CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@mcc the rate at which we keep running into “oopsies what we said before wasn’t *technically* accurate, you see…” feels sus

@mcc love 2 have undisclosed dependencies in my federated independent network graph

@pojntfx it doesnt help that it’s overhyped. opus 4.6 is genuinely useful in a way these tools weren’t a year ago.

but listening to the hype you’d think 4.6 came out a year ago.

it also doesn’t help that most people are not being exposed to frontier models

@mcc the only way to prevent it is to build a different one!

@yoasif this article is complaining about a vibe-coded rust port; i don’t think you can vibe code a port of a project as complex as sqlite just yet.

my claim is more like that porting sqlite to rust has gone from a 2 year project to a 3-month project.

@yoasif yeah i agree - i just think the solution is to do what Aaron was trying to do, not to go back to the status quo

@yoasif LLMs are actually quite good at disassembling existing software and translating it into new languages.

as of today this still requires a lot of human effort but i feel confident that before LLM innovation peters out we’ll be able to clone most things that expose an API

@yoasif when Aaron Schwartz crawled all of JSTOR i thought that was cool. my ideal solution here is making all of JSTOR public.

i agree that the current equilibrium where only OpenAI and Anthropic get to copy all of JSTOR is deeply unfair.

@yoasif copyleft is a hack that uses copyright as a way of enforcing contributions back to the commons. i generally license my code (A,L)GPL and i think ppl who complain about the GPL are fools

but! the important part is the existence of a commons, not the exact enforcement mechanism - i use a lot of MIT and Apache licensed code too. i prefer it when ppl are forced to share but sharing still happens without it

i wont go into too much detail cos im still working on a demo but my early vibe is the commons might stand to benefit; i think we’ll be able to use LLMs to clone proprietary software and place it in the commons

@yoasif i’m happy to engage on the harms.

broadly speaking i think harms currently outweighs benefits; as of today if i could wish the technology away i think i would. as it is we need to regulate it more.

that said, does how other people use the tool impact the morality of how i use it? i don’t know. i’m not sending people spam.

i don’t really believe in intellectual property so we can skip “theft”.

this mostly leaves us with environmental concerns and social upheaval.

as a programmer it feels hypocritical to wax and wane about automation being inherently bad; automating tasks has been my whole career.

environment is kind of the strongest angle, but that’s downstream of not having clean energy. if you could built it all on wind and solar power then it’d be OK

@yoasif the past three-ish years it was extremely impressive but also kind of useless.

the harms obviously outweighed the benefit.

now however it caught up to (some) of the hype: i’m feeling excited about the kinds of projects i’ll be able to deliver with good quality.

(also people really ought to disclose when they use it. nothing makes my blood boil like being asked to review slop they haven’t read, or realizing a blog author’s become prolific because they’re cutting a lot of corners. just disclose!)

@henry it’s still overhyped constantly. it’s a big struggle. hard to communicate that it’s still sloppy but useful

because this is the fediverse, an ethics disclosure:

- AI has been very harmful to the open web’s infrastructure
- it’s plain to see that AI has hurt a lot of people’s cognitive and emotional skills
- the dumbest and most evil people alive misuse it constantly
- i don’t really believe in copyright tbh my ideal compromise is we make every academic paper free for everyone not just big tech companies
- so far AI’s externalities outweigh the positives
- the environmental costs are real but overstated; imho can be reduced to “capitalism is bad for the environment and rich people need to be stopped”

can you one shot vibe code production saas apps? no.

claude writes worse code than i do, isn’t very good at debugging, and it produces mid architecture. at least for now.

but in the hands of a skilled practitioner working patiently i feel like we’ve reached a stage where you can deliver much more ambitious projects than were possible before

i would say the hype is about 12-18mo ahead of the tech; opus 4.6 is about as good as people said this stuff was a year ago

ie what ppl said was an urgent reality one year ago has actually finally arrived

i thing i’m struggling with is AI has crossed a threshold where it’s actually useful for work, gasp, but the discourse has been so poisoned by over-hype and fascism it’s hard to talk about

@cargot_robbie it’s been very eye opening to spend time on bsky and see every single complaint people lodged against fedi replicated then magnified cos bsky juices engagement

@olivia my observation here is, charitably, the gay guys aren’t *trying* to push out women; their goal is to be near the other men

they are i think definitely *careless* — they don’t care that they’re pushing me away and that i find them repellant.

and it’s just made me think of other ways in which these dynamics are replicated, among men writ large, in systematic ways. have a nice day!

@olivia (bear with me here) at queer dance parties i’ve been to, gay guys like to dance near other gay guys, and once a critical mass forms they exert a gravitational pull that draws in more gay guys like a horny black hole

but in trying to be near men in the process they push out the women, who don’t tend to like to rub up against each other in quite the same way

so women often end up relegated to the back of the dancefloor, to say nothing how there’s fewer of us at events in general