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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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 for many it’s a Moral question.
There are two kinds of ‘free’ in OSS
Free as in beer: no downside you get something you didn’t have
Free as in piano: something so unwieldy you can have it if you can move it.I’m not against free anything - but sometimes there’s a hidden cost.
We can be against hidden cost Morally *and* still enjoy free pianos - if you can move them. -
I am not sure we disagree, I do agree on the fact that a tools that allow anyone to modify programs for their own needs is exactly what free software is about.
I disagree that what we have today is that though, feels more like a free drug for kids program right now.
To build domestic of them efficiently we would need to understand how they work… should not stop anyone of course.
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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 What a bizarre take. One of those pipelines lets me feed my family, the other means layoffs for our entire sector (which is happening)
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@mjg59 Are you using open-source hosted models or are we supposed to rent our tools from som company?
@platlas my preference would be for local models where the underlying runtime cost is more visible to users
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Erm...sure... Seems like you are now switching the fictional strawman against which you are arguing, but sure.
Then again, all creative endeavours require critical appreciation of prior work. No novelist doesn't read books, no miso doesn't listen to music.
So the point you are making, with which I agree, is in fact a point for coding being a creative endeavour (dunno if this implies an aesthetic dimension)
@MrBerard words aren't just the embodiment of a creative story, they influence how we understand and feel about it. When I read someone else's code I'm not typically feeling that dual creative nature - I'm seeing the embodiment of the creativity that created a novel algorithm or exploited hardware behaviour in an interesting way. That's what I'm interested in, not the actual lines of code that tell the compiler how to implement that.
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@glyph @mjg59 Yeah, this rubbed me the wrong way too.
As I see it, you can write code in a lot of different ways: from rules lawyer-proof legalese to shitpost, and all of these are valid. And that resulting code can be anywhere from painfully, boringly practical to something damn near poetry.
I've seen data wrangling that has flow and metre and fancy UIs written in code that nearly put me to sleep.
And this is the raw interpreted code, not the comments.
All of this is creative art, all of this is engineering (whether you like it or not) and all of this is ultimately just translating ideas into instructions for a very simple machine.
And yes, we all learned this craft by copying and pasting, but we learned from what we pasted and ended up learning how to steal the ideas and concepts and themes behind the "word"s.
My understanding of LLMs is that they're nowhere near the point where they understand why things mean what they mean, even if they can generate pretty plausible explanations for that, so they cannot generate output with "soul" whatever that means. Look at all the abortive attempts to generate videos for example.
I agree that LLMs have opened the field to people who would otherwise not be able to program and that this is a good thing. My manager wrote a coffee ordering tool that is both vibe coded bullshit and shockingly functional, and I believe he's learned along the way.
But would I trust him to work on our software product? Would I trust whatever tool he used to work on it? Fuck no. And thankfully, he's self-aware enough to not even try. As much as he's generated a useful tool, I know that the engineering behind it is nonexistent and I'd be shocked if he could explain how any of it worked at a low level.
As much as it is gatekeepery to doorslam the slop wranglers from open source projects, I believe that most of this antagonism comes from frustrations with people generating shit and trying to pass it off as gold without understanding or engaging with why it isn't.
And then we get to the moral and environmental issues outside of whether the tool can actually do the thing.
@juliancalaby @glyph I am absolutely not advocating for LLM use in software development in general, I am saying that the actual code is massively less creative than the majority of words or music or graphics consumed by the training and so I don't have an ethical objection *on that basis* (plenty of other ethical objections in most cases)
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@mjg59 is it enabling it though? You have to use proprietary tools which you have no control over and cannot build yourself anyway. I might be wrong but I think gcc was one of the first tool RMS built.
A bit like being self sufficient food wise but you need to source seeds and fertiliser from “someone”, not to say big corp, and be happy because the seeds are free.
@Ced a proprietary solution that grants the user an ability to modify free software to match their needs is worse than a free one, but it's still something that enhances that user's freedom
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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 thatMy personal problem with LLMs is that they generally have no concept of attribution or licensing. Give me a LLM trained on GPL'd code, that actually knew where each generated line came from and added it to the credits, and I'd start using it in a heartbeat -
@mjg59 I don't read other people's code save for documentation and snippets on StackExchange. That's not to say my code is unique, but saying "every line of code I write is a copy of someone else's" is more or less true about virtually every sentence ever committed to paper. Doesn't make your creativity any less valid. Doesn't make the problem you're solving or the app your building any less unique.
@gardiner_bryant my choice of code is driven almost 100% by the desire to communicate my intention to another blob of code. My choice of words is significantly more complicated than that.
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@juliancalaby @glyph I am absolutely not advocating for LLM use in software development in general, I am saying that the actual code is massively less creative than the majority of words or music or graphics consumed by the training and so I don't have an ethical objection *on that basis* (plenty of other ethical objections in most cases)
@mjg59 @juliancalaby I appreciate the clarification on the scope of the disagreement. I still disagree, but you have gotten put disproportionately on blast in the replies. probably should have opened with this caveat
also despite that disagreement I think there’s an interesting aesthetic philosophy question in here and I wish we didn’t have to have this discussion while standing in the long shadow of the art-annihilating machine
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@mjg59 What a bizarre take. One of those pipelines lets me feed my family, the other means layoffs for our entire sector (which is happening)
@corycarson I think the effects of all of this on the industry are terrible and also I think the arguments I feel legitimately apply to LLMs replacing the creativity of authors and composers and artists with a cheap imitation are much less strong when applied to the regurgitation of code
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@barubary Disagreement, I understand - accusation that it's not a good faith argument, I don't
@mjg59 It misses the point so completely (and doesn't address any of the actual counterarguments I've seen made) that it is functionally indistinguishable from a piss take.
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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 i see so many people on here going on and on about how llms write bad / lazy / sloppy code, and im like, if you think that's bad hold my beer i can do _far_ worse
but yeah the gatekeeping vibes are real rn
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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.
I'm a full-time professional novelist. Have been for 25 years. Before that I was a software dev. From the inside, the cognitive experiences of writing prose fiction and writing software *feel identical*. The creativity exists outside the words, and most of the phrases and grammar I use are unoriginal.
Ball's back in your court.
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I'm a full-time professional novelist. Have been for 25 years. Before that I was a software dev. From the inside, the cognitive experiences of writing prose fiction and writing software *feel identical*. The creativity exists outside the words, and most of the phrases and grammar I use are unoriginal.
Ball's back in your court.
