This took a lot of courage. Glad to see this is being shared. It's the best honest advice I have seen to date.
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I don't understand how you extracted political bias from this.
A one-word summary of TFA would be: "wisdom".
To my students
21–30 of 221 posts
Re: To my students
#22Prof. Yorgey has done some great work over the years, and wrote one of my favourite papers*. Good on him for speaking up like this. I saw an engineer from Anthropic speak at my alma mater a little while ago and the overwhelming impression I took away from the session was, "if Anthropic are meant to be the good ones, we're really going to be in for a rough time."
* Monoids: Theme and variations (functional pearl): http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf
Re: To my students
#23"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…
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Re: To my students
#24"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…
> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources
This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.
Re: To my students
#25I really love the encouragement. Honestly it resonates a lot with me. It shows that the craft itself is still beautiful, you just need to find the right people to mingle with.
But the real world and money blended in creates a weird corrupt mix, just like everything. Not to mention there is a real risk for people who are already has their feet in the industry but not yet senior enough to survive or to control, for example, the AI replacements. And more than likely, the seniority required is way higher than one would think. In the end, economic drives are the dominant forces.
Re: To my students
#26"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose." The academic navel gazing is strong with this one.
Re: To my students
#27There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
Re: To my students
#28I agree with the points made, even if personally I am okay with LLMs (as long as they're used with appropriate caution).
Especially relevant for students I think, since they are hurting themselves most by relying on LLMs. Just like how young children are forced to do math by hand instead of using calculators to build intuition and memory, students should aim to do things manually to build their skills.
Go make that toy website, game, OS, emulator or programming language. Read specifications and try implementing them yourself. You aren't in an environment that requires you to churn out features, you can explore!
Re: To my students
#29This took a lot of courage. Glad to see this is being shared. It's the best honest advice I have seen to date.
> This took a lot of courage.
It was important to say, but I very much doubt there was any courage involved.
Re: To my students
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