No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture."
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@dalias @xgranade denying the usefulness of LLMs seems a bit wrongheaded at this point. I've been an engineer a decade now, at this point I don't really encounter things I can't build myself anymore, but LLMs let me build them far more quickly. 1000x more quickly? Absolutely not. But measurably quickly. I use this added time to increase my personal leisure as well as finally get some civic hacking done I've had on the to-do for years.
@komali_2 @dalias I'm curious what you're trying to achieve here. Do you think I don't have the experience needed to claim that LLMs are useless? Do you expect that your one anecdote from someone I've never met or heard of before and have no reason to trust — an anecdote that flies in the face of all available theory and empirical evidence, no less — will sway me into thinking that ah, yes!, the fascist lying machines built by union busters are good, actually?
Why would you expect that?
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@komali_2 @dalias I'm curious what you're trying to achieve here. Do you think I don't have the experience needed to claim that LLMs are useless? Do you expect that your one anecdote from someone I've never met or heard of before and have no reason to trust — an anecdote that flies in the face of all available theory and empirical evidence, no less — will sway me into thinking that ah, yes!, the fascist lying machines built by union busters are good, actually?
Why would you expect that?
@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
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@xgranade here's my question: the IDF uses Microsoft cloud solutions in service of their genocide, fascists are on Teams, and apparently Bill Gates was getting antibiotics from Epstein. Using Windows is using the tools of fascist pedophiles.
Unjustifiable. Anyone that uses Windows is Wrong. Right?
Is that a purity test? Am I as justified in criticizing anyone on earth that uses Windows as everyone here is for going goblin mode on LLMs and anyone using them?
@komali_2 Funny how that concern arises precisely when it's needed to justify using LLMs, then convieiently disappears once it's no longer needed.
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
@komali_2 You came in with a wild and unsubstantiated claim, now you're playing all hurt when I called you on it.
Go troll someone else with your AI boosterism.
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
@xgranade I'm not trying to argue they're a categorical good, I just don't see how it's a bad thing to leverage them to quickly spin up a site turning publicly available data on pedestrian involved traffic incidents into some boomer-friendly charts that I can show to a local minister when I meet with her. I can build that myself, but with LLMs I can build it and five other things in the same time. So like, how's that bad?
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
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@komali_2 @xgranade
Of course any such potential usage is a minefield of issues, but this has me thinking.Because if (keyword being *if*) there were such a usage, that might give some credence to Cory's call the seize the tech, so that we might employ it without dependence on the hostile entities which control it.
Is it wrong to say we really ought to have our own versions of these tools, just in case? Maybe they really will turn out to be useless. But we surely cannot have exhausted all possibilities already, especially with our limited access to these tools.
If a usecase like that is found, we better be able to control it. An anti-stylometry tool we don't fully control would be an absolute disaster... I've heard of attacks embedded in the weights.
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@xgranade It could only be "purity culture" if we were denying ourselves something useful to put ourselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons. That's not what's happening.
@dalias Doctorow seems to feel that this is what he would be doing; he finds the LLM useful. And some programmers I follow and respect feel that way about their LLM-based coding agents (using the big rented models, not a local one like Doctorow), that they'd be denying themselves something useful and putting themselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons.
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@dalias Doctorow seems to feel that this is what he would be doing; he finds the LLM useful. And some programmers I follow and respect feel that way about their LLM-based coding agents (using the big rented models, not a local one like Doctorow), that they'd be denying themselves something useful and putting themselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons.
@dalias To be clear, I'm not convinced by the proponents of LLM-based coding agents. I find the idea of having a statistical text generator pump out volumes of code from ambiguous natural language distasteful. And I sure wouldn't want that approach to be used for something like musl, where you clearly work on it deliberately, carefully, with no line of code wasted.
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@xgranade My dude is torching his own credibility to use an LLM to check for typos.
TYPOS.
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@cthos I think that's less an indictment of Doctorow and more one of the never-LLM crowd, who have clearly become dogmatic Puritans
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@xgranade@wandering.shop opposing LLMs is an integrity culture, not purity.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade
What if instead of "opposing use of LLM" we say as we mean "opposing use of tech you don't control", or something like this.
Can you, guys find better way to focus attention on the bad power dynamic at hand? -
@xgranade
What if instead of "opposing use of LLM" we say as we mean "opposing use of tech you don't control", or something like this.
Can you, guys find better way to focus attention on the bad power dynamic at hand?"But I don't control it!" is not a very compelling issue.
And it's not the most important issue for those who oppose Generative AI.
There are a number of compelling issues with Generative AI. And many of them, on their own, may rationally be enough to swear off of it, or even to ban it.
Insisting that everyone limit the argument to one relatively weak point is a fallacious argument, a logical fallicy.
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@SRAZKVT @xgranade I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean, or by "my work" or "valuable," and that's not me trolling, I often have trouble understanding things that are obvious to others.
But what you say makes me think of means of production, which are all quite fully seized by capitalists. My thinking is it's quite funny to blow up their investments by e.g. disseminating distilled models (deepseek) or FOSS versions of software they try to sell
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@pip @subterfugue @xgranade yknow .. i dont think OP saying that their using LLMs to harm people and scaming the public, is a pro-AI stance, but thats just a guess
@Li @subterfugue @xgranade OP is literally insisting that it doesn't matter if you use AI, as long as you're not using it to generate code. Yep, I would call that pro-AI.
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"But I don't control it!" is not a very compelling issue.
And it's not the most important issue for those who oppose Generative AI.
There are a number of compelling issues with Generative AI. And many of them, on their own, may rationally be enough to swear off of it, or even to ban it.
Insisting that everyone limit the argument to one relatively weak point is a fallacious argument, a logical fallicy.
@JeffGrigg @xgranade
Well, we collectively took our eyes from the ball. Your not controlling tech in a technological world is the root of a problem.
Without already existing reliance on "tech you don't control" (+ some policy = big tech), there would be no giants forcing on us whatever-current-nonsense.
Let us focus on power play. Without underlying control, those players won't be in a position to tell whole world what to do. -
"But I don't control it!" is not a very compelling issue.
And it's not the most important issue for those who oppose Generative AI.
There are a number of compelling issues with Generative AI. And many of them, on their own, may rationally be enough to swear off of it, or even to ban it.
Insisting that everyone limit the argument to one relatively weak point is a fallacious argument, a logical fallicy.
@JeffGrigg @xgranade
If you control where datacenter is built, you wouldn't do harm, that people are against.
If you control, ....
Without control, we'll be playing an infinit whake-a-mole game.
