Free software people: A major goal of free software is for individuals to be able to cause software to behave in the way they want it toLLMs: (enable that)Free software people: Oh no not like that
-
When I write code I am turning a creative idea into a mechanical embodiment of that idea. I am not creating beauty. Every line of code I write is a copy of another line of code I've read somewhere before, lightly modified to meet my needs. My code is not intended to evoke emotion. It does not change people think about the world. The idea→code pipeline in my head is not obviously distinguishable from the prompt->code process in an LLM
@mjg59 Yeh I agree; I think some people only saw LLMs maybe 3 years ago and they were pretty stupid at the time just regurgitating junk and haven't noticed the modern stuff is actually understanding the code in some cases; well, at least as well as an intern and frequently better.
-
I’ve heard this argument before and I disagree with it. My goal for Free Software is to enable users, but that requires users have agency. Users being able to modify code to do what they want? Great! Users being given a black box that will modify their code in a way that might do what they want but will fail in unpredictable ways, without giving them any mechanism to build a mental model of those failure modes? Terrible!
I am not a carpenter but I have an electric screwdriver. It’s great. It lets me turn screws with much less effort than a manual one. There are a bunch of places where it doesn’t work, but that’s fine, I can understand those and use the harder-to-use tool in places where it won’t work. I can build a mental model of when not to use it and why it doesn’t work and how it will fail. I love building the software equivalent of this, things that let end users change code in ways I didn’t anticipate.
But LLM coding is not like this. It’s like a nail gun that has a 1% chance of firing backwards. 99% of the time, it’s much easier than using a hammer. 1% of the time you lose an eye. And you have no way of knowing which it will be. The same prompt, given to the same model, two days in a row, may give you a program that does what you want one time and a program that looks like it does what you want but silently corrupts your data the next time.
That’s not empowering users, that’s removing agency from users. Tools that empower users are ones that make it easy for users to build a (nicely abstracted, ignoring details that are irrelevant to them) mental model of how the system works and therefor the ability to change it in precise ways. Tools that remove agency from users take their ability to reason about how systems work and how to effect precise change.
I have zero interest in enabling tools that remove agency from users.
@david_chisnall @mjg59 I don't think AI is ready to empower non-programmers to build whatever they want... yet. I think they might have the potential to do so in the future, though, as the technology improves.
-
Clearly my most unpopular thread ever, so let me add a clarification: submitting LLM generated code you don't understand to an upstream project is absolute bullshit and you should never do that. Having an LLM turn an existing codebase into something that meets your local needs? Do it. The code may be awful, it may break stuff you don't care about, and that's what all my early patches to free software looked like. It's ok to solve your problem locally.
@mjg59 years of reputation thrown away on a single thread: a masterclass
-
@petko @mjg59 Speaking as a FOSS maintainer for over a decade, when I look at my human users who largely don't contribute (especially the FAANG users), I also get very doubtful, no AI needed. Stasis is the definite non-AI future for most projects.
I have been able to get a lot more done driving AI "contributions" this last 9 months, including tasks I was unable to do alone; it's all FOSS.
-
Clearly my most unpopular thread ever, so let me add a clarification: submitting LLM generated code you don't understand to an upstream project is absolute bullshit and you should never do that. Having an LLM turn an existing codebase into something that meets your local needs? Do it. The code may be awful, it may break stuff you don't care about, and that's what all my early patches to free software looked like. It's ok to solve your problem locally.
@mjg59 But why would LLM trash solve ANY need, locally or globally, Matthew? That's the real question.
Your opinion on this matter honestly ought to be discarded without consideration: you have a naked conflict of interest in plain sight, corrupting your judgment. Your livelihood depends upon #Nvidia and its dedication to corrupting all of computing with LLM gibberish (and, in the process, turning all software into mere tools of corporate surveillance.)
-
@dekkzz78 I am absolutely not going to argue that LLMs replace the need for skilled developers! But many people who want to modify software are just doing it for personal use and if we argue using LLMs for that is unethical we risk alienating them all
-
@mjg59 But why would LLM trash solve ANY need, locally or globally, Matthew? That's the real question.
Your opinion on this matter honestly ought to be discarded without consideration: you have a naked conflict of interest in plain sight, corrupting your judgment. Your livelihood depends upon #Nvidia and its dedication to corrupting all of computing with LLM gibberish (and, in the process, turning all software into mere tools of corporate surveillance.)
@mjg59 it's therefore only natural that you'd think of writing code merely as a utilitarian matter of extruding whatever goo and dribble is sufficient to satisfy bare minimum internal requirements, whatever's just barely enough to pronounce that the goo is salable. Meanwhile the end user gets to endure software products that are getting ever worse by the year—more bloated, more unreliable, more dedicated solely to serving the corporate needs of the software's vendors (and whatever fashy police-state government entities they're dealing with under the table.)
-
@mjg59 it's therefore only natural that you'd think of writing code merely as a utilitarian matter of extruding whatever goo and dribble is sufficient to satisfy bare minimum internal requirements, whatever's just barely enough to pronounce that the goo is salable. Meanwhile the end user gets to endure software products that are getting ever worse by the year—more bloated, more unreliable, more dedicated solely to serving the corporate needs of the software's vendors (and whatever fashy police-state government entities they're dealing with under the table.)
@mjg59 you're a genetics Ph.D., Matthew? do you mind if I ask why you quit on science to chase after computer money?
-
@petko @mjg59 Speaking as a FOSS maintainer for over a decade, when I look at my human users who largely don't contribute (especially the FAANG users), I also get very doubtful, no AI needed. Stasis is the definite non-AI future for most projects.
I have been able to get a lot more done driving AI "contributions" this last 9 months, including tasks I was unable to do alone; it's all FOSS.
@hopeless how about the people coming after you?
-
Look, coders, we are not writers. There's no way to turn "increment this variable" into life changing prose. The creativity exists outside the code. It always has done and it always will do. Let it go.
phew, not sure (!!!)
What if the variable is a cursor in Marx Capital or Orwell 1984?
Or both?And what would Jesus have done?
-
@dekkzz78 Safety critical and security critical software should always have an appropriately skilled human in the loop
its all to easy to taint known good code, on sharepoint now everything has sprouted a co-pilot button tagged as "made available by your org tech team"
a totally false statement that suggest your employer wants you to use it
that's why all the programmers had an all hands teams telling them in no uncertain terms no AI code was to be created & would be deemed as instant dismissal offence
-
@radex See I fundamentally don't believe that code should be copyrightable and also me 30 years ago did not produce code that was suitable for professional use but it fixed my problems anyway
-
@p If you're doing something other than
var++
then you're doing something wrong. Code is instructions to a machine. The description of what that code does may be creative, if the actual implementation is then you are almost certainly in a bad place.
@mjg59 If you measure prose by looking at corporate emails and VCR manuals, then you come to the same conclusion.
When I write prose, I'm putting my thoughts into English. When I write code, I'm telling my thoughts to a machine.
Even a little script, I'm teaching the machine how I want to talk to it. I put it in ~/bin and I've taught the computer a word. I build up my little environment where the machine and I understand each other. Dick Gabriel, the "Worse is Better" author, said:
> I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise?
If style and thoughts couldn't come out through the code, he wouldn't be able to say something like that.
ken, when describing his compiler bug, started off talking about adding '\v' to the C compiler. First he hard-coded the numeric value for '\v': `if(c == 'v') return 11;`. Then, because the C compiler was written in C, he could write `if(c == 'v') return '\v';`. And he said "It is as close to a 'learning' program as I have ever seen." He's taught the machine. A lot of people have read the paper, but you can go read ken's code, a lot of it is out there. (You can download a CD image, mount it, and look at his code: http://9legacy.org/download.html .) You can see a style of thinking, you can see ken in his code. Maybe you can't see someone's personality in a four-page technical manual that comes with your refrigerator, maybe you can't see someone's personality in a webapp at your day job, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to create something beautiful.
Here is a small program:
echo '++++[->++++<]>[-<+++++>>+++++++>++<<]<------.>>+++++.--.+.>.<[-<+>>>+<<]>[--<++>>-<]>---.+++++++++++++.+.<<<.>>>-------.---.<<<--.>.>>+++.-------.++.++[->+<<+>]>++++++.<<.<<.>[-<<->>]<<++++.[>>>--<<<-]>>>+.' | \
sed -E 's/(.)/\1\n/g' | \
awk 'BEGIN{print "BEGIN{p=0;"}END{print "}"}/\./{print "printf \"%c\",a[p]"}/\+/{print "a[p]++"}/-/{print "a[p]--"}/</{print "p--"}/>/{print "p++"}/\[/{print "while(a[p]){"}/\]/{print "}"}' | \
awk -f /dev/fd/0
Every coder I have showed this program to in person has laughed: why did they laugh?
p761-thompson.pdf -
@jenesuispasgoth @raymaccarthy Agreed. From a pure technical sense @mjg59 makes sense. But it ignores the massive ethical and environmental problems and these cannot be decoupled.
The quality of the output is not relevant. It is going to get better. The ethical problems are not. Too many people opposed to LLMs concentrate on the ai-slop problem when they should be shouting about the ethical issues.
-
@raymaccarthy @mjg59 I don't really hate LLMs per se, but they do generate this soulless "enterprisey" code as an artifact of how they're trained. The thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the series of posts was mainly that it's this call to mediocrity.
And then he uses Roast Beef as an example; Roast Beef is severely depressed and has this pathological self-deprecation and also is not a real hacker: he's a drawing of a dog. But one of the reasons Achewood sticks with people is Onstad is brilliant with his use of language and is pretty good at sketching personalities. There are people that say comics are not art, Ebert went to his grave insisting video games cannot be art, this guy is saying to the reader, specifically, that some code can be art but then says "Your code sucks, it's never going to be beautiful" and he uses this guy as an example:
2007-02-02 -
@ignaloidas @mjg59 @david_chisnall @newhinton I think you are misreading what I am saying. That is exactly what I am saying. I never fully trust my code, not a single line of it, partly because every line of my code usually requires billions of lines of code I haven’t written to run. I can apply methods and use my experience to trust it enough to run it.
@mnl @ignaloidas @mjg59 @david_chisnall @newhinton I don't think you are being miss-read. You just stopped making and sense part way into this thread because you started to overload simple words with too much meaning while also bereaving other words of any meaning at all. It is hard to have a meaningful discussion with someone when they keep changing the language as they go or the goalposts keep moving.
-
Look, coders, we are not writers. There's no way to turn "increment this variable" into life changing prose. The creativity exists outside the code. It always has done and it always will do. Let it go.
Maybe it is because I do not write code for a living. But boy are you wrong on so many levels!
I don't even want to demonize LLMs, they have their place _especially_ in coding because this might be one of the very few comparably deterministic fields.
But when I write code I _want_ it to be art, nothing more, nothing less. And I will never let that go
-
@raymaccarthy @mjg59 I don't really hate LLMs per se, but they do generate this soulless "enterprisey" code as an artifact of how they're trained. The thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the series of posts was mainly that it's this call to mediocrity.
And then he uses Roast Beef as an example; Roast Beef is severely depressed and has this pathological self-deprecation and also is not a real hacker: he's a drawing of a dog. But one of the reasons Achewood sticks with people is Onstad is brilliant with his use of language and is pretty good at sketching personalities. There are people that say comics are not art, Ebert went to his grave insisting video games cannot be art, this guy is saying to the reader, specifically, that some code can be art but then says "Your code sucks, it's never going to be beautiful" and he uses this guy as an example:
2007-02-02@p @raymaccarthy @mjg59 There's nothing code can be EXCEPT art. Modern high-level languages have so many different ways to skin a cat that you need a strong dogma just to be able to complete anything more complex than a MySpace page.
A lot of code preference is entirely arbitrary, but the preference itself is required; else, you become The Framework Guy. -
true, but then its down to values & how you prioritise such things
wrt coding specifically companies are worried about skill loss & being dependant plus it ties the seniors into code review all the time
also I know 2 auto companies that have banned them due to creep into safety critical code
@dekkzz78 I agree that there are excellent reasons to prefer hand written code under an extremely wide range of circumstances
-
@mjg59 "sure" as in you're agreeing or disagreeing with me?
@dngrs Agreeing - if you want high quality implementation of a spec there's going to be meaningful human involvement in the process
