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I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make t

by mccoyb 11mo ago

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse. That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the true value (or lack of value) of these tools can be established — the only place where one can test mettle against metal in a completely unconstrained way. Did you ever want to build a compiler (or an equally complex artifact) but got stuck on various details? Try now. It’s going to stand up something half-baked, and as you refine it, you will learn those details — but you’ll also learn that you can productively use AI to reach past the limits of your knowledge, to make what’s beyond a little more palatable. All the things people say about AI is true to some degree: my take is that some people are rolling the slots to win a CRUD app, and others are trying to use it to do things that they could only imagine before —- and open source tends to be the home of the latter group.

nowittyusername 11mo ago
True innovation will come from open source for sure. As the developers don't have the same economic incentives to be "safe", "ethical" "profitable" or whatever. large corporations know this and fear this development. That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. And I think they will be very convincing to the government. Because the government also fears the "peasants" and giving them any true semblance of real AGI like systems. I bet very soon we will start seeing various classifications that will define what is legal and what is not for a citizen to possess or use.
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  > That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. I think they're going to be using porn and terrorism (as usual) to do that, but also child suicide. I also think they're going to leverage this rhetoric to lock down OSes in general, by making them uninstallable on legally-available hardware unless approved, because approved OSes will only be able to run approved LLMs. Meaning that I think LLMs/generative AI will be the lever to eliminate general-purpose computing. As mobile went, so will desktop. I think this is inevitable. The real question for me is whether China will partner with the west on this, or whether we will be trading Chinese CPUs with each other like contraband in order to run what we want. > any true semblance of real AGI like systems. This is the only part I don't agree with. This isn't going to happen, but I'm not even sure it would be more useful than what we have. We have billions of full AGI machines walking around, and most of them aren't great. I'm talking about restrictions on something technically barely better than what we have now; maybe only a significant bit more compute-efficient. Training techniques will probably be where we get the most improvements.
exasperaited 11mo ago
> It’s posed to get significantly stronger It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny. Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they have to sit down and have a policy discussion about whether to accept AI submissions, which involves people reheating a lot of anecdotal claims about productivity. Having learned a bit about how to write compilers I know enough to know that I can guarantee you that an AI cannot help you solve the difficult problems that compiler-building tools and existing libraries cannot solve. It's the same as it is with any topic: the tools exist and they could be improved, but instead we have people shoehorning AI bollocks into everything.
- micromacrofoot 11mo ago
  yeah we are getting lots of "I don't know how to do this and AI gave me this code that doesn't work, can you fix it" or "AI said it can do this" and the feature doesn't exist... some people will even argue and say "but AI said it doesn't take long, why won't you add it"
  - exasperaited 11mo ago
    It weaponises incompetence, carelessness and arrogance at every turn. AI, to me, is a character test: I'm regularly fascinated by finding out who fails it. For example, in my personal life I have been treated to AI-generated comms from someone that I would never have expected it from. They don't know I know, and they don't know that I think less of them, and I always will.
    - danielbln 11mo ago
      I will never judge someone for using AI, but I will absolutely judge anyone for lobbing slop at me. I define slop as low effort, non-vetted, fiest-try-output.
    - 11mo ago

by mccoyb 11mo ago

nowittyusername 11mo ago

True innovation will come from open source for sure. As the developers don't have the same economic incentives to be "safe", "ethical" "profitable" or whatever. large corporations know this and fear this development. That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. And I think they will be very convincing to the government. Because the government also fears the "peasants" and giving them any true semblance of real AGI like systems. I bet very soon we will start seeing various classifications that will define what is legal and what is not for a citizen to possess or use.

pessimizer 11mo ago
> That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. I think they're going to be using porn and terrorism (as usual) to do that, but also child suicide. I also think they're going to leverage this rhetoric to lock down OSes in general, by making them uninstallable on legally-available hardware unless approved, because approved OSes will only be able to run approved LLMs. Meaning that I think LLMs/generative AI will be the lever to eliminate general-purpose computing. As mobile went, so will desktop. I think this is inevitable. The real question for me is whether China will partner with the west on this, or whether we will be trading Chinese CPUs with each other like contraband in order to run what we want. > any true semblance of real AGI like systems. This is the only part I don't agree with. This isn't going to happen, but I'm not even sure it would be more useful than what we have. We have billions of full AGI machines walking around, and most of them aren't great. I'm talking about restrictions on something technically barely better than what we have now; maybe only a significant bit more compute-efficient. Training techniques will probably be where we get the most improvements.

exasperaited 11mo ago

> It’s posed to get significantly stronger It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny. Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they have to sit down and have a policy discussion about whether to accept AI submissions, which involves people reheating a lot of anecdotal claims about productivity. Having learned a bit about how to write compilers I know enough to know that I can guarantee you that an AI cannot help you solve the difficult problems that compiler-building tools and existing libraries cannot solve. It's the same as it is with any topic: the tools exist and they could be improved, but instead we have people shoehorning AI bollocks into everything.

micromacrofoot 11mo ago
yeah we are getting lots of "I don't know how to do this and AI gave me this code that doesn't work, can you fix it" or "AI said it can do this" and the feature doesn't exist... some people will even argue and say "but AI said it doesn't take long, why won't you add it"
- exasperaited 11mo ago
  It weaponises incompetence, carelessness and arrogance at every turn. AI, to me, is a character test: I'm regularly fascinated by finding out who fails it. For example, in my personal life I have been treated to AI-generated comms from someone that I would never have expected it from. They don't know I know, and they don't know that I think less of them, and I always will.
  - danielbln 11mo ago
    I will never judge someone for using AI, but I will absolutely judge anyone for lobbing slop at me. I define slop as low effort, non-vetted, fiest-try-output.
  - 11mo ago