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Comment on Probably want to stop using Booklore...

shads@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I think I can provide you a great equivalent. Firearms, they have utility, but there are people who make them a lifestyle choice, and there are people who make them their whole personality. There are also a lot of people just desperate for an excuse to use one. I grew up with a couple of farmers in the extended family, I would never argue guns should be entirely banned, but I am so glad I live somewhere with sane laws around gun ownership. It would be so nice if we had similar consideration around regulating LLMs.

The danger to open source as I see it is that LLMs degrade the quality and ability of developers while increasing their throughput, and I have never once heard someone complain that open source lacks quantity, but I hear a lot of people complaining about the quality.

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PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think that the problem, in both cases, is culture.

It’s not that either of those are bad, or bad for people; it’s bad for people of this culture or people of this society. It’s how the two intersect that is the problem.

It could be a tool that lifts up the worker or creative, but instead it’s a tool to devalue the creative and extract power and wealth.
It highlights that people with power get a different set of rules and laws than the rest of us, and they’re using that to further entrench and enrich themselves.

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- shads@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  And it’s so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it’s swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive “work” on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.
  
  I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn’t like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It’s so insidious, by being “helpful” it reinforces its necessity.
  
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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I will complain about quantity, many areas where open source projects are competing with closed source commercial products they have not achieved feature parity or a comparable level of polish, quantity matters. So does, as someone else touched on, quality of life improvements to the process of writing code like ease of acquiring and synthesizing information. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff, but how much is really being sacrificed depends on what exactly is being done with a LLM. To me one part of what’s described here that’s clearly going too far is using it to automate communication with other people contributing to the project, there’s no way that is worth it.

As for the gun thing, I will support entirely banning LLM powered weapons intended to kill people, that’s an easy choice.

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- shads@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I still don’t think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it’s amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?
  
  Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can’t be better it will be subsumed in slop.
  
  Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these “AI” companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.
  
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  - chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    One example of a place where quantity is lacking is web browsers. Another might be mobile operating systems. I am glad projects like Firefox and GrapheneOS exist, but it’s obvious that the volume of work needed to achieve broad compatibility and competitiveness for these types of software is a limiting factor. As for the idea that any LLM use is a slippery slope, the way to avoid the slippery slope fallacy would be to have compelling evidence or rationale that any use really does lead naturally to problematic use; without that the argument could apply to basically any programming thing that gets to be associated with things done badly (ie. Java), but I think it isn’t usually the case that a tool has genuinely no good or safe ways to use it and I don’t think that’s true for AI.
    
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    shads@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you night credit. Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I’m afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilia terrorists faster than you can blink.
    
    Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.
    
    We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?
    
    Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?
    
    At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of “AI” I’m really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.
    
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