Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of coding is weeding?
Probably a similar ratio!
How much of gardening is dealing with bugs?
Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
111–120 of 557 posts
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#112I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time (time / energy) given how much everything costs just to be alive. Maybe they live in a different universe where programming for fun and first principals of “learning” matters. But for the other 99% of humans, costs have gone up 40% due to money printing and anything like this looks like a waste of time.
Surely most people in the US have hobbies at least in the minimal sense of downtime activities that they enjoy. It may not be golf or hobby programming, but even laying on the couch watching football is a "hobby" or sorts and takes up just as much time.
I realize there are people with young kids or 2-3 jobs that really have little to no downtime, but it seems that for most people time isn't really the issue - it's just are you more of a passive or active type of personality.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point. I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me…
> Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point. Unless your hobby is backyard robotic gardening. Which is my way of saying that people have different reasons for enjoying a hobby. Like most hobby debates, this one comes down to "Let people enjoy things"
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Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#114Earlier 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…
> I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall.
That's decoration, not art.
> Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
No one should be celebrating the theft of music from artists. Everyone can participate in making music today just as they always have throughout human history - learn to sing or play an instrument.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The debate is about whether or not the new code qualifies as derived . They can remove all of the literal code matches from the codebase, but if it was written by having an LLM study the original code and then write something similar, it's hard to argue it's not a derivative work.
Genuine question: if a human did this manually would it be considered derived?
Mechanical transformation is always considered derived.
The difference is that if humans do it, there's plausible deniability that it is derived.
I mean, even when humans do it, we still do clean room engineering.
It goes further though: LLMs are just a tool, and tools don't get rights, humans do.
Humans having the right to learn from a few dozen books and projects is not the same as a tool that infers output using all copyrighted works know to man.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#116A 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.
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that. The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appr…
I'm the same way. The "grind" makes the successes all the sweeter.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#117Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself. Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft) (Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then…
> Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
(I absolutely relate to your experience with sudoku etc. Of course, writing a basic sudoku solver is also interesting.)
The thing is, software architecture and systems design can also get the hobby treatment. I've found that I'm happy to have a short discussion with ChatGPT and have it barf out a few hundred lines of a concept, then refactor and maintain it myself. Or come up with a few different pieces that can be written fairly easily, let the machine skip over most of that tedium, make sure they conform to the interfaces I had in mind, and then verify for myself that the system actually comes together the way I imagined.
Of course, it does help a lot that I can understand the code, and work with it line by line if necessary. But SICP teaches us that it's abstraction and composition all the way down. So I feel like I'm exercising the same skills while not letting myself get intimidated by the sheer amount of initial typing or the self-doubt (instinctive immediate review of the code, you know) that creeps in when I try.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#118A 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.
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that. The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appr…
If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and visualization. I'm recently retired and having enormous fun plowing through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't that be a cool tool" (https://pcons.org) or a climate visualization (https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com) or a travel packing list app (packzen) or a bunch of 3d printer tools... so on and so on. Totally co-engineered with Claude. What we're doing together, and getting out to the world as useful open source projects, is easily 10x what I could've done on my own, in the limited time available to me in this life.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#119> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora I think the problem goes deeper. When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few mo…
Did you read about the Canadian politician who was making a speech and simply thoughtlessly read out some of the LLM boilerplate prefacing the text some chatbot had written for him?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-...
Are we going to end up a bunch of meatbag puppets of the machines? Makes me wonder.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#120I'm a hobbyist, what am I missing? LLM gave me a new spark. I never managed to get a SE job so some weekends I tinker around with LLM for small personal projects and it helps me learn more.