March 05, 2026
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AI And The Ship of Theseus
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch by only pointing it to the API and the test suite. The motivation: enabling relicensing from LGPL to...