Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke

duhhhhh1212

Damn. It’s hard not to see it as plagiarism. I can only imagine the surprised Pikachu face you must have made reading that announcement from Anthropic.

mad_vill

Oh wow. Being pretty new to meta and seeing the anthropic announcement I was thinking to myself “wow that sounds a lot like sapling”. I guess that is the case.

gizajob

This headline is very confusing for fans of Basic Channel / Chain Reaction records.

6879346626

Is this what is expected of how to cite sources? Because if this is the expectation nobody does it. There are two cases and only one is an issue for citations: - Mononoke was directly consulted and not attributed - Concepts were reinvented or used as a derivative (Sapling cited Mononoke and implements something similar) For one I know Sapling, Git, and Jujutsu, but up to today I have never heard of Oxide or Mononoke and I am not exactly compelled to look up the research papers of any of them, at most I read through their high level documentation.

BryantD

From the Anthropic announcement: “Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind.” Mononoke is a component of Sapling, as I understand it. In fact, the repo link provided in this article links to a subdirectory of the Sapling repo. I’m not totally sure I understand the complaint.

wakamoleguy

Agents tend to act differently than humans here. I would have expected most humans to notice and acknowledge the connection. Passing it off as one's own insight definitely feels like plagiarism. Agents are generally not equipped to deal with this type of thing, since looking for prior art is a detour from their goal or an exercise in post-hoc rationalization of knowledge built into the weights. Whether it is plagiarism or hacking, the buck has to stop with the operators. It's not a good look.

forrestthewoods

I really really wish Sapling could be used externally. It is by-and-large TheWay. Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI. It’s fantastic. People who only use Git really don’t understand how much better things can be.

cmrx64

hi rain :) Anthropic’s post reminded me a lot of your work, glad this is getting some visibility. do you think the “time has come” for some of these ideas that previously may not have spread because they need too much learning to appreciate? I wonder what new norms will emerge in creative collectives.

flakiness

Can anyone explain the difference between sampling vs mononoke? Edit: I was too lazy. From the README: "Mononoke is the server built for the Sapling Source Control System"

MeetingsBrowser

When Fable first released, I had it "one shot" a project using an initial spec and a team of agents. I was blown away with how good the results were. And then I noticed some links to images from random small github projects and realized somewhere along the way agents had searched for existing projects and copied almost everything. I wonder if something similar happened here on a larger scale.

jauntywundrkind

Woo, I got cited. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076122 Another effort I couldn't have done without Astra. Even more so. All I did, the only reason I got cited, was because I'd asked Astra.

arjie

The company is predominantly FAANG people. They’re going to just rebuild what they know. I don’t think you need any kind of conspiracy here. One year into ad tech and everyone was using HyperLogLog. Everyone was using 20 years ago LMAX-style disruptor, and single threaded event queue powered by loop called governor. It’s just what happens. People carry in their head what they know. IP maximalism is the present zeitgeist but that’s just how knowledge flows.

exe34

Once it's been through the slopotron, the provenance is laundered away.

pmbauer

Anthropic effectively doing a "git clone" with extra steps here. Uncharitable? I don't think so. If this were about functionality, why not use Sapling/Mononoke or extend it and contribute back to the open source community? Because that doesn't juice the IPO valuation.

matt3210

Did they know or did the agents just have that in training data?

micimize

Whether the ant post amounts to plagiarism, it is definitely somewhere between extremely lazy and intentionally misleading. No particular idea has its inspirations or origins traced or cited, there is no comparison to comparable tooling or discussion of prior work, and there is absolutely nothing to actually position or discuss the project in a manner that might lead to "Contributing to the wider ecosystem." If only they had had a claude write the post, it'd be full of citations, inspiration credit etc.

j45

Appreciate the perspective, more to learn from.

evolve-maz

I've always worried about the level of "IP laundering" which is done by LLMs. While that's not technically the case here (given Mononoke's license) it is still quite negative in my view. We will have fewer people wanting to share ideas openly since LLMs are so good at not only finding them, but also not attributing them. This also leads to a loss in diverse collaboration, which is probably one of the biggest drivers for good software. Right now there's probably a lot of these "novel" ideas floating around which models can present as their own, but that's raiding our coffers with no inbound future stream.

verdverm

Not to be confused with Google's Scion (kubernetes based openclaw platform) https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/overview/

ezst

So it's mercurial all the way down, then?