Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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