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 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'...
Mmm steady on... at least in his first part he has a good point (didn't read the rest). To the extent that LLMs push FOSS forward, they are good. His point can stand or keel over without having to bash him over the head with his supposed motivation.
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@larsmb @jenesuispasgoth @mjg59
The US is the country that on the one hand has the draconian DMCA (unfair) and on the other hand said it's fine for Google to entirely scan copyright works (a totally paid for decision that isn't "fair use").
The USPTO broken since Edison.It's not a clean room re-implementation. It's automated plagiarism. I can do that in Perl or WP to a novel changing places and people. Copyright violation.
Even if you also manually transpose to a different era it might be.@raymaccarthy @jenesuispasgoth @mjg59 I think it morally is a copyright violation too.
I also have come to the conclusion (including an explanation by Fontana in the chardet issue) that unless you can identify persistent copyrightable expression from prior art, your new work isn't a violation.
If you don't care whether it's copyrightable, you're probably in the clear.
Exposure is a problem if you're under NDA or trade secrets are involved, yes. Or maybe patents.
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@seanfurey I assume you're referring to the ISO containers. Can you please check how long did it take to switch to predominantly containerized shipping, and was it two years? Because this is the chief issue -- short-sighted companies WILL fire en-masse not leaving time for people to re-specialise/transition safely and peacefully to a new craft.
I imagine not, although I have no idea.
I think that's less of a question of " is there a fundamental problem with replacing programmers with llms?", more " if it happens, would it happen quicker than people can adapt to?".
Both are valid questions, they're slightly independent I think.
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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.
@mjg59 no
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@barnoid Huh interesting, that's really not my experience of writing code - I sit down with a formed idea of what needs to happen and then I smash keys until it's there. And now I'm curious whether there's a real disconnect between with different models of coding.
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@mjg59 That said, I don't object to LLMs. With what I do, their use is niche, and I rarely need them, but they're useful for spitting out unimportant code in some unwieldy framework like Vue/JS/HTML.
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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 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.
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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.
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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
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@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.
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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.)
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@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
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@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.)
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@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?
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@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?
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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?
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@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
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@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
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@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
