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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

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Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#291
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? See: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 A 2021 research paper warning (among other things) precisly about this confusion. > The ersatz fluency and coherence of LMs raises several risks, precisely because humans are prepared to interpret strings belonging to languages they speak as meaningful and corresponding to the communicative intent of some individual or group of individuals who have accounta…

>Is there any Researcher who maintains that LLM models contain Reasoning and intent? That's the funny thing about the (in)famous OpenAI letter; the first sentence kind of does this: >AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1] 'human-competitive intelligence' sounds like reasoning to me. What's even funnier is that [1] is the stocha…

> 'human-competitive intelligence' sounds like reasoning to me.

Yes, and when AIs reach that level of intelligence, we can revisit the question.

However, as long as LLMs will confidently try to explain to me why several footballs fit in an average coffee mug, I'd say we are still quite some way away from "human-competitive intelligence".

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#292
post #97

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

One possible problem is if Copilot gets good enough that you can rather easily sidestep GPL (or any other license) by having Copilot implement functionality X for you instead of using a license-bound library providing X. Not only may this be questionable regarding the license, but it would also be tend to reduce contributions to the library which otherwise would have been used.

ChatGPT already can rewrite functions to use different algorithms.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#293
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. You sound very bitter. Is there a story behind that bitterness? There's a wide variety of people in the open source community at large. And a wide variety of motivations for contributing. I for one am happy that open source software is a thing. It's been a net good for mankind. Sure, there are abuses, and I'm sure many things could be improved. But I'm glad it's there all the same.

Nah, not at all, just don't like power structures that feed on benevolent naivety. Of course it's good, but compensating those people should be the norm. Where is the payments side of github for example? So it's open source but in order to clone the rep you should spend 1 bucks on it, or if you want a bug/feature addressed you could name a price or the dev can set the price on it? Because the holy sacred cow must not…

I disagree that compensating FOSS contributors should be the norm. That would open people up to a huge can of worms (labour laws, liabilities, etc).

> Because the holy sacred cow must not be agitated... suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#294
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? See: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 A 2021 research paper warning (among other things) precisly about this confusion. > The ersatz fluency and coherence of LMs raises several risks, precisely because humans are prepared to interpret strings belonging to languages they speak as meaningful and corresponding to the communicative intent of some individual or group of individuals who have accounta…

How is that different from "This evidence for X raises the risk that people falsely believe that X"? That's an argument for X, not against. And nothing in that paper, even if I discard the dross (ie. everything except one section on page 7), seems to actually make an argument against X of any strength beyond "it is wrong because it is wrong". My point is this: I disagree with you. This is not because I have "misunder…

> it is because I understand the stochastic-parrot argument and think it is erroneous.

Okay then, what exactly about it is erroneous? Because stochastically sorting the set M of known tokens by likelyhood of being the next, is literally what LLMs do.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#295

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

Co-pilot spits back protected expressions, not novel expressions based on ideas harvested from code. It is therefore violating the licenses of numerous free and open source projects. The author is right to be pissed.

That's not the case, there's a probability it may "spit back" the protected expression. There's also a probability I, as a human "spit back" the protected expressions. This could either be by pure chance or from past learnings, reading the protected code and internalizing it as a solution, my subconscious forgetting I actually saw it elsewhere.

In Uni, students run their theses through plagiarism checkers, even if it's novel research as it naturally occurs.

As the thought experiment goes, given infinity, a monkey with a typewriter will inevitably write Shakespeares works.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#296
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty ironic that the argument that LLMs are stochastic parrots actually sounds like the actual parrot. I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.

> I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine. No we're not, and no they are not. An LLM doesn't reason, period. It mimics reasoning ability by stochastically chosing a sequence of tokens. Alot of the time these make sense. At other times, they don't make any sense. I recently asked an LLM: "Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9…

GPT-4 reasons about a lot of gotcha logic puzzles correctly any pre GPT-4 opinions should be reconsidered, that is effectively two different epochs in the history of AI effectiveness and reasoning.

> Me: Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9th floor. Who left the elevator first?

> GPT-4: Mike left the elevator first, as he got off at the 2nd floor, while Jenny left at the 9th floor.

> Me: If the elevator started at the 10th floor, who would have left first?

> GPT-4: If the elevator started at the 10th floor and went downward, then Jenny would have left first, as she got off at the 9th floor, while Mike left at the 2nd floor.

> Me: How many footballs fit in a coffe-mug?

> GPT-4: A standard football (soccer ball) has a diameter of around 22 centimeters (8.65 inches), while a coffee mug is typically much smaller, with a diameter of around 8-10 centimeters (3-4 inches). Therefore, it is not possible to fit a standard football inside a coffee mug. If you were to use a mini football or a much larger mug, the number of footballs that could fit would depend on the specific sizes of the footballs and the mug.

It easily answered all of your questions and produces explanations I would expect most reasonable people to make.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole open source thing is the biggest farce on planet Earth. Someone with a good knowledge about geeks and their behaviour concocted up this open source bullshit. So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. And faceless entities use their hard w…

> So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous. Is it? I can't think of a single professional dev making money right now that isn't making money because they did not have to reinvent the entire tech stack that they are skilled in. If there was no open s…

If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries. Now we have open source, and a lot of devs are not compensated. End of story. No proper solution. That's all.

Roughly the same applies to newspapers. Ohm please do not turn off advertisements so we could keep the lights going.

Digital beggars everywhere.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#299
I am someone that also left GitHub. [1]

To the author, yes, it's worth it.

I didn't go to another service, though; I set up Gitea on my own server. Because of drama there, I'm going to have to replace Gitea as well.

But GitLab itself is going down the drain, I'm not welcome on SourceHut, and I haven't heard the best things about Codeberg. Also, git needs a replacement.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/04/i-am-moving-away-from-github...

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#300
post #81

I tend to disregard articles that default to the "Stochastic Parrot" argument. These tools are useful now, I don't personally care about achieving actual intelligence. I want additional utility for myself and other humans, which these provide now, at scale. By a lot of measures many humans perform at just about the same level, including confidently making up bullshit. This post reads like one of the "Goodbye X online…

Being useful and a stochastic parrot are not mutually exclusive. And I in fact think the opposite. it's Necessary to remind people what it really is, especially in this phase of "Enthusiasm" because I see to many people attributing some meaning or some hidden Insight and especially some innate infallibility to AI nowdays, maybe confused by the name AI.

Right, but most arguments, including the one here, go something like "AI is a Stochastic Parrot so it's a lie and now I think it's bad and we shouldn't do it."

Which is a pretty dumb position imo. Not that I personally think these newer LLMs are a stochastic parrot, or at least not to the degree proponents of the Stochastic Parrot argument would have you believe.

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