Mastodawn

Joshua Barretto

Someone decided to get an LLM to create a website summarising a bunch of libraries in the Rust compiler development ecosystem, and the whole thing is chock full of inaccuracies, misinformation, or entirely hallucinated features that don't actually exist.

It rated my parser library as slower than one that runs several orders of magnitude slower on every benchmark I've seen.

For my diagnostic library, it hallucinated a feature that the library doesn't even have.

I have spent so many hundreds of hours curating the docs and examples for these projects. Why do people do silly crap like this?

Joshua Barretto 2d ago

More and more I think we need strong social norms against using LLMs in 'write mode'.

When they're used in read mode, the only person they're misinforming is you, the twit that decided to use one. In write mode? They've got the ability to disseminate false knowledge to others, an actively hostile and anti-social act. This should be seen as akin to littering or fly-tipping.

At the absolute minimum you have the social responsibility to admit that the artifact you brought into creation was done so with a language model to minimise the fallout to others. Ideally, don't publish it at all.

Paula Maddox 1d ago

@jsbarretto wait, are saying Tronald Dump is an LLM?
It all makes sense now!

Joshua Barretto 1d ago

@PaulaMaddox None of his training material contained punctuation, you see

gaytabase 2d ago

@jsbarretto they probably don't know enough about any of the libraries to know it's wrong.

Joshua Barretto 2d ago

@dysfun Right?! If someone wanted rubbish half-truths about stuff they can pollute their brains with an LLM of their own accord. The internet doesn't need someone that's infatuated with their box of statistics to decide that their Claude subscription is an authority on this stuff.

gaytabase 2d ago

@jsbarretto i know, you know, but you've surely noticed that this shit just rots peoples' brains apparently leaving them unable to engage logic?

Joshua Barretto 2d ago

@dysfun Oh, certainly. I'm moving my stuff to codeberg for a reason. It just breaks my brain that people keep doing this. It's... *gutter faux-intellectualism*

gaytabase 2d ago

@jsbarretto yeah it breaks me too

grob (teeth era) 🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️2d ago

@jsbarretto because they are idiots who have no idea what they are doing. They might as well think they are helping, just like managers telling employees their job will get easier when they use LLMs. (I'm not excusing them, just trying to make sense)

@jsbarretto I agree with people saying they don't know, but I think more importantly, they don't care.

@jsbarretto https://sdiehl.github.io/compiler-crates/ is this the site? A friend linked it to me yesterday

Introduction - Compiler Crates

Some notes about crates that are useful for building compilers in Rust.

Joshua Barretto 2d ago

@thezoq2 It is, although I'm deliberately not linking to it to avoid folks going and harassing the author. I think it's quite likely that they *thought* they were being helpful.

@jsbarretto Oh oops, I meant to set the post to private

xd009642 2d ago

@jsbarretto That sucks, I can't help but wonder if the author is creating these resources as result of work they could be doing on another failed blockchain startup...

xd009642 2d ago

@jsbarretto Well "to-fail" past tense is likely incorrect.