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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

#171

Post by _carbyau_ »

MostlyStable wrote: post #12
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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.

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 robot to do it

It depends what you value. There's "zoning out going through the motions" for mindfulness and then there's "building stuff!" for interest, learning and fun.

And you can have any combination of the two. Like maybe doing the same planting routine but with different details for a different plant or experimenting if a new layout works better.

I don't care to do the labour of gardening. But if I had time, I'd spend it bikeshedding optimisations. IE what about grow lights? Is it worth having a greenhouse in my climate? etc etc. And all the little details about building stuff.

Aside: I too want a robot. One for lawn mowing (they exist but expensive) and one for spraying the little lawn weeds that pop up.

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

#172

Post by didibus »

samatman wrote: post #57
podgietaru wrote: post #13

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…

Keeping in mind that I'm going strictly off the commit[0], a bit-packing layout is very much the kind of thing which is not subject to copyright in the first place. Neither are algorithms. Ideas, in general, are not subject to copyright: expression is. So "lifting ideas from other engines", as you yourself put it, is entirely licit, no matter how you do it. _Should_ you credit others when so doing? I err on the side…

I think that's true, but I'm not sure if this would characterize itself as "lifting ideas". I mean, it's one thing to personally take the idea and re-implement it yourself elsewhere. But I have to believe there could be an argument, that having an inference algorithm take the original source and re-implement it in the context of your engine might count as derivative work.

A particular work is deliberately supplied at inference time so the system can recreate or adapt it for another environment. It resembles commissioning a translation, port, or derivative adaptation through an automated tool, even where the output is not verbatim, so it seems it could hold a candle in court.

You have a few scenarios now up for legal debate:

    1. Is training a model using copyrighted material fair use?
    2. A model outputting chunks of identical coryrighted code from it's training material
    3. A model being given in it's prompt copyrighted source code, and asked to implement the same in a new source code.
I think #1 and #2 have open legal battles on it, but #3, which seems to be this scenario, is new to me, and I feel it could have legal ground for being considered infringing on the copyright.

Sidenote: how is your account "samatman" and created "April 24, 2010", that's a really funny coincidence

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

#173

Post by croes »

Schnitz wrote: post #166

Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight fa…

Or Warhammer figurines painting, let’s buy them already painted

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

#174

Post by sailfast »

lelanthran wrote: post #115
ncphillips wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It could be the same act - but not necessarily legally the same because of the actor.

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

#175

Post by anematode »

cdelsolar wrote: post #156

I'm in an _extremely_ niche hobby programming community of Scrabble engine developers. There are single digits of us, but we're building the best engines and methodology out there and have all embraced LLMs to help us do it. There's a lot of experimentation that goes into it and LLMs certainly make it easier to iterate and try new ideas. So at least for our community, I don't think the points here hold.

That's awesome :) Do you have any links to your guys' work that I could check out?

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

#176

Post by didibus »

acedTrex wrote: post #26
gbjcantab wrote: post #20

What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal…

> So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community. Keeping the experience bearable BY gatekeeping. That is the point, gatekeeping is not inherently a bad thing. It's a required thing in many circles.

Is it gatekeeping in this case? Would they not allow beginners to join and learn? Are they not fully sharing the knowledge to anyone who's interested to learn it?

To me, it amounts more to disapproving showing up to a handmade sweater community and showing off your machine made sweaters, or maybe a machine made sweater you added a handful of stitches too yourself. It's like not realizing that the community wasn't about cool looking sweaters, but about hand-made cool looking sweaters.

Having said that, there might be another community that's more about cool looking sweaters, and new machine techniques that deliver really nice looking sweaters would be of interest to them. I actually think it's what is happening a bit in programming, there are niche that remain more about the manual programming, and others that are about any process that can lead to better outcomes.

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

#177

Post by ButlerianJihad »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #66
podgietaru wrote: post #13

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.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/patent...

  The League for Programming Freedom is opposed to Software Patents

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

#178

Post by senor_digimon »

croes wrote: post #173
Schnitz wrote: post #166

Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight fa…

Or Warhammer figurines painting, let’s buy them already painted

You can take already painted warhammer figurines, pose them, take a photo, prompt an AI to make that your first scene, and generate a hollywood level scene in about a minute or two.

Yes, sure, you can buy the figurine and get the joy of painting it. But there's new things you can do now too, things you couldn't dream about before.

But I'll grant you this, the AI coding extinction event is so severe that I do believe we need to support anyone trying to preserve any memory of it. Like, we need to build entire museums, one for each programming language.

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

#179

Post by fenprace »

Schnitz wrote: post #166

Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight fa…

People programme for 2 reasons:

1. Some programme because it’s the one of 2 ways to get the things they want (another way is hiring a team to code for them). Now that they have vibe coding, they’d happily never touch a line of code again. 2. Other people programmes because they just enjoy it. Vibe coding ruins the best part for them. Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."

Most people getting paid to code are probably somewhere in the middle?

But nowadays hand-writing code at work is starting to feel kinda 'illegal'. The manager is gonna ping you just because you fall behind on the company's token waste leaderboard.

Maybe it's just another "hobby should never become job" story?

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

#180

Post by ac29 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #124
MostlyStable wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

>> 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) ...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.

One can piss away a lot of money gardening with little to show for it, especially if you buy bagged soil. Buy a raised planter, some soil, some fertilizer, some seedlings, a couple garden tools and you can easily be in for $150+ which is definitely more than you'll get out of a season worth of growth even if nothing fails.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you grow in fertile native soil from seed your costs can be close to zero

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