Cassandra is only carbon nowNo, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
Jeff Atwood@xgranade it depends so much, I mean I can oppose screwdrivers being used to drive nails into the wall
@codinghorror Sure, but we're not talking about "which tool is best for driving a nail that I own into a wall that I own," we're talking about "is it ethical to use a technology built on fascist ideology and stolen work, that carries unconscionable environmental costs, and that's used to disrupt labor movements to perform a task that that technology is fundamentally unsuited to?"
It's quite fair to have a very firm "no" by way of answer to the second question.
@codinghorror Anyway, this isn't the first time you've replied to me to make the argument that LLMs are just another kind of tool. I suspect we won't see eye-to-eye on that, especially as my work has been abused to make LLM products.
I hope we can agree though, that my objection *even though you disagree with it* is principled and neither knee jerk nor purity culture.
@xgranade LLMs told me something critical about my health that no healthcare professional -- and I have a whole team working on me, because I'm bonkers -- ever did. If you want to ask, ask, I can provide very detailed citations and proof.
@codinghorror I'm not a doctor (well, not that *kind* of doctor, anyway), so I'll absolutely admit that I'm not the right person to evaluate those citations. I'll say that from a pretty damned nontrivial degree of expertise with machine learning, I would find it extremely surprising if *on average* text recombination without any underlying semantic model yielded useful advice more commonly than outright dangerous advice.
@codinghorror Like, nothing about LLMs and the theory behind them prevents anyone from getting lucky — and I'm glad that you got lucky instead of the much more common and probable case. But that doesn't mean that they're anything other than outright terrifyingly dangerous in a medical context more generally.
@xgranade people should absolutely be taught all the pros and cons, but I really dislike absolutism and zealotry.. it's not useful, it's not practical, it accomplishes nothing (except in the very narrow cases of civil rights or human dignity). If I wanted more ones and zeroes, I'd own more computers..
Cassandrich@codinghorror @xgranade All of the "zealotry", including sea lioning 👆, is from the people who want to force us to give their precious slop machines a fair chance.
Wanting to be left alone by that shit, not to have people submitting PRs and bug reports with fraudulent provenance to our projects, wanting not to have our time wasted reading slop nobody actually wrote, wanting not to have our servers hammered by gigabits per second of scraper hits, etc. isn't called "zealotry". It's called boundaries. Something tech bro culture refuses to understand.
@codinghorror @xgranade Among the folks who came out of that culture, you're one of the few I largely respect and consider decent. But you really need to realize sometime that the whole culture was rotten to the core in matters of consent and boundaries. And overall folks here on the fedi are done with that shit. We're not having it.