This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
LLMs suck at writing code, but they are absolutely amazing at reading code and finding bugs. I am firmly against the usage of LLMs to write anything, but they have a place as a diagnostics tool when verified by a human.
Line completion is pretty damn handy, it's when you start asking for whole functions that things go downhill
not to be an AI bootlicker, but i don't get why people treat AI-generated code like it's the Plague 2. it's not; all code is constrained by the programming language, and so it either implements the feature correctly... or it doesn't. yes, human review is undeniably important, but other than that, AI-generated code and human code is still all logic at the end of the day
because it's a perfect storm. The way it's being managed by businesses is causing :
So, the tool is getting a bad rep. never mind that for over a decade, machine learning was something that was tinkered away and thought of as "one day this is going to be amazing", now it's being wielded by assholes trying to be TRILLIONAIRES and people are losing their jobs, access to technology, political and environmental collapse.
To top it off, before you could contextualise ML in statistics and say "it's a work in progress, some things are not quite right" but now you have ads saying "Replace your humans with our AI/Robots" as if it's 100% reliable, a drop in replacement and not going to provide any social ills.
Exactly. The concept of an LLM is perfectly fine, we've had its precursors like markov chains and neural nets for decades, the issue is how their being created and used these days, particularly the scale of it. LLMs are the shiny new toy the way blockchains were previously, so all the tech bros and utterly clueless CEOs are rushing out to embrace the hot new thing and demand it be shoved into every nook and crany because they think if they don't they might not make every last cent they possibly might.
I think the people most extreme about it haven't done much development.
Or they have, professionally, and associate it with very real AI psychosis at work.
Or they're in school and see LLMs ruining the student body, as we've seen some in other Lemmy posts.
It all comes down to ethical tool sourcing, and using those tools in moderation, responsibly. Like all sorts of other automation/technology that's popped up in programming...
But I guess I'm saying I can sympathize with absolute "no-LLM-code" positions, too. The way true vibe-coding has been peddled to the public really has done tremendous damage, and honestly the space deserves the negative attention its getting, and then some.
The fact of the matter is as an AI hater I do actually trust AI generated code if run through the right people. I just don't know when the people I trust will trust the AI more than themselves, and that's part of the worry. Are they going to be as diligent on checking their AIs bug fix #125 if the first 124 were perfect? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly am not trusting AI code in the hands of vibe coders who have no idea what they're doing and are only contributing to a project because it happens to allow AI contributions.
I also just don't like LLMs in general, the way they collected data, the way they were trained on data, the way they are affecting communities across the globe, and the harm the people at the top of these companies are doing, not to mention the job loss which is really not a main concern of mine. I don't like the idea of people using tools that are so harmful if it can be avoided.
I'd wager people like linux devs will learn exactly how unreliable they are, quickly, once they start using them. Its kind of impossible to miss.
There's a chance some devs succumb to AI psychosis, but that's why these large open source projects are institutionalized. No one person can ruin them, by design.
As for ethics, I think the open weights LLMs are far more ethical, albeit far from perfect. They're trained modestly, presented as tools, apache licensed, self host able, more efficient to run, and good enough; people just need to know they exist as an alternative.
Open weight LLMs are not trained any differently than all the others. They just publish the weights. It's still massive theft run through a data center.
There is no (good) coding LLM trained ethically because securing rights to the amount of code and text required has not been attempted and is likely not possible. The best you can do is a company who hid a "by using this service you give us rights to use your code/writing to train our LLM" into a six page EULA no one reads and that's just a different kind of unethical.
Some models like Nemotron use open datasets, and utilize hardware more efficiently than OpenAI and such.
Its (IMO) also quite different when the weights are Apache licensed. If absolutely zero profit is involved, that gets close to the "fair use" umbrella, IMO, like other noncommercial derivative works of restrictively licensed content (fanfics/fanart).
You are not wrong about the closed datasets though, for the vast majority of LLMs. Lord knows what the Chinese trainers or OpenAI use to train...
But anything truly "open weights" is still a different order of magnitude in the ethics scale, IMO. I view the primary issue to be profiting off the scraping and training; take that away, and its not nearly as egregious.
ethical tool sourcing
Almost everybody that brings up ethical LLMs is full of shit because they point to them existing as a defense then turn around and use claude.
I don't. I've never had an OpenAI or Claude subscription. Basically the only thing I've used Claude API for is science/testing when comparing it to an open weights model, and I haven't done that in some time.
I've never felt a need to, either.
Not that Im perfectly innocent or anything. Or that you're wrong. People DO exactly this, and it makes me scratch my head.
Oh. No. I'm sorry, unrelated to the ai debate, but I have to correct this. Software architecture is intensely not raw logic sequences like you learn in uni. Everything before compilation is cooperative abstract modeling that does not necessarily impose any change at all in the binary. You are essentially teaching laymen that all programming languages for the same plattform are a creative choice, that extensibility, robustness, scaling or maintenance are just completely imagined fields of research. I'm sorry but that statement is complete nonsense misinformation. The binary itself, while it's a stretch; sure, in a way it can be considered only logic. From a certain angle. But that viewpoint is actively unhelpful for understanding what code is. The product is always so much more than the machine code. Consider writing raw arm instructions vs the obfuscated js that our engines churns through that decides most of our executing logic. All that is architecture and affects output only through the lens of the machine code. You have to enter the "code“ any time anything breaks, or is updated, if even a single thing is not as expected, or if you wanted to iterate on the program, or collaborate, you have to move into abstract land and then the architecture matters. The term spaghetti code does not mean that the logic is messy. The compiler wil usually remove most such mistakes. Instead the whole architecture, the "blueprint" the "workbench" is the magic of code, even if it is often obscure for the user is much more important for their experience than the raw logic.
Antoine’s argument is still very naive and short sighted.
Only because some corporations are linked to fascism, does not make the technology inherently fascist.
If these links are an issue, we should also all stop using Microsoft and Google, because they offer Isreael computing power, and thus every service is now supporting genocide. So if you are that user, all fine, enjoy an off-grid life. But don’t pretend to be better, if you still rely on those companies in the first place.
I agree that the corpos being linked to fascism doesn't make the technology fascist, but plenty of people are switching from MS and Google for that among other reasons. Acting like any interaction with these companies is just as bad as going all in is completely incorrect. All small acts of resistance add up and are important, even if you can't totally avoid a company that is causing harm. Taking a bus is not as harmful as driving a car just because they both use fossil fuels.
there are robust anti Microsoft and anti Google movements getting more and more mainstream over time. there are plenty of great alternatives to MS and Google software and services. Linux and FOSS as a whole is benefiting immensely from anti Microsoft sentiment right now. We can and should boycott these two terrible companies
"Avoiding fascist-supporting companies is inconvenient" is a poor excuse, especially when it's so easy to degoogle compared to 10 years ago.
NetBSD banned submitting "Tainted Code" in their commit guidelines...
https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html
May be time to dump Linux, Linus.
I've been thinking about doing just this, but I haven't seen any evidence that BSD is actually usable in real life yet.
Linux is actually good today, it's a viable alternative to the big corpos for virtually anybody, and the community is big enough to be sustainable. Also Steam has made Linux gaming a real thing.
If I could build a little pc to try BSD out on I would, I'd love for the competition to be there... But even a raspberry pi is like $500 today. It's insane. Fucking AI.
Still looks like they allow it as long as it gets approval by the core team. Not saying I agree with that choice, but there's still a very real chance LLM-generated code makes it into NetBSD.
Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.
So Debian, what are you going to do now?
Edit: nm, they allow LLM written code now.
Oh, please... is it still a text generator, or is it already a religion?
In his commit message:
[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.
I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.
I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.
But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.
This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]
Didn't he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
Regardless of how he got there, this is a pretty obnoxious and useless commit message...
Seriously. You don't need to outline your whole journey to finding the bug, commentary on the tools you used, and how it all made you feel, just what the problem was and how it was fixed. Put the rest in a blog post.
Whatever's the outcome, the anthropomorphization in that message stinks 🤮
Silly humans, antropomorphizing everything. Say, what species are you?
Correct. A being of power should never anthromorphise. It is a thing of flesh. I laugh at that because I am human and I never anthromorphise even the slightest part of a marble slab. I must be superior to most humans I guess. The forest people, though, those are legit just uninformed I think. I hate those creaks they make. I mean generate. I mean the wind . I mean no i mean the sound that nobody years because nobody is there and only humans and tree people are alive and the other animals are biological machines that we must try to ignore even if they lick us on the face wagging their tiny tail at us. For they are unworthy. I mean its tail. If it generates tail wags it is only an impression of aliveness and we must stand firm beside our tree people brothers and sisters on this.
Dude, I'm not an AI zealot, but I anthropomorphize my socks.
Trying to avoid anthropomorphising something with which you interact via natural language is incredibly laborious, and achieves nothing.
