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To my students

ozark.hendrix.edu

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Re: To my students

#31

Post by cwillu »

infotainment wrote: post #24
tptacek wrote: post #11

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…

> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.

Be that as it may, it is a quote from the “Statement on LLMs” at the bottom of the link.

Re: To my students

#32

Post by glitchc »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

Start three two-decade projects: programming language, operating system, and home lab. Build your own job-portable software libraries. Yes, you might need a lawyer. Start now.

Not sure how this is supposed to help earn money or be a path to financial independence. Can you elaborate?

Re: To my students

#33

Post by infotainment »

cwillu wrote: post #31
infotainment wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.

Be that as it may, it is a quote from the “Statement on LLMs” at the bottom of the link.

Of course, which tells you the position from which the author of the linked post is arguing.

Re: To my students

#36

Post by simonw »

tptacek wrote: post #11

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…

I remain hopeful that some day someone will train an LLM which is tolerable to people who take this stance (which I respect, much like I respect food vegetarians despite not being one myself).

I've been tracking models trained entirely on out-of-copyright data, for example. I've not yet seen one of those which appears generally useful and didn't chuck in a scrape of the web or get fine-tuned on examples generated by a non-vegetarian model.

Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

Why do I care? This post is a great example. If you're a professor of computer science I really want you to be able to tinker with this fascinating class of models without violating your principles.

UPDATE: Huh, speaking of potentially vegetarian models, I just saw https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie on the HN homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927903

I've explored I different out-of-copyright trained model Mr Chatterbox before but found it to have been mildly corrupted through the help of synthetic conversation pairs from Haiku and GPT-4o-mini - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/mr-chatterbox/

Talkie isn't entirely pure either though: "Finally, we did another round of supervised fine-tuning, this time on rejection-sampled multi-turn synthetic chats between Claude Opus 4.6 and talkie, to smooth out persistent rough edges in its conversational abilities."

Re: To my students

#37

Post by dijksterhuis »

nightpool wrote: post #12
dijksterhuis wrote: post #8

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…

Every ABET accredited CS course (almost every CS course in the US I think?) requires an Ethics in Computer Science credit. I remember going over a lot of case studies, including Therac 25, but our course also included a lot of general grounding in ethics and philosophy as well, which I enjoyed a lot.

ah, fair enough! maybe it is/was a uk thing (admittedly times might have changed a little since i did my masters/phd).

at the very least i have a wikipedia article on therac 25 to read through now. so thanks for that!

also, yea i remember really enjoying the ethics module too. lots of discussion and not always a clear answer. was very different to the rest of the "one correct maths answer" in a lot of the other modules.

Re: To my students

#38

Post by danny_codes »

oidar wrote: post #10

You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite ] and the points would be identical.

This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good.

In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial.

Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?

Re: To my students

#39

Post by [deleted] »

_jackdk_ wrote: post #22

Prof. Yorgey has done some great work over the years, and wrote one of my favourite papers*. Good on him for speaking up like this. I saw an engineer from Anthropic speak at my alma mater a little while ago and the overwhelming impression I took away from the session was, "if Anthropic are meant to be the good ones, we're really going to be in for a rough time." * Monoids: Theme and variations (functional pearl): htt…

[deleted]

Re: To my students

#40

Post by csmantle »

cdfalcon wrote: post #19

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…

The industry's goal is to ship fast and profitably. A learner's goal isn't.
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