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We have R U OK? day here and the idea is to check in on people you know to de-stigmatise mental health issues.
I don’t understand what’s he talking about. I was forced to use AI by my employer and instantly lost all the joy in programming.
Have it do the tedious work
Have it create a better testing environment
Have it do bunch of edge case things or automate ui testing.
Use it as a tool. You can still be the brains.
I’m doing all that, but it’s not the same. I’m no longer writing code and it was my favorite part of the job. I guess I was lucky to have a job I enjoyed, now I join the 87% of people who hate their job.
That’s your managers fault then not ai itself if you can’t use it how you want to
What happens if you write the code and your LLM agents write the unit tests, maintain the CI scripts, keep the requirements and specifications and comments in sync with what the code actually does, reviews your code and points out potential problems?
LLMs are actually the best “employees” I’ve ever had, they don’t get their feelings hurt, they usually do what they’re told after a few reinforcement instructions. They’re forgetful, but willingly write and refer to comprehensive notes.
The thing to realize is: you have always been the brains. It’s just a tool. If you try to let it be the brains, you’ll just get the miserable end of the deal and it will be doing an inadequate job as “the brains,” making your end of the relationship even more miserable.
a great way to find joy in programming
I already had that, thanks Linus. Did you not?
Ai is bad is such an intellectually lazy take. Anyone who understands Data Science and Calculus well enough to understand how LLM’s work are going to be able to get better results than everyone else. Everyone else, well, they are grasping at straws and inventing fictions…Seriously go study data science and experience statistics before you make claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Torvalds is doing an illicit substitution of Claude, Gemini, Copilot et al. for the vague term AI, which also includes local models, open-weight models and things that aren’t LLM (machine translations, for example), thus ignoring the ethical issues associated with the operation of commercial AI/LLM services.
Most tokens sold come from China today and open weight models, and
most(EDIT) 42% of energy produced in China is from clean sources like nuclear or renewables. Don’t blame AI for ethics or lack thereof in neoliberal capitalism and a lack of planning or regulations. China also has the most and smartest regulations on AI so far.Does Linux Torvalds use those Chinese and open weight models? Iirc he was using Claude
The point is that fuckai aims to outright villanize people who use AI, although in a proper democratic society we would have massively invested in nuclear and renewables.
The principles would be “If a material good or service can be produced ethically but is only not produced ethically due to profit maximizing which the individual has no power over, then the individual is not ethically responsible for using or boycotting it”.
Or said simpler, the whole fuckai demagoguery is misdirecting anger that should go towards capitalism and especially neoliberal capitalism against people just trying to exist in the fucking system.
• Specific Sources (Recent 12-month baseline via Low Carbon Power): • Coal: ~54% of electricity consumption • Hydropower: ~14% • Solar: ~12% (split evenly between utility-scale and behind-the-meter) • Wind: ~11% • Natural Gas: ~3% • Nuclear: ~4% • Biofuels / Biomass: ~2%
That would be China today.
Thanks for correcting. But overall the trend rapidly goes upwards year by year for china.
The more general argument would be that you can’t blame an individual for systemic ills, which has been done to death for climate change and tried to turn it into personal responsibility. We do not live in true democracies but capitalist societies. And we can’t be expected to “opt out of the system”. If something could be implemented in a way that is ethical but isn’t because the ruling plutocrats make more profit that way, this is not the individuals fault. This demonization of people for using AI is unethical and a strategic blunder in a fight for liberation and ultimately only serves to shield specifically neoliberal capitalism from critique.
Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that’s destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I’m getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn’t working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.
It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.
NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.
That’s the neat part, you can.
If I had to pick one, it’d be Olmo 3 from Ai2: Non-profit. Ai2 is a research institute, not a company that needs to sell you a subscription or harvest your prompts. Fully open, not just “open weights” Ai2 publishes the training data, the training code, every checkpoint and the logs. Anyone can check exactly what went in, and in principle rebuild it from scratch. You don’t have to take their word for anything.
Runs locally. The 7B version runs on an ordinary gaming laptop or a recent MacBook. Your code never leaves your machine, there’s no data centre involved when you use it, and the energy cost is your laptop being on. Apache 2.0 licence. No usage restrictions and no strings attached.
Good enough for the tutor use case. Explaining errors, walking through why code misbehaves, and pointing out likely bugs are all well within what it can do.
To be fair about it: the training data is largely scraped from the web, like nearly every model. The difference is that Olmo is honest and auditable about it.
If strict consent matters most to you, StarCoder2 is cleaner (only permissively licensed code, with an opt-out)
Devstral is very good
I used a local model today to write a long form regex for me today. it would have taken me 30 minutes. instead it took 3 seconds and worked out of the box.
I think this is a perfect example of what LLMs should be used for.
Ok. But did you understand the regex? That’s what people are missing out on. The learning aspect.
absolutely. I know regex, better than most devs I know personally.
I also don’t use it all the time. I happened to have it up and just said, “hey fucker, give me the pcre regex to find all instances of these keywords in a string like this”
reviewed it, threw what I had into my code, ran my tests and everything was golden.
That’s how I felt when I found MDMA, and it allowed me to find joy in parties and being around people. If used responsibly, of course.
I’m getting exactly the same feeling with AI now. It is instant dopamine fun, but I can see it being addicting in exactly the same way. Of course I tell myself I’ll use it responsibly, for work, and keep my skills sharp by making sure to do some of my own projects, and be responsible in properly reviewing and checking my code.
Just as I told myself that I’ll keep a healthy pause of two months between mdma use, and have a rogorous vitamine and supplements plans based on the most recommended harm reduction research.
Sure, I did manage to do that for the first half a year or so, you can guess how it is now.
It’s pretty unsettling how exactly the same it feels, the way you slowly start giving up on things you’ve sworn to do, and how you slowly start to be unable to do/enjoy the thing (be it parties or coding) without it.
Suddenly Lemmy is going to explain to me why AI is the best thing ever.
Nah im still firmly anti AI regardless of what daddy says. Still based, but hypnotized by the tokens.
It’s a thing, good for some things, not so great for others.
It’s a new thing, people are just starting to figure out what it’s really good for. It’s also improving rather dramatically over the past year, hard to say if that’s the start of an exponential curve, or if we’re hitting an s-curve rolloff already…
If it continues to grow its energy / environmental impact at the current growth rate, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not “in a bad place” yet… if you’re outraged about the last 2 years of AI environmental impact, you should have already been apopleptic over the past 15 years of Bitcoin’s environmental impacts.
So what happens when AI can recode on demand… Rather than programming a game, a gaming AI just generates the game as you play it.
Rather than writing a program, it just codes and runs the code at the same time… so that what you need is there when you request it to be.
Code chunks being put together and pulled apart as required. What then?
so what happens when i start barfing up gold coins and never can’t afford food again, what then?
There’ll be no gold coins, or individual programs anymore. Programming will be extinct.
bad bot
Botjacketing is dehumanization
Fuck off dickhead.
i mean they’ve already shown that you can just straight up have an image model generate the game in real-time without even writing code
the future is the reverse matrix: all-but-sapient computers forced to dream our games
I miss when computers were fancy rocks we tricked into doing maths…There are things that we don’t know about yet that are too complicated to code by hand, and whey the models are good we will discover their limits then and start working on those
Rather than writing a program, it just codes and runs the code at the same time
Yeah, so there’s been a lot of improvement very quickly over the last year in LLM agent’s coding abilities.
If they continue to improve at an exponential improvement rate like they have been… maybe 5-10 years from now you might see such a “code and run” as you make the descriptions LLM performance, for simpler things.
I’m curious, with “unlimited access” to the inference engine hardware capabilities, just how much faster the LLM agents can run when they’re not in timeshare over the internet mode?
…Verily?
Linus Torvalds is correct.
Often enough to give his statements serious consideration.
And then yesterday he said something along the lines of “we need to make it harder to contribute to the Linux kernel.” Which I believe he means to say “oh god there’s so much being submitted all of a sudden and it’s all slop.”
The people who are keeping up with this controversy and end up with this conclusion are wildely illiterate, or, extremely biased and making up fictions.
"Well, well, well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. "
- Linus Probably
Hey, I’d only be killing people objectively bad for humanity. Trump and his allies, Putin, my ex-wife, Saudi Arabia’s crown Prince, Netanyahu, that guy who cut me off in traffic last month, Rupert Murdoch, the Ellison family…
y’know this actually made me think of a good plot for a short spinoff:
Hardcore christian person finds the death note, spends some time researching who the most evil people are, then follows a year of writing one name every day after which they go through a ritual and prayers and then repeat the next day, and at the end they finish by writing their own name because they know humans can’t be trusted with that power and consider themselves to have simply been the hand of god and now it’s time to face His judgement.
Basically just literally Silas (the white haired dude) in the Da Vinci Code.
stop trying to force a reality that fits your narrative
lol how many tokens did you burn today
Its been an hour, the chatbot hasn’t given them the perfect retort yet.
Perfect retort to name-calling? FM69’s comment is not exactly a rhetorical masterpiece.
I find this comment a kind of masterpiece, because there was both no actual name calling, and you refuse to type FartMaster’s actual name.
believe it or not i have the ability to still use my mind even when there are tools at my disposal! And I was at the local veggie market talking to people during that hour, so sadly again your narrative is wrong 😞 your response, however, pretty low effort… might need to throw a captcha at you
You won’t trick me into solving basic logic problems that you and your bot cannot!
let’s see, i woke up and did jiu jitsu. I went to the local vegetable market with my dog, bought some breakfast and got some coffee and practiced my Spanish with the vendor. I spoke with a nice lady about art residencies and her desire to live an alternative lifestyle even though shes 75. I had a conversation about iterative prisoner’s dilemma game theory. Then I came home and now I’m replying to your low dimensional attempt at an insult, while spending some tokens to fix a form validation bug across a web app 💙
Ew, a web sloper even.
how sad that’s what you decided to highlight…
How sad that you engage in sloppery.
this transports me back to high school level communication, thanks for the nostalgia 😄 🙏
Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
Some humans cannot own knives responsibility. It doesn’t mean I have to cut the pineapple with a spoon.
Correct - knives do more good than harm, even when some people use them irresponsibly. My point is that AI doesn’t; even when some people could arguably say that they use it responsibly and do good work, those that use it for slop, to perpetuate disinformation, and to further degrade our ability to think critically outweigh those people.
There’s an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today’s regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we’ve been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.
So, have today’s goalposts moved so much that “AI” no longer passes modern society’s definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions
sometimes held accountable for their actions
Very weak theater.
boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.
In today’s world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.
In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is “wasteful” - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it’s good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for “getting stuff done” not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?
If you’re concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.
Then just let AI use AI. I’ll collect my Nobel prize now thx.
You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai
Sorry, I don’t really feel like reading anything from Anthropic atm (I might later, it sounds interesting), but my actual, non-sarcastic position on the matter is fuck LLMs; they should not be doing any sort of policymaking.
Long story short: AI using AI can find ways to run itself on TV set top boxes and similar common IoT devices, as part of a bot-net. It can also find ways to self-propogate such bot-nets across many surprisingly low powered and widely distributed devices in our world.
“Knives cause lots of stabbings, so let’s ban knives”
“Guns cause a lot of shootings, so let’s ban guns”
~ any reasonable country on the planet
All those things, including knives, are heavily regulated, yes.
I’m sorry, who or what exactly regulates knives? Knife manufacture? Knife ownership? Even knife sales… If you’re referring to ballistic knives or switchblades, sure - those are like guns, but the 99.999% of knives in the world? The ones anybody with a piece of metal can hammer out and sharpen for themselves?
Sweden has a knife law, you can’t carry knives in public without a valid reason.
In plenty of countries carrying knives in public is not allowed. You can own one for use in your home or work but don’t brandish it out in the open.
The reason few people know this is because it’s rarely ever needed, and the people violating that law are generally the people you want arrested anyway (e.g. because they’re trying to stab someone).
I see nothing special about knives in that respect, though I have no doubt there are laws.
Making credible threats of killing or seriously injuring people, with whatever tools, would seem to be a good basis for arrest.
Nice try to equating a knife to fucking drugs. AI is even worse than drugs, is like the digital version of nuclear weaponry: it shouldn’t even exist.
Every country that has legalized or decriminalized drug use and promotes safe and responsible usage with support systems such as addictions counseling and drug purity testing has shown a decrease in drug use and addiction rates and overdose deaths. Whereas the ‘war on drugs’ has been going strong for like 100 years and usage in the US keeps rising, deaths keep growing, addiction rates are skyrocketing… And billions of dollars go to criminal enterprises. AI is so much worse than drugs and while open source models might seem like a friendly weed dealer on the corner they’re actually getting their product from the same monsters and gangsters that are selling crack to schoolchildren (those are the big AI companies).
I swear, some people still think Prohibition was a great idea.
I mean, it is how ice cream became so popular… https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ice-cream-prohibition-era-craze
However, the end of Prohibition was a much better idea than the start of it.
It was.
If the goal was to reduce the amount the average American drank alcohol year over year (and that was the goal) it was an overwhelming success; not only during prohibition but thereafter as well.
Banning stuff and then enforcing the ban works really well and we have tons of evidence of it working; not just in the US but literally world-wide.
You seem to have missed the 1001 negative side effects of Prohibition, that eclipsed the tiny ideological victory of reducing drinking.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences
Additionally, there is no consensus on whether Prohibition was even successful at that, owing to a lack of hard data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
This is quite aside from the fact that today we’ve figured out that criminalising drugs and users is the wrong approach and does a lot more harm than good. But we STILL have people like you.
