8 ms·

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless co

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI. The first non-title sentence is the most notable to consider, with the rest providing reasoning difficult to refute.

perching_aix 1y ago
[flagged]
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - sgarland 1y ago
      But definitions can and are proven false. I hate it, mind you, but I can’t ignore it. For example, the usage of “literally” as an intensifier, e.g. “I literally died of laughter.”
      - Eisenstein 1y ago
        But that is their whole point -- as much as you want to make the definition something else, you can't. And this is a perfect example of that.
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        Logical statements can be proven true/false. Definitions are not logical statements, they do not have truth values, therefore cannot be proven neither true, nor false. These are mathematical logic basics.
        drdeca 1y ago
        Yes. However, in some cases (though probably not the ones relevant here) a definition can be proven to be incoherent (or, to presuppose something false), which is vaguely similar to “being false”.
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        It would be difficult for a definition to make any presuppositions. You could have a definition that defines some set in which a contradiction is involved ("an integer is special if it is both prime and divisible by 4"), but then you'd say that the set so defined is empty, not that the definition is incoherent.
        drdeca 1y ago
        It is quite common for a lemma to be needed to ensure that a definition is well-defined. The term “defi-lemma” exists for a reason. As a simple example, suppose X is a set and r is a relation on X. If I define Y := X/r , the set of equivalence relations with respect to r, this implicitly assumes that the relation r is an equivalence relation.
    - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this.
        AdieuToLogic 1y ago
        > Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this. You wrote: You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs. They're literally just "thoughts and feelings". They may masquerade as arguments from time to time, much to my dismay, but rest assured: there's nothing to "refute", debate, or even dispute on them. Not in general, nor in this specific case either. I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse. I am not a Gentoo maintainer so cannot definitively state possibility #3 is what happened. Maybe one or both of the other two possibilities is what transpired. I doubt it, but if you have evidence refuting possibility #3, please share so we may all learn.
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        > I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse. That position would look better if they hadn't relied so heavily on feelings to justify the announcement: >> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. >> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees [which ones?] and reduction of service quality. >> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. There is no experience or rational discourse involved there.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs. Maybe. There's a known condition in pigs that prevents them from forming one.
  - johnfn 1y ago
    But it's also difficult to prove it correct by argument or evidence. "Refute" is typically used in a context that suggests that the thing we're refuting has a strong likelihood of being true. This is only difficult to prove incorrect because it's a summary of the author's opinion.
paulcole 1y ago
How is it telling at all? It’s just what every other tech bro on here wants to believe, that using LLM code is somehow less pure than using free-range-organic human written code.
- Kwpolska 1y ago
  Tech bros want the exact opposite, so that they can sell their AI crap and replace human developers with AI bots.
  - paulcole 1y ago
    That has not been what I have seen in the comments here on HN lol
jjmarr 1y ago
I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review to show I care about quality. LLMs increase review burden a ton but I would say it can be a fair tradeoff, because I'm learning quicker and can contribute at a level I otherwise couldn't. I feel like I will become a net-positive to the project much earlier than I otherwise would have. edit: the PR in question. Unfortunately I've been on vacation and haven't touched it recently. https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970 https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970 It's a community's decision whether to accept this tradeoff & I won't submit AI generated code if your project refuses it. I also believe that we can mitigate this tradeoff with strong social norms that a developer is responsible for understanding and explaining their AI-generated code.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- totallymike 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jjmarr 1y ago
    I didn't make a decision on the tradeoff, the LLVM community did. I also disclosed it in the PR. I also try to mitigate the code review burden by doing as much review as possible on my end & flagging what I don't understand. If your project has a policy against AI usage I won't submit AI-generated code because I respect your decision.
    - h4ny 1y ago
      > I didn't make a decision on the tradeoff, the LLVM community did. I also disclosed it in the PR. That's not what the GP mean. Just because a community doesn't disallow something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. > I also try to mitigate the code review burden by doing as much review as possible on my end That's great but... > & flagging what I don't understand. It's absurd to me that people should commit code they don't understand. That is the problem. Just because you are allowed to commit AI-generated/assisted code does not mean that you should commit code that you don't understand. The overhead to others of committing code that you don't understand then ask someone to review is a lot higher than asking someone for directions first so you can understand the problem and code you write. > If your project has a policy against AI usage I won't submit AI-generated code because I respect your decision. That's just not the point.
29athrowaway 1y ago
LLMs trained on open source make the common mistakes that humans make.
- wobfan 1y ago
  > make. No, made. Which is a very important difference.
JohnBooty 1y ago
There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation... Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough I'm struggling to understand this particular angle. Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of generating extremely poor code. How is this is an LLM-specific problem? I believe part of (or perhaps the entire) the argument here is that LLMs certainly enable more unqualified contributors to generate larger quantities of low-quality code than they would have been able to otherwise. Which... is true. But still I'm not sure that LLMs are the problem here? Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place, LLM-aided or otherwise. It seems to me that LLMs are, at worst, exposing an existing flaw in the governance process of certain projects?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  It means, if you can’t write it, they don’t trust you to be able to evaluate it either. As for humans who can’t write code, their code doesn’t tend to look like they can.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  > Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place, Without LLMs, people are less likely to submit such PRs. With LLMs they're more likely to do so. This is based on recent increases in such PRs pretty much all projects have seen. Current LLMs are extremely sycophantic & encourage people to think they're brilliant revolutionary thinkers coming up with the best <ideas, code, etc> ever. Combined with the marketing of LLMs as experts it's pretty easy to see why some people fall for the hype & believe they're doing valuable work when they're really just dumping slop on the reviewers.

perching_aix 1y ago

[flagged]

AdieuToLogic 1y ago
[flagged]
- perching_aix 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sgarland 1y ago
    But definitions can and are proven false. I hate it, mind you, but I can’t ignore it. For example, the usage of “literally” as an intensifier, e.g. “I literally died of laughter.”
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      But that is their whole point -- as much as you want to make the definition something else, you can't. And this is a perfect example of that.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Logical statements can be proven true/false. Definitions are not logical statements, they do not have truth values, therefore cannot be proven neither true, nor false. These are mathematical logic basics.
      - drdeca 1y ago
        Yes. However, in some cases (though probably not the ones relevant here) a definition can be proven to be incoherent (or, to presuppose something false), which is vaguely similar to “being false”.
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        It would be difficult for a definition to make any presuppositions. You could have a definition that defines some set in which a contradiction is involved ("an integer is special if it is both prime and divisible by 4"), but then you'd say that the set so defined is empty, not that the definition is incoherent.
        drdeca 1y ago
        It is quite common for a lemma to be needed to ensure that a definition is well-defined. The term “defi-lemma” exists for a reason. As a simple example, suppose X is a set and r is a relation on X. If I define Y := X/r , the set of equivalence relations with respect to r, this implicitly assumes that the relation r is an equivalence relation.
  - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this.
      - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
        > Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this. You wrote: You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs. They're literally just "thoughts and feelings". They may masquerade as arguments from time to time, much to my dismay, but rest assured: there's nothing to "refute", debate, or even dispute on them. Not in general, nor in this specific case either. I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse. I am not a Gentoo maintainer so cannot definitively state possibility #3 is what happened. Maybe one or both of the other two possibilities is what transpired. I doubt it, but if you have evidence refuting possibility #3, please share so we may all learn.
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        > I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse. That position would look better if they hadn't relied so heavily on feelings to justify the announcement: >> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. >> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees [which ones?] and reduction of service quality. >> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. There is no experience or rational discourse involved there.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs. Maybe. There's a known condition in pigs that prevents them from forming one.
- johnfn 1y ago
  But it's also difficult to prove it correct by argument or evidence. "Refute" is typically used in a context that suggests that the thing we're refuting has a strong likelihood of being true. This is only difficult to prove incorrect because it's a summary of the author's opinion.

paulcole 1y ago

How is it telling at all? It’s just what every other tech bro on here wants to believe, that using LLM code is somehow less pure than using free-range-organic human written code.

Kwpolska 1y ago
Tech bros want the exact opposite, so that they can sell their AI crap and replace human developers with AI bots.
- paulcole 1y ago
  That has not been what I have seen in the comments here on HN lol

jjmarr 1y ago

I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review to show I care about quality. LLMs increase review burden a ton but I would say it can be a fair tradeoff, because I'm learning quicker and can contribute at a level I otherwise couldn't. I feel like I will become a net-positive to the project much earlier than I otherwise would have. edit: the PR in question. Unfortunately I've been on vacation and haven't touched it recently. https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970 https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970 It's a community's decision whether to accept this tradeoff & I won't submit AI generated code if your project refuses it. I also believe that we can mitigate this tradeoff with strong social norms that a developer is responsible for understanding and explaining their AI-generated code.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
totallymike 1y ago
[flagged]
- jjmarr 1y ago
  I didn't make a decision on the tradeoff, the LLVM community did. I also disclosed it in the PR. I also try to mitigate the code review burden by doing as much review as possible on my end & flagging what I don't understand. If your project has a policy against AI usage I won't submit AI-generated code because I respect your decision.
  - h4ny 1y ago
    > I didn't make a decision on the tradeoff, the LLVM community did. I also disclosed it in the PR. That's not what the GP mean. Just because a community doesn't disallow something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. > I also try to mitigate the code review burden by doing as much review as possible on my end That's great but... > & flagging what I don't understand. It's absurd to me that people should commit code they don't understand. That is the problem. Just because you are allowed to commit AI-generated/assisted code does not mean that you should commit code that you don't understand. The overhead to others of committing code that you don't understand then ask someone to review is a lot higher than asking someone for directions first so you can understand the problem and code you write. > If your project has a policy against AI usage I won't submit AI-generated code because I respect your decision. That's just not the point.

29athrowaway 1y ago

LLMs trained on open source make the common mistakes that humans make.

wobfan 1y ago
> make. No, made. Which is a very important difference.

JohnBooty 1y ago

There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation... Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough I'm struggling to understand this particular angle. Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of generating extremely poor code. How is this is an LLM-specific problem? I believe part of (or perhaps the entire) the argument here is that LLMs certainly enable more unqualified contributors to generate larger quantities of low-quality code than they would have been able to otherwise. Which... is true. But still I'm not sure that LLMs are the problem here? Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place, LLM-aided or otherwise. It seems to me that LLMs are, at worst, exposing an existing flaw in the governance process of certain projects?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto 1y ago
It means, if you can’t write it, they don’t trust you to be able to evaluate it either. As for humans who can’t write code, their code doesn’t tend to look like they can.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
> Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place, Without LLMs, people are less likely to submit such PRs. With LLMs they're more likely to do so. This is based on recent increases in such PRs pretty much all projects have seen. Current LLMs are extremely sycophantic & encourage people to think they're brilliant revolutionary thinkers coming up with the best <ideas, code, etc> ever. Combined with the marketing of LLMs as experts it's pretty easy to see why some people fall for the hype & believe they're doing valuable work when they're really just dumping slop on the reviewers.