alt Hacker NewsMalus – Clean Room as a Service
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Distinguished staff level trolling
A LOT of people are taking this seriously and not getting the (no so?) subtle satire in this. I fell for it at first glance too, had to do a double take. Some of the smartest people I know asked me for my thoughts on this.
The scary part - what's today is satire, is tomorrow's stealth mode startup.
The name gives it away :)
Edit: I did it. Paid them $0.51 to clean room `copyleft`, just to see what would happen. A clean package is now sitting on my desktop, custom-built (I presume) and fully documented. Deleting it now, for obvious reasons. But is it still satire if they actually provide the literal service they're satirizing?
How far do they take the satire? If you pay them do they actually generate output?
Wait this is joke, yep this is a joke... Wait it's not a joke why are people taking this seriously? Ok good this is a joke wait it's REAL?
I love these satirical sites that take a jab at how LLMs are (genuinely) ruining software.
> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code.
Obviously it's sarcasm. But the problem with this part is that LLMs actually have seen all the code. So real life it's worse than this because no one even pretends
Was malice.sh taken?
Excellent
It's not april 1st yet
This could also be done with a fair amount of commercial software, especially anything that's basically a wrapper around APIs, databases, etc.
With the classic Claude colors and fonts
It took me too long to understand it’s satire. BP went through stratosphere before I noticed.
Let’s hope one of these fake AI grifters doesn’t take this as a serious idea, raised a couple hundred million, and do real damage.
(I’m not against AI, I just don’t like nonsense either in tech, or people)
> 2010, Jordan Peterson: clean your room > 2026, Malus: Clean Room as a Service > 2026, Jordan Peterson: how could I have missed this business opportunity
Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was about physical clean-rooms?
Why would I pay for this? Makes no sense.
It's just confirming to me "yes, LLMs can do it so reliably that someone is trying to sell it, so I can probably just ask an LLM then".
It will soon not be a joke, and it reminds me of these crypto bitcoin tumblers
I hate to say it, but if you dropped the sarcasm and I think you'd have a viable business ... Truly a bizarre place we find ourselves in.
The irony of course is that this service already exists. It's called Claude Code (or Codex, etc...) and it costs $200 / month.
Oof, this is unironically amazing!
Interesting
See also: claw-guard.org/adnet, ai-ceo.org and ai-chro.org in this category
I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags out there ideas.
turd.png classy
Now this is a conversation piece
blegh, i like the motivation but why again and again do you need to write the content of the page with Slop-LLM-GPT? Your motive and points are valid, why waste it on a word filter that cannot capture it?
Ah yes, how apropos, a "modest proposal" for a new AI era.
In this climate, it almost feels like it's not satire.
Bruh this feels evil hahaha
Can we stop with the AI slop here? Last chance then I have to look elsewhere for real content.
New_projectname
Brought to you by Jin Yang from Silicon Valley HBO.
I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats.
The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents"
It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad)
We really need to stop hyperventilating and get back to reality.
edit: it's satire. but likely not too far off from the reality in 6 months.
> Our process is deliberately, provably, almost tediously legal. One set of AI agents analyzes only public documentation: README files, API specifications, type definitions.
since nearly all open source dependencies couple the implementation with type definitions, I'm curious how this could pass the legal bar of the clean room.
Even if they claim to strip the implementation during their clean room process -- their own staff & services have access to the implementation during the stripping process.
yay capitalism. thank god it is a joke!
> Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?
ROFL
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I unironically want this service to exist. The GNU GPL "is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can't think for themselves."
Historically, it was a good license, and was able to keep Microsoft and Apple in check, in certain respects. But it's too played out now. In the past, a lot of its value came from it being not fully understood. Now it's a known quantity. You will never have a situation where NeXT is forced to open source their Objective-C frontend, for example
1. Best part of this (satirical) post is, the service they offer isn't really needed. LLM's can do this already for small projects, and soon likely will for large ones too. You don't need a company to do this, we all have the LLM tooling to do it. Critical we're all spending time thinking about what that means in a thoughtful way.
2. For the sake of argument assume 1 is completely true and feasible now and / or in the near term. If LLM generated code is also non copyrightable... but even if it is... if you can just make a copyleft version via the same manner... what will the licenses even mean any longer?