tell me you’re a coward without telling me
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tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
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@Athena the beatings will continue until consensus emerges
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@imyxh I’m on the edge of doing number 1. We aren’t short on programming languages; I like Rust as a language but many people have named Zig as an alternative. I’m going to look into it; I have some dependencies in Rust that would make it painful but I’m questioning if I have a choice.
From what folks more involved with Rust contributions have said, this is a case of bad leadership from David Wood and others imposing their pro-language model will on the bulk of the body of contributors, who are too afraid to speak up. That’s the makings of a culture that ships absolutely hideous vulnerabilities right there.
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cited as reason to allow LLM contributions experimentally:
Instead of using ethical concerns as a basis for policy, we should justify policy on the basis of how something is impacting our ability as a project to deliver a really great programming language.
if the orphan grinder lets us make a better programming language then FIRE THOSE BABIES UP
@Athena I'm so tired of this. In my head anytime I see "ignoring the ethical concerns", I'm just going to think "you know who else ignores ethical concerns? sociopaths"
Is that unfair to some people? I don't give a shit anymore. How unethical of me.
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tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
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@Athena@chaosfem.tw And yet that policy actually misses an important use case for LLMs: non-native speakers (or people with dyslexia) using them to "proofread" and fix mistakes (orthography, grammar, style) in their own text. Basically machine translation from English to English.
Having to post the original English text would defeat the purpose of not wanting "to look like a moron" who misspells every third word.
Obviously this use case is rather limited, and as a user, one must then verify one still "owns" the resulting text, and that it remained in one's own general style - just more correct. And of course pre-LLM tools exist for the same purpose, and it also applies vice versa - some tools may use an LLM internally and the user may not even know that. As an example, right now I don't know how the grammar checker of LibreOffice works, and as a user I should not need to care how it is internally implemented, provided it fulfills the necessary invariants (primarily to only fix concrete issues in the text, and to not rewrite the entire thing in someone or something else's style). -
tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
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@Athena topic locked because discussions got too heated.
You don't say. The degree of ignorance behind that "moderation" [cough] dictat is quite something and brings the whole project and the language itself into disrepute.
The only person who deserves a ban for this is the one who wrote that and those who stood by.
#LLMs can cause harm to humans and it mustn't be discussed in relation to #Rustlang #LLM policy. What tripe.
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boutta write my own fucking rfc
@Athena Hopefully you're proposing a serious anti-LLM RFC, but I kind of want to see "Instead of considering technical issues, we should focus on ethical issues with the decision" and expicitly include a list of pro-LLM claims that aren't allowed in discussion of the PR.
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@Athena@chaosfem.tw And yet that policy actually misses an important use case for LLMs: non-native speakers (or people with dyslexia) using them to "proofread" and fix mistakes (orthography, grammar, style) in their own text. Basically machine translation from English to English.
Having to post the original English text would defeat the purpose of not wanting "to look like a moron" who misspells every third word.
Obviously this use case is rather limited, and as a user, one must then verify one still "owns" the resulting text, and that it remained in one's own general style - just more correct. And of course pre-LLM tools exist for the same purpose, and it also applies vice versa - some tools may use an LLM internally and the user may not even know that. As an example, right now I don't know how the grammar checker of LibreOffice works, and as a user I should not need to care how it is internally implemented, provided it fulfills the necessary invariants (primarily to only fix concrete issues in the text, and to not rewrite the entire thing in someone or something else's style).@divVerent I’m very much not confident in that use case. The times I have used (as a native English speaker) language models to generate writing advice or revisions, that advice has been actively harmful to the writing and even asking for alternative wording tends to be worse than the original. Anecdotally, I have read a piece by a professor who had a colleague whose work suddenly turned to nonsensical shit and, upon investigation, found that their work was still great UNTIL they put it into a language model to “fix” their non-native English (which then emitted pretty garbage which lost substantial semantic points from the original which “must be better because it’s from an AI”)
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@Athena Hopefully you're proposing a serious anti-LLM RFC, but I kind of want to see "Instead of considering technical issues, we should focus on ethical issues with the decision" and expicitly include a list of pro-LLM claims that aren't allowed in discussion of the PR.
@nothings I was planning to both be serious and focus on ethical issues, yeah
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@divVerent I’m very much not confident in that use case. The times I have used (as a native English speaker) language models to generate writing advice or revisions, that advice has been actively harmful to the writing and even asking for alternative wording tends to be worse than the original. Anecdotally, I have read a piece by a professor who had a colleague whose work suddenly turned to nonsensical shit and, upon investigation, found that their work was still great UNTIL they put it into a language model to “fix” their non-native English (which then emitted pretty garbage which lost substantial semantic points from the original which “must be better because it’s from an AI”)
@Athena@chaosfem.tw "It depends". Definitely don't do "rewrite this text in convincing style: ...".
Such use has to stay limited to fixing concrete issues, and it's best done not by pasting text into a LLM with a "more or less" good prompt in front of it and then using the output unchecked, but more by using a specialized tool for orthography, grammar and style checking. If one must operate that way, the absolute minimum requirement IMHO is that they compare the input and output text to see what changes the LLM made, and make a manual decision for every change.
Let's be concrete: should use of Grammarly be allowed? What about Gmail's grammar checker? MS Office 2003's? MS Office 2021's? MS Office 365's? LibreOffice's? How's a person even supposed to draw the line there - they're all grammar checkers after all, and they even all basically look and feel the same.
Or should users be allowed to type on a mobile keyboard? Many are LLM powered nowadays. Is voice input allowed?
Practically this all applies to primarily English, and only to a small extent to code (luckily). -
tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
Information useful to people contributing to Rust. Contribute to rust-lang/rust-forge development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
@Athena this is actually a really solid LLM policy!
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cited as reason to allow LLM contributions experimentally:
Instead of using ethical concerns as a basis for policy, we should justify policy on the basis of how something is impacting our ability as a project to deliver a really great programming language.
if the orphan grinder lets us make a better programming language then FIRE THOSE BABIES UP
@Athena
These people need to be shunned from decent society. -
cited as reason to allow LLM contributions experimentally:
Instead of using ethical concerns as a basis for policy, we should justify policy on the basis of how something is impacting our ability as a project to deliver a really great programming language.
if the orphan grinder lets us make a better programming language then FIRE THOSE BABIES UP
@Athena As if I needed another reason to not use Rust, but now I sure have one more.

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tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
Information useful to people contributing to Rust. Contribute to rust-lang/rust-forge development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
@Athena Lets hash out policy without discussing its social, economic or environmental impact, or its impact on intellectual property or ethics. What even is the point of this except masturbatory praise of all the imagined successes of our new digital slavery? It got locked? Right up there with canceling one of those presidential meetings that are nothing more than the cabinet competing to heap the most praise on the superannuated orange calf. Nothing of value was lost…
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tell me you’re a coward without telling me
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
The environmental impact of LLMs
Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.Add an LLM policy for `rust-lang/rust` by jyn514 · Pull Request #1040 · rust-lang/rust-forge
Information useful to people contributing to Rust. Contribute to rust-lang/rust-forge development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
My nascent interest in Rust just completely evaporated.
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give it to me and I’ll do what someone should’ve done 10 minutes ago.
i wrote a thing https://parthen.online/notes/rust-llm-rfc/
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@Athena this is actually a really solid LLM policy!
@soundasleep I really dislike the “experimental” foot it’s trying to drive into the door, which kind of guts the whole thing. If you delete that it’s okayish.
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i wrote a thing https://parthen.online/notes/rust-llm-rfc/
@Athena love it. is it worth mentioning a third reason, that LLM code can have unintended side effects that are harder to detect because the person using the LLM is so reliant on it?
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@Athena love it. is it worth mentioning a third reason, that LLM code can have unintended side effects that are harder to detect because the person using the LLM is so reliant on it?
@mnemonica I agree with this reason strongly but omitted it from the points listed for brevity and simplicity. As much as it’s correct, I think listing off every problem with language models just gets way too long and gives too many footholds to debate about parts that ultimately don’t matter and I think this is something that ought to be simple.
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@mnemonica I agree with this reason strongly but omitted it from the points listed for brevity and simplicity. As much as it’s correct, I think listing off every problem with language models just gets way too long and gives too many footholds to debate about parts that ultimately don’t matter and I think this is something that ought to be simple.
@Athena makes sense.
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cited as reason to allow LLM contributions experimentally:
Instead of using ethical concerns as a basis for policy, we should justify policy on the basis of how something is impacting our ability as a project to deliver a really great programming language.
if the orphan grinder lets us make a better programming language then FIRE THOSE BABIES UP
@Athena This is how any great idea ends tainted by the will of power. Speaking frankly, I'm not surprised, I've already seen it happening.