Hobby programming is not a "community".
Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
151–160 of 561 posts
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your entire commenting history is about how much you dislike LLMs (with the high likelihood that you would not accept any evidence about agentic productivity), which does not lead to good discourse on Hacker News.
lol "my girlfriend doesn't go here but you wouldn't even believe me if i lied about it" disliking LLMs is just an opinion. Refusing to engage with an argument and instead defaulting to downvotes when you can't supply a reasonable argument or proof is just ai/corporate-fanaticism and self-delusion enhanced by LLM-dependence.
Wow, those are some very strong claims, yet you haven't provided any evidence or argument to support them.
If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that anyone who disagrees with you is:
1. An AI/corporate fascist. 2. Self-deluded. 3. Dependent on LLMs.
Could you now provide what you yourself called a "reasonable argument or proof" that these claims are actually true?
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
>At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD. Care to share it?
No, it felt too invasive and creepy so I abandoned the idea. Or my lack of follow-through is a sign that I’m actually on the other side of the “war”. Reader decides! But suffice it to say that it was, to me, a significant trend especially around the “Claude Code moment” back in February/March is this year.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#154> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all...
I think the key word to all this is "communities." If you can make something alone, just do it. If you enjoy gathering together to build a bigger thing, often the bigger thing is 1/3 an excuse to gather together. In that way, the LLM is like revealing the answer to a murder mystery game too early and expecting it still to be fun for everyone.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#155A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth. I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people…
Well yes. That's why you see many westerners complaining about the cost of living even though all things told they have a good life. I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).
look I enjoyed reading the status game too but it's really not rocket science that a fish will flounder when taken out of the water
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#156I'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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question: if a human did this manually would it be considered derived?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code. LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a cle…
would using one LLM to create a spec, and another with only access to the spec doc count as clean enough?
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question: if a human did this manually would it be considered derived?
Yeah, absolutely. The defense there is "clean room reimplementation ". If anything, the use of an LLM would be stronger than a human doing the copying. (Assuming American jurisdiction!)
Clean room implementation is not a concept in copyright law. It's a defensive legal strategy to avoid expensive lawsuits.
Copyright law does not require a clean room implementation when copying non-copyrightable elements of a work, such as algorithms.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#159Earlier 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?
https://www.paulaoki.com/.admin/930108.oppose.html
Not content to destroy one potential competitor, USL also seeks to keep a stranglehold on the entire market by claiming that everyone who has had ever had access to UNIX source code a group that include~ most experienced programmers in the industry is "mentally contaminated" and may not develop any functionally similar product, without first purchasing an exorbitantly expensive license from USL. In accordance with this argument, USL requests this Court to prohibit BSDI from hiring anyone who has had access to UNIX source code. USL's request would not only require BSDI to fire all of its current employees, but would make it difficult to find any qualified replacements. Having chosen to widely disseminate its source code in order to build a market for its product and having succeeded in making it an industry standard, USL cannot now claim that everyone with knowledge of it is restricted from developing competing products.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#160There are (very coarsely) two types of people:
- people who like writing code for codes sake
- people who like writing code to build things
In the past, these folks have lived more or less in harmony unified under the common interest of applied maths, engineering and architecture that is necessary to write things that require a lot of vode. Aside for a few classic and very public spats.
Now that community is fractured because llms are increasingly making writing code irrelevant. If that weren't true, we wouldn't be having this convo at all.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to cultivate spaces that preserve that craft, but wish they wouldn't be so obnoxious about it. I imagine that a good handful of these folks in the "no llm ever camp" collectively rolled their eyes at vegans and animal rights advocates at some point, and are now feeling being on the unpopular side of progress.
Personally I think it's a cool prospect to have Trappist Monk-like communities producing hand crafted code. It will probably be really good and sturdy. We'll look at it in 10 years and say, "damn they really don't make it like that anymore!"