https://stream.syscoi.com/2024/05/09/john-mccarthy-and-the-ai-schism-from-cybernetics-links-for-reference/

Part of it was stream of consciousness. Also taking my cat out for a walk.

The LLM haters will (rightfully) look at US data center, power, water, pollution as a big example why training is extremely problematic. And in the USA, it is.

Chinese power is primarily solar, and using things like geothermal and other better renewables. Their training is still problematic, but nowhere near the Muskean "let's run 40 methane generators next to the black community cause fuck blacks" happening in Memphis and Louisiana.

Funny. Cause all my comments on mastodon are 100% my own. No automation.

But that's now a general insult of "things I don't like" by calling it slop.

And the only way I can figure that Chinese power plays any role in this question is you used it to extrude that reply, lol

There's so many problems with these claims.

Banning generated code? How do you even tell? Code quality? 'Claude' committed it? Has a certain "smell"?

Or is it the US supreme court obscenity standard of " I'll know it when I see it."?

Cause that last one is what Codeberg admins said they'd use. For obvious reasons, this is a terrible precedent.

As for environmental impact, everyone who howls about that ignores that you can run #localllm on your own machines. And with Chinese open source/weight models freely available, means I can own my means of computation.

And Chinese energy is some of the most environmentally sound given TW's of their energy is solar, and rewilding the edge of the Gobi while they're at it.

I guess it does use a mug of water an hour.... Cause I'm drinking that mug of coffee.

And 'submitting slop to the stack', so most FLOSS projects are just 1 human. So 1 human+1 bot is now somehow troubling?? I reject that assessment. The bot could be doing test writing, documentation, validating specifications, attacking the code in a container, etc.

Now the big projects that are inundated - there are simple ways to impede that. Account age. Minimum viable commits. Required tests. Proofs of concept. No refactoring. Most of those would block the deluge.

A marketing ploy

There are good uses for it - but it's mostly NOT being used for those purposes.

As a result, it's like a wrench being used as a hammer. Yeah, it seems to work, but eventually things are going to break and people aren't going to be able to use it for anything.

I tend to reserve "machine learning" for what I consider technically rigorous pattern classification.

I consider "AI" to be an unscientific term, and use it to refer to things I consider hype-driven and lacking technical merit.

After visiting a harbor in Maine today, I learned that "A.I." first referred to the artificial ice created by the seafood storage facilities!

From what I'm seeing these days, its a bimodal distribution of:

1. "I don't understand it but it allows me to do amazing things I couldn't do before!"

2. "I don't understand it but its going to destroy civilization and environment and I hate it and will reactionarily lash out."

And even now after Codeberg's anti-LLM stance, now Debian is getting in on it as well. Its tiring.