I can understand how a technology, this one or any others, can be a fun and interesting tool, a creative one even, but a few things bother me a lot about it which all can be summarized as what Ivan Illich called "Tools for Conviality".
Simply put, we delegate a freedom of use and cognitive power to complex tools and organizations that control and shapes them. One can argue that it's kind of the same if I decide to code any kind of programs the 'old' way, especially using native language, albeit their exist toolchains and OSes that are open source and thus technically free of monolithic take over.
Furthermore those LLMs tools seem to me like the transhumanists cybernetic enhancements of cyberpunk dystopia, splitting Humanity between those of us that would be able to afford them and the others that are left off the competitive arena. Again, an issue that were still there to some degree in a capitalist economy but where the real entry to programming was just a computer and an internet connection to some extent, a way more democratic and affordable goal than having a subscription to a Big Bad Corporation owning everything about you and your creation, where 'free' non local models are not a real answer here either.
Any new technology have some good potential, sure, it's obvious even. I don't think the path they naturally lead to are always the best we could take though, and I hope we wake up to the fact our society are nothing short of democratic* when the economical entities that govern us is nothing but.
* Well, I don't even think we could call our political systems democratic without any kind of random selection anyways. A pastiche of one at best.
It's funny and beautiful because I recognized the sounds from my country but less so those from other places, which obviously might be a bias due to me seeing where the pointer is at any moment but can also simply be explained as different geography and biomes would produce different sounds. Even a river will be mold differently and have a peculiar acoustic, which I never really think about until now and find fascinating.
See, my GitHub email is not my main address, and when I got some it's either from a user of one of my repository or from a marketing team that extracted thousand of address from starred repositories to fake genuine email with my name and all.
The things is, it's always a less than stellar product. It started with NFTs, calm down for a bit and now came back with a vengeance with AI startups.
I guess it's a number game for them but I can't comprehend their lack of value, same for those peoples that subscribes to everyone just to gain a sub back (and judging by the number, a lot of people sub back without thinking about it, so it works).
Damn I despise that marketing-bussiness hellscape that the internet slowly morphed into along the years. We can't have nice things because there will always be a prominent proportion of us that would exploit it for personal gain and we would do collectively nothing against it, for the name of liberal economic or something. And forward the enshitification goes.
> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.
Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?
Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).
I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.
Interesting, in my experience LLMs hallucinate so much on stuffs I know about that I instinctively challenge most of their assumptions and outputs, and found out that this kind of dialectic exchange bring the most out of the "relationship" so to speak, co creating something greater than the isolation of us two.
I haven't used LLMs a lot and have just experimented with them in terms of coding.
But about a year ago, I had a job to clean up a bunch of, let's call them, reference architectures. I mostly didn't mess with the actual architecture part or went directly to the original authors.
But there wasn't a lot of context setting and background for a lot of them. None of it was rocket science; I could have written myself. But the LLM I used, Bard at the time, gave me a pretty good v 0.9 for some introductory paragraphs. Nothing revelatory but probably saved me an hour or two per architecture even including my time to fixup the results. Generally, nothing was absolutely wrong but some I felt was less relevant and other stuff I felt was missing.
It's funny because I rarely seen this (wrong approach) done anywhere else but I pick it up by myself (like a lot did I presume) and still am the first to do it everytime I see the occasion, not so for optimizations (while I admit I thought it wouldn't hurt) but for the flow and natural look of it. It feels somehow more right to me to compose effect by signals interpolations rather than clear ternary branch instructions.
Now I'll have to change my ways in fear of being rejected socially for this newly approved bad practice.
At least in WebGPU's WGSL we have the `select` instruction that does that ternary operation hidden as a method, so there is that.
Simply put, we delegate a freedom of use and cognitive power to complex tools and organizations that control and shapes them. One can argue that it's kind of the same if I decide to code any kind of programs the 'old' way, especially using native language, albeit their exist toolchains and OSes that are open source and thus technically free of monolithic take over.
Furthermore those LLMs tools seem to me like the transhumanists cybernetic enhancements of cyberpunk dystopia, splitting Humanity between those of us that would be able to afford them and the others that are left off the competitive arena. Again, an issue that were still there to some degree in a capitalist economy but where the real entry to programming was just a computer and an internet connection to some extent, a way more democratic and affordable goal than having a subscription to a Big Bad Corporation owning everything about you and your creation, where 'free' non local models are not a real answer here either.
Any new technology have some good potential, sure, it's obvious even. I don't think the path they naturally lead to are always the best we could take though, and I hope we wake up to the fact our society are nothing short of democratic* when the economical entities that govern us is nothing but.
* Well, I don't even think we could call our political systems democratic without any kind of random selection anyways. A pastiche of one at best.