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I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I

I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I had to drop out of university a year before finishing due to a disability and loss of financial resources, and thanks to being trans, disabled, and a dropout, as well as the job market that's fucked up due to AI and all the other reasons for layoffs, so I can't get a tech job, despite having been programming since I was seven and being very good at it. I don't think it's really fair to talk about "people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on" in the comments on one of my posts. I'm an agentic AI coding enthusiast because I find it fascinating, it allows me to focus more on what I like most about programming (software architecture, systems thinking, etc), and the decreased cognitive load and increased productivity allows me to continue to do interesting projects in the time and energy I have left after my jobs and disability take.

martin-t 8mo ago
The current crop of genML criticism is a false dichotomy. People either focus on the models not meeting their standards (which is very subject matter dependent) or being exploitative. The thing is, both can be true at the same time and the models can in theory get good enough. Just like the water usage argument - I am not saying it's right or wrong, I am saying it can change if somebody comes up with more energy efficient models. We should focus on the fundamentals. And those are that LLMs are build on the work of millions (hundreds of millions?) of people without their consent and that their goal is to reduce or completely eliminate the economic (and therefore political) power of those people. I understand why you do it, I use stolen code too because ultimately nobody is likely to be punished and I'd just be disadvantaging myself for no reason. But we need to think about the endgame - not ours - theirs - because theirs dictates ours.

martin-t 8mo ago

The current crop of genML criticism is a false dichotomy. People either focus on the models not meeting their standards (which is very subject matter dependent) or being exploitative. The thing is, both can be true at the same time and the models can in theory get good enough. Just like the water usage argument - I am not saying it's right or wrong, I am saying it can change if somebody comes up with more energy efficient models. We should focus on the fundamentals. And those are that LLMs are build on the work of millions (hundreds of millions?) of people without their consent and that their goal is to reduce or completely eliminate the economic (and therefore political) power of those people. I understand why you do it, I use stolen code too because ultimately nobody is likely to be punished and I'd just be disadvantaging myself for no reason. But we need to think about the endgame - not ours - theirs - because theirs dictates ours.