Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 246 posts

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#11

Post by fhdkweig »

nz wrote: post #7
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it. In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code. I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business". I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "an…

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue. The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a…

In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.

At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#12

Post by bee_rider »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #4
gregdaniels421 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future. People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without…

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it. In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code. I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business". I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "an…

Although, I do with these LLM companies would be better about licensing their derivative works (the models) under GPL, when they ingest GPL’d code.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#15

Post by smalltorch »

Generally agreed with most of the points.

Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.

I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#16

Post by novaRom »

nz wrote: post #7
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it. In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code. I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business". I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "an…

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue. The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a…

> It clearly memorized the code

This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#18

Post by kristoff_it »

some_furry wrote: post #14
keinzirp wrote: post #13

Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video? [0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092

https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo

(reposting my comment from lobsters)

For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.

Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.

I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#19

Post by spudlyo »

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.

Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#20

Post by conqrr »

spudlyo wrote: post #19

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such…

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
Post reply on HN