Love the one-armed code bandit on the home page of this blog!
Nice UX experience!
See: https://dbushell.com/
I quit. The clankers won
401–410 of 515 posts
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#402> First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit. Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I…
I think what you're looking for is patents. I've said it before, but I think patents are the only protection left for innovative software and "the little guy." It always was, really, but it's blindingly apparent today.
Unfortunately, that would be considered heresy on forums like HN, and people will continue to rail against AI and whatever it's causing and patents, instead of realizing that one is the only available leverage against the other.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that. I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of men…
See one, do one, teach one.
Yes—and the key is, you do not leave the category of "how to learn a thing" between steps 2 and 3.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#404> First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit. Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I…
I think what you're looking for is patents. I've said it before, but I think patents are the only protection left for innovative software and "the little guy." It always was, really, but it's blindingly apparent today. Unfortunately, that would be considered heresy on forums like HN, and people will continue to rail against AI and whatever it's causing and patents, instead of realizing that one is the only available…
I have a few patents, including one for a novel machine instruction, and I recall the attorney telling me that one cannot patent mathematics, only methods and systems.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Jesus christ. "The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentiall…
This argument commits the same fallacy as the argument against piracy; copying is not stealing, because the original still remains. A lockpicked and squatted house means someone else does not have that house, it's a zero sum game which information which is freely copyable does not align with.
That only works if you assume that the exclusive value is in the object and not the labour.
The reproduction of the object is essentially free in the internet, but the labour to produce it isn't.
If I spent 3 years making my codebase, and you copy paste the git repo, yeah your access to the information is not going to replace the original. But your labour cost is 0 and you can undercut the 3 years of expense, loans or debt I adquired to produce it.
Btw the FBI murdered Aaron Swartz for attempting to open access to research papers, Mark Zuckemberg admitted to stealing those ssame papers through libgen and showed off the results of Llama and his stock price went up.
I think the piracy argument falls apart when the class warfare and 2 tier justce system is openly weaponised towards open access
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#406I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
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Re: I quit. The clankers won
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just isn’t true at all, with guidance and guard rails they produce much better code than the average developer does. They are only going to get better.
That is completely false in my experience. I have never once seen an LLM produce code that would be acceptable. It certainly is worse than what a human can do.
Have you seen the kind of code an average developer writes?
I agree that LLMs produce code that is less good than what a good developer could write, but most developers are not good developers, and even the good developer gets tired and must sleep eventually.
Arguments against LLMs are like the old arguments against high level languages like C. People argued that the compiler wrote trash code, that humans could do better, that the costs weren't worth it. None of that mattered and it's the same story here.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#408I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
Because some of us actually enjoy programming. For some people those side projects aren't about the destination, but the journey of learning how something works by making it with your bare hands.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#409I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…
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Re: I quit. The clankers won
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument commits the same fallacy as the argument against piracy; copying is not stealing, because the original still remains. A lockpicked and squatted house means someone else does not have that house, it's a zero sum game which information which is freely copyable does not align with.
That only works if you assume that the exclusive value is in the object and not the labour. The reproduction of the object is essentially free in the internet, but the labour to produce it isn't. If I spent 3 years making my codebase, and you copy paste the git repo, yeah your access to the information is not going to replace the original. But your labour cost is 0 and you can undercut the 3 years of expense, loans o…
Labor doesn't have value inherently, it's about what is produced by said labor. These days even the labor to create something falls to zero via LLMs so I'm not sure the point is valid these days.