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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@mjg59 @barnoid Yeah I think many of us need the back and forth with the compiler to fully flesh out an idea - it's certainly something that I've heard other people say as well.
And not just coding. Even emails or just plain old speech. Explaining an idea to someone else often results in me realising it wasn't fully formed after all, and the process of communicating it to someone else forces me to make it better. -
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@mjg59 That's an unrealistic example. My piano playing is MUCH worse than the code I used to write.
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@dngrs sure! Define smaller blocks, examine them, modify if the output isn't what you need
@mjg59 "sure" as in you're agreeing or disagreeing with me?
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@promovicz
That completely oversimplifies what's being discussed here. Every math book you ever studied is copyright, that does not mean you cannot use what you learned to solve math problems. -
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@Nfoonf Back in the day I had software that didn't do what I wanted, and I didn't know C yet. I patched stuff in many awful ways that met my needs and which taught me nothing in the moment and could never be upstreamed. How would having a machine help me achieve that make free software worse?
@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.
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@bluca (The original version of this is pretty anti-semitic and the author is a fucking nazi)
@mjg59 yeah sorry I had no idea, already deleted earlier as someone else told me
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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...
@mjg59 but wait, there's more
What if you're not renowned security expert and open-source celebrity @mjg59 (that currently works at nvidia btw, profiting from the LLM boom, sorry) but just some guy trying to make ends meet doing some coding?...
Now you get an LLM mandate from your company that comes with the implication that 'either you boost your productivity with 80% or we fire you and contract a cheap prompter in your place'...
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@promovicz I think a set of instructions to a machine should not be copyrightable and the rest flows from there.
@mjg59 Since you don't want to talk about the human/social side, you can only miss it.
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@troed @chris_evelyn @mjg59 last time I checked, Mistral models were merely open weight, with no training dataset available nor training pipeline released as FOSS. Has that changed?
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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.
@mjg59 before all this computer stuff I learned a manual craft, I still own the skills, I can use them when I need them, no one has to be paid. I can gift these skills to people, that need but can not afford them otherwise. Is this not, what all is about?
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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 heh, poked the bear with this one.
unfortunately most computer users are also not set up in a way where a subtle piece of malware injected into a python script or something could ruin their day.
tao uses them for generating proofs, which seems to work, and I have had some use to similar ends. they're quite bad if you have any delay in your feedback loop though
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@david_chisnall @mjg59 @ignaloidas I have encountered plenty of people and books that were wrong, so I still have to engage my brain and double check, though.
@mnl @david_chisnall @mjg59 @ignaloidas
Yes, but that is also not the argument.
If you read a book to extract information, you already have a mental model of the failure modes (or can build one, like students do)
- Is the author known to be proficient in the space
- Is the publisher reputable
- Is the book 'new'Depending on the answers to those questions, you either take the content as absolutely correct, likely correct, plausible, or problematic. You can know those things before
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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 @mjg59 one, you're clearly not a carpenter if you think they don't pay rent, maintenance costs, overhead, professional licensing, etc. two, you don't understand how the industry works. production is a really big deal, even if you're a craftsman.
craftmanship has always been for the well-to-do. most people get buy with what they can get cheaply, which means sending everything with uncalibrated nailguns, close-enough tolerances and twisted studs here.
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@Nfoonf @mjg59 one, you're clearly not a carpenter if you think they don't pay rent, maintenance costs, overhead, professional licensing, etc. two, you don't understand how the industry works. production is a really big deal, even if you're a craftsman.
craftmanship has always been for the well-to-do. most people get buy with what they can get cheaply, which means sending everything with uncalibrated nailguns, close-enough tolerances and twisted studs here.
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@mnl @david_chisnall @mjg59 @ignaloidas
Yes, but that is also not the argument.
If you read a book to extract information, you already have a mental model of the failure modes (or can build one, like students do)
- Is the author known to be proficient in the space
- Is the publisher reputable
- Is the book 'new'Depending on the answers to those questions, you either take the content as absolutely correct, likely correct, plausible, or problematic. You can know those things before
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@mnl @david_chisnall @mjg59 @ignaloidas
even reading the first page.
Generally, this assessment of the overall book extends to each page, even if it contains pages with errors.
For llms, there is a probability that each query is resulting in garbage. In the book-analogy, it is as if each page is written by a different author, some experts, some crooks
Except no page is attributed, and guessing who wrote what page is up to the reader.
There is no model to be build around that fail-mode
2/2 -
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 suspect CHERI would make running LLM-generated code more feasible, and probably less risky. I'm not saying this to be an annoying contrarian, but rather that stronger underlying models seems to make playing with garbage LLM code more viable. Terry Tao has been using them to generate quick and dirty proofs, cha bu duo.
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@troed @chris_evelyn @mjg59 last time I checked, Mistral models were merely open weight, with no training dataset available nor training pipeline released as FOSS. Has that changed?
@zacchiro I understood the ask I replied to was regarding ethical training. Mistral, as an EU company, has to abide by EU regulations AI companies in the US, China etc don't have to.
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@jenesuispasgoth I mean kind of the point of free software is that people get to modify it to their own ends and that doesn't mean it has to be good - when I first started hacking things to meet my needs I was definitely writing stuff that couldn't be upstreamed, but it worked for me, and making it easier for others to do that is a win
@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.
