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
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They do speak of 'elegance' even 'beauty' when it comes to mathematical proofs.
Aesthetics are not a positivist axiology. Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder.
Just because you are aware you write ugly code doesn't mean code cannot be beautiful, or that aesthetics are not a legitimate field of assessing information systems.
@MrBerard I agree that code *can* be beautiful, but the overwhelming majority of it is not in a way that is very distinct from, say, literature, where even the most churned out boilerplate nonsense still embodies some level of emotion
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@mjg59 No, I do think you're being honest, I just think your opinion is kinda bad.
@barubary Disagreement, I understand - accusation that it's not a good faith argument, I don't
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@mjg59 You never realise the original idea could be improved a bit along the way? This probably depends on what's being worked on. Most of the stuff I do is fairly small scale and not particularly well specified (day job is mostly sysadmin, off day jobs are museum installations).
@barnoid Oh yeah, frequently - but the same happens when I'm in the shower or walking to the station. It's the act of thinking about the problem that does it for me, which is kind of incidental to the act of coding.
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@mjg59 you might be missing a few of people's issues with LLMs. Our programmer standpoint is quite niche.
What happens to people with jobs that are affected by LLMs? They either start using LLMs to match the competition's performance, or get obsoleted... What if they can't actually afford using LLMs to stay competitive?...
And then there's art.
On top of all of that LLMs are energy and resource-hungry, ruining the environment and making everything more expensive...
@petko Yes, I think there's a large number of extremely bad real world outcomes associated with LLMs
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@mjg59
I can't help but feel this leads to short-term decision making.
On the one hand I get it, people have shit to do and don't want to fight with upstream projects to get their needs met. Software dev culture can be a warzone.
On the other, I see this as creating a bunch of fragile siloed work, everyone solving their own immediate needs in the short term rather than working together to build a more robust long-term solution for most needs. No assumptions challenged in their approach or potential improvements to their workflow, just a "yes boss" and something that may work in the now.
It feels like the seeds of an increasingly insular world, "got mine jack" culture.@strm I think widespread adoption of LLMs in the software industry is likely to result in an overall decrease in the quality of software and the quality of software developers
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@mjg59 but you are paying the owner of the machine a recurring rent, aren't you? does this not bother you? what this machine does for you will never be yours, you will pay them again and again. you do not own the tools of your trade anymore. If the rent seeking owner denies you access or you can not afford it anymore this is all gone.
@Nfoonf Not inherently, no - local models can be run on reasonably affordable hardware, and produce acceptable outcomes.
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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 yeah Matthew that's not a good one mate... Cya later.
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@mjg59 you might be missing a few of people's issues with LLMs. Our programmer standpoint is quite niche.
What happens to people with jobs that are affected by LLMs? They either start using LLMs to match the competition's performance, or get obsoleted... What if they can't actually afford using LLMs to stay competitive?...
And then there's art.
On top of all of that LLMs are energy and resource-hungry, ruining the environment and making everything more expensive...
@petko I think the widespread adoption of LLMs by industry is likely to reduce the quality of software and make it extremely difficult to maintain a pipeline of people who actually understand how software works, and I'm certainly not going to defend what's going on there
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@mjg59 @jenesuispasgoth
There are people that analyse, design and then implement as code. Those are programmers. LLM can't replace that,
If you only ever tweak someone else's design, you may not have learned to program, only learned a language, or framework or library APIs. So maybe an LLM might help, because it's a plagiarism machine. It ignores licences and the companies building them (so called "training" = copying) have violated IP, copyright, copyleft/GPL etc on a massive scale. Theft.@raymaccarthy @jenesuispasgoth I'm not arguing that LLMs replace the need for humans who understand how code works, or that people who use them are becoming programmers in the process.
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@raymaccarthy @p I am more familiar with both than I want to be
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(Yes ok there are cases where code is beauty and embodies an idea that could make a grown man cry and:
(1) your code is not that code
(2) you would think nothing of copying the creative aspect of that code if you needed to don't fucking lie to me)@mjg59 Everything I ever wrote in R4RS Scheme was poetry, and I'll hit anyone who says otherwise with a chair.
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@mjg59 you mean "not by paying monthly $200 to a wanna be megacorp"? Yeah, not like that indeed.
13 years old me started coding on an old Windows 3.1 workstation with ~$0 monthly cost. If I were to enter the industry now, when one has to invest in LLMs, which btw also prevent from gaining actual skills and erode existing skills, I would simply have not done that. Must be why genZ hates LLMs
I don't see how one can look at the thought-extruding machine and think "surely it will liberate me"
@lodurel If someone is interested in coding then they should learn to code! I am 100% in favour of artisinal handcrafted code and the process of learning how to create it. But there's plenty of people who don't have the desire or time to learn, and giving them a way to modify code to behave the way they want anyway seems good?
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@mjg59 This might be the dumbest thing you have written. You basically just said anyone who claims not to have committed copyright infringement is lying, which is both obviously false and insulting to developers.
@distrowatch No, I didn't. Code is copyrightable, the underlying creative concept isn't, and reusing that concept isn't copyright infringement.
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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 to
LLMs: (enable that)
Free software people: Oh no not like that@mjg59 I used to think you were cool...
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@mjg59 " Every line of code I write is a copy of another line of code I've read somewhere before." This cannot possibly be true. Surely you've written some original content, as a developer, which was unique or which created your own function, or did something you hadn't simply read before?
Even if it is somehow true for you, it is not at all how most developers write code.
@distrowatch I come up with a creative concept of how a function should behave, and then I mechanically churn out the code that results in it doing so. The individual lines are fundamentally uninteresting, it's the first step in the process that's where the creativity happens.
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@mjg59 "i don't like programming and anyone who does is a liar" is a hill to die on, i guess
@phooky I greatly enjoy programming! I enjoy figuring out how to solve a problem, I enjoy having that solution exist in the real world, the actual process of writing the code is pleasing. But the code itself feels like the least interesting part of that?
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This is such a bullshit, deprecating framing of what developers do. The fact that you also deprecate yourself doesn't make it any better.
Sure, the individual "line of code" may not be very unique. But the arrangement of many lines is. Your comparison is about equivalent to saying "hah, how can an author produce anything novel if he's just using the same old words from the English alphabet!"
@luatic Let me try to express this differently. A literary work consists of both a plot and the work expressing that plot. Both of these are extremely creative - a mechanical implementation of a compelling plot has little value. For software, the concept and the logical structure are where almost all of the value is, the actual choice of words in the implementation is pretty uninteresting in comparison
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@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer If you want to use LLMs to make a software what you want, feel free to do it in a private forks. Private forks for yourself are fine. Private is private.
But its also the freedom of the developer/maintainer of the software to not allow such changes upstream or force such changes to be marked.@neintonine Agree
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Pragmatic standpoint is completely valid, but don't forget why do we have writing systems: to convey information. That's the basic need. So taking the same pragmatic approach we don't need writers nor poets nor prose or anything of sorts: language exists to transfer data from human to human, and don't you dare to find any of that serialization into english/anything beautiful. Is that it?
@bsandro Not at all! But almost all users of software typically never see the underlying code, which feels like a significant distinction from literature
