gspr

Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships.

Most of these turn intellectual work into that of indie musicians, or outright beggars. You are stepping dangerously close to stripping people rights in favour of giant AI companies.

How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world.

"Content creators" heavily rely on IP protections. You could always try taking some youtube videos with 100M views, altering them a bit an using them as your own and seeing how that goes down. Do let me know!

Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets.

And open market is not one where I can say that you are just sitting on your ass, so I'll take your stuff and sell it.

Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why?

Because it's my stuff of course! And why should one even pay market value in your world? Why not always 0?

Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor?

What in the world are you on about? If the price someone puts on their IP seems too high to you, you should not pay that price. We wholeheartedly agree. Where we disagree is where you from this conclude that you can just choose the price yourself and take it anyway!

I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.

Are you really saying that because IP protections are (and should be, I agree) time-limited, they're not doing anything in the first place? This is patently ridiculous.

Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the Public Domain work in yours?

Can you elaborate on what you're asking? I don't understand your question.

Yes. But you can't redistribute it. Which is what the AI companies are doing.

Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent?

How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain?

They are, presumably, human. We can perfectly well say that humans have certain rights without needing to give machines those same rights.

For example, we've more or less all agreed that it's fine for a human to watch a movie and enjoy the memories forever, and be inspired by it forever. But we've also more or less all agreed that that doesn't mean that a human can use a machine to record that movie and keep it forever.

Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

The debate has existed for several generations at this point. You may disagree with the mainstream opinion, but it's disingenuous to frame it as "copyright maximalism".

I thought these "engineers" were bragging that they aren't writing code anymore.

We're not mad at you. But we'd really like to learn: what went through your head when you read that comment? Was there not even an inkling that this might be satire? Can you tell glaringly obvious satire apart in oral conversation?

I have so many questions!

Fine, replace "low" with "too low".

GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up.

What does "scarce" mean to you?

I'd wager that to most reasonable people it means "available in a supply that, measured against demand, is low". Market forces typically react to such a state by pushing prices up. Saying "they're not scarce, they're just expensive" is just silly.

The exception to this would be during e.g. supply chain hiccups (lots of compute sitting there, unable to get to its operational destination) or when other forces artificially push up prices. But that's not what we're seeing here. Compute is much scarcer than it's been for years.

I've had the opposite experience. Inspired by a recent HN post where someone made the world's dumbest browser by having an LLM read HTML and draw the rendered page, I thought I'd do a fun art project and take it a notch dumber: have the LLM "be" the computer and execute code as a VM. I chose a simple instruction set that I thought would be very present in the training material (RV32IM), and defined a very simple machine model with flat memory and two trapped calls (to terminate and to request to print).

I couldn't once get any of the SoTA models from a month or two ago to correctly execute more than the first 5% of the instructions for a fizzbuzz (compiled from C with GCC). As I recall, one of the Qwens did the best and would only mess up "a little bit", but that's of course enough to derail everything (can someone remind me again why we think natural language is good for interacting with precise machines?). I didn't think it'd go very well, but failing at decoding something as well-documented as RISCV is not very impressive!

Most models would also start gaslighting me when I pointed out their mistakes. To their credit, they'd very often cheat by deducing that the code was for fizzbuzz, and try to fake the execution. Always badly though. (This despite explicit instructions to execute the code faithfully instruction by instruction and not be informed by their overview of the code).

I honestly don't understand how people can work like that. I had fun because the whole thing was a joke, an art project. Doing serious work in that way must be so ridiculous.

But then again, I don't use LLMs very much and might be holding them wrong.

Thank you. I dread where we're heading.

It's a wonderful place. It feels like HN, but with the Silicon Valley attitude dialed way way way down, and with a much narrower scope (politics, economics and entrepreneurship are all off-topic, for example).

Sure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites.

This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.

For one, it's bound to teach us something about our brains. And while I'm not usually an optimist, I actually find it more likely that we'll take active steps to stop the evil applications of this if research like this is out in the open.

I watched few of them and it does nothing for me?

It's so cool that you have an MRI handy to check such things.

Again, your doctor is more of an authority than you on medicine. It'd be hubris to think you'd understand the field better, no matter how smart you are.

You are talking to strangers on the internet. When I go see my doctor, I initiate a conversation with a certified professional subjected to serious state scrutiny. I'd indeed do well to take their medical advice to heart. Nothing similar applies to reading your comments.

Moreover, part of the reason that I do trust the doctor is that I know that their claims can be challenged and that the claims will withstand that challenge (this is in part ensured by certification and regulatory bodies, and in part by the medical community). You seem not to want to respond to such a challenge.

Here's another doctor-based analogy: Suppose my doctor suggests I suffer from a specific medical condition. Even though I know that they are the professional, it wouldn't be insane for me to voice a concern I have that the condition does not seem to fit what I'm experiencing. That's not even really a challenge to their authority – it might just be a way for me to try to understand. Now, if the doctor responds to that concern by angrily tapping his diploma saying "you know nothing, I'm the professional, bow before me you moron!", I think I'd be wise to change doctors.

It is true that it is pretty common in large companies. It is also true that it feels very hostile to some people (myself included).

(Make claim that something is "critical".)

(Get challenged on that.)

omg you don't know anything, being without the thing is primitive and everyone sophisticated uses it.

You can see how you can be accused of not actually presenting any arguments here, right? If you're gonna appeal to authority, at least back that appeal up with something.

Of course. What's your point?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767422

When you say "If you are forced to slopcode" you are implying that LLMs (or humans who operate the tools) can only produce slop with it.

No.

Huh? You can accept things that are forced onto you, due to needing to earn a living, while still acknowledging that the things that are forced onto you are bad.

All I'm trying to say here is that slopcode is generally a bad idea. If you are forced to slopcode to earn a living, I am not saying you shouldn't do that ("be a purist", as you'd put it). I'm just trying to point out that HN doesn't seem to generally acknowledge that concept as being bad.

I'm a bit more pessimistic.

In ten years we'll be drowning in subtle bugs introduced by the unreliable garbage that is machine-generated code

Yes. But replace

and the industry will hopefully have learned to never rely on anything that wasn't at least seriously looked over by an actual thinking human being that understands it.

with: "and the industry will throw even more LLMs at the problem, producing an even deeper soup of garbage that in some cases perform a tiny bit better, and when things do break it's always the fault of someone else. So for example a bank denies you a mortgage or an insurance company fails to process your claim, and you are almost certain that it's due to some slopcode somewhere, but you have to suck it up because the world has become accustomed that this is just how things are done."

It's a way of breaking computers that I'd never thought I'd see. We're wilfully taking the one cool thing about computers – them exactly interpreting instructions carefully crafted by humans to do exactly the right thing – with bucketloads of vibes that hopefully mostly do the right thing most of the time ("the tests pass"). What the hell are we doing.

This conversation does not exist primarily for your benefit though.

Indeed. I wouldn't call everyone who uses LLMs to generate code a slopper. But I'm afraid that there are so many sloppers that they pose a real danger to the ecosystem, especially considering the amount of code they generate. A volunteer project has limited resources, and I can totally understand why it doesn't wanna use those to separate the wheat from enormous amounts of chaff. If that's the case, an outright ban might be a smart move.

Note that a ban on LLM-generated code is not a prohibition on other forms of LLM-based assistance. Those other forms don't incur a direct burden on the maintainers.

Sure. I did not mean to throw shade at people whose professional survival depends on doing this.

I'm merely trying to establish that it's bad. A lot of HN seems to be cheering for the badness. That is, to me, unfathomable.

Then you don't have time to maintain the codebase. Sad, but sometimes true.

Alternate take: in ten years we'll be pulling our hair out cursing at the world over how we could possibly accept "10k lines added, 8k lines removed" as the normal everyday churn of software development. We'll curse the morons who gave up understanding our own code.

If you can't fix them without LLMs, then you can't fix them. You probably shouldn't be trusted with maintaining the codebase in the first place.