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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

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Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#81
post #76

A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.

I enjoy molding hyper specific software across my whole eco system of tech through prose with LLMs. Iterating over time to hone the right solutions based on very abstract reactions to the results I get. I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act. I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the sam…

> I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.

Boy isn't that the truth haha, I feel like my previous phase of dotfile ricing has become "LLM ricing."

Not complaining though, it is genuinely fun!

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#82

A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.

This is not strictly true.

I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it

This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This repo is all "stolen code regurgitated by an LLM" so that is an impossible task and therefore makes the request performative.

My implicit request, which I should have made clearer, was for him to delete (or make private) the repository and move on to greater ideals.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#84

The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them. "Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code deri…

> lifting ideas It's not like ideas are protected by copyright though. Copyright protects the specific expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Anyone can "lift ideas" from anyone else, including proprietary software.

[dead]

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#85
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, without knowing, that art often is similar to the hobby programming communities the thread leads with: the end result is interesting not by itself, but through the process that made it. We have feelings about art pieces because we feel with and through the artist. Can't do that with silicon. The Mona Lisa, even if the end result were exactly the same, would be dead boring had it been produced by the hand of…

Totally disagree. I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall. If they’re totally unique and nobody else has them, even better. I can have a mounted picture of me on a horse like the famous Napoleon painting. I don’t care at all about the dude who painted it, I don’t even know his name. The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the back…

> Now every person can make satisfying music.

Thanks to taxis, everyone can drive.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#86

A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.

> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will. It's an age-old debate in every hobby. Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with. In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with…

> Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something.

Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#90

The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them. "Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code deri…

> lifting ideas It's not like ideas are protected by copyright though. Copyright protects the specific expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Anyone can "lift ideas" from anyone else, including proprietary software.

You're attacking his word choice, but the context is clear that it would be protected.
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