We're well beyond benefit of the doubt these days. If it looks like a duck... For me there wasn't any doubt, the author's first top comment here was evidence enough, then seeing the readme + random code + random commit message, it's all obvious LLM-speak to me.
I don't particularly care, though, and I'm more positive about LLMs than negative even if I don't (yet?) use them very much. I think it's hilarious that a few people asked for Python bindings and then bam, done, and one person is like "..wha?" Yes, LLMs can do that sort of grunt work now! How cool, if kind of pointless. Couldn't the cycles have just been spent on trying to make muPDF better? Though I see they're in C and AGPL, I suppose either is motivation enough to do a rewrite instead. (This is MIT Licensed though it's still unclear to me how 100% or even large-% vibe-coded code deserves any copyright protection, I think all such should generally be under the Unlicense/public domain.)
If the intent of "benefit of the doubt" is to reduce people having a freak out over anyone who dares use these tools, I get that.
You still have no basis in claiming copyright protection hence you cannot set a license on that code.
Instead of the WTFPL you should just write a disclaimer that due to being machine generated and devoid of creating work, the work is not protected by copyright and free to be used without any license.
Has the world moved on from copyright? Or expecting other people to behave ethically and fairly?
No, and god I hope not.
But it's a real dick move to set up your CI the way you have. Zig explicitly requests using one of the many mirrors for CI instead of hammering the main ziglang.org site itself. Perhaps you've moved on from trying to be ethical?
For the copyright thing, I understand that there's legit ongoing debate around all this AI-assisted coding and copyrightability.
In this case of zpdf, while Claude Code did a lot of the heavy lifting on implementation, there was a real effort in architecture decisions, iterative prompting/refinement, debugging, testing, benchmarking.
My intent is zero restrictions: use it, fork it, sell it, whatever. WTFPL captures that spirit perfectly for me. It's as permissive as legally possible while being upfront about not caring.
The goal is just to make a useful tool freely available.
This is a follow up to the article "I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right." [0] Previous article was posted two times to hn but didn't get traction.
You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit."
I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.
Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.
The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.
It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D
I found that book before ever reading any Kerouac, and it indeed put me off.
Of possible interest to the "ramen profitable" set, there's a part in the book where she had no money and had heard you could live on just cabbage and peanut butter, so she does that for a month.
Especially when the legacy C code is complex and
thus single threaded, Go's fabulous multicore
support means you can be exploiting parallelism
and finishing jobs faster, with far less effort
than it would take to do it in C.
If you measure performance per developer day
invested in writing the Go, Go usually wins
by a wide margin.
> If you measure performance per developer day invested in writing the Go, Go usually wins by a wide margin.
I can accept that performance/hour-spent is better in Go than C, but that's different from Go's performance ceiling being higher than C's. People often confuse ceilings with effort curves.
Are you using LLMs for parts of the coding?
What's your work flow when approaching a new project like this?