyone can use, provided they follow some rules. Nobody minds if you offer an "alternative" Service yourself.