Mastodawn

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl

One reason that it’s hard to take anti-ai discourse seriously here is the underlying assumption that everybody using ai is somehow all-in and uncritical about the technology. Yet the llm for coding discourse on X looks like this… everybody was dunking on Claude code too, for example, except the takes were usually informed and funny.

I can actually have productive discussions there, about labor, about ethics, about technical quality, about novel ideas, about concrete uses, and even have fun and good laughs (do I like that the main timeline is a hellhole? Of course not). There’s a reason most people don’t switch over to bluesky or mastodon, if even mentioning that you use llms just gets you abuse in the comments, or the assumption that you aren’t thinking about the consequences of your actions.

#llms #genai #llm #vibecoding

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 6h ago

I have never worked in big tech, I don’t own capital, I don’t drive a car, I don’t eat red meat, i am heavily invested in local organizing, I support artists every way I can, I own thousands of books, i am European but emigrated to the US, I love nature, I learn to repair most devices I own, I left my job over ai slop.

Also: I work in tech, I own many computers, I am a heavy proponent of llms for coding in order to improve quality of and access to computation.

All decisions I am making after careful research and deep ongoing reflection on their ethical implications.

#llms #llm #vibecoding #genai #ai

prom™️6h ago

@mnl i do not understand why you expect a sane conversation, when there is so much threat in the air. this is precisely why we should not have a hype, and as long as there is one i would not expect a sane conversation, because certain proponents make insane threats.

prom™️6h ago

@mnl if you hold a gun to people's head, you don't expect them to be calm. certain people are holding a gun at people's jobs, rather than allowing a regulation discussion. this is why I do not expect my friends to be sane, when arguing against AI. a minimum social equity must come before sense-making, because the conversation could not be fair otherwise.

prom™️6h ago

@mnl i think the thing that you are missing, is people's *fear*. certain AI proponents are using marketing to maximize it. the conventional term for this behavior is "terrorism".

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 6h ago

@promovicz the hype is the one sided conversation happening here, the assumption that everybody using ai is brainrot capitalist out to get you. That’s fear mongering and cutting out people that use the tech because it is genuinely useful. I have been talking about the labor implications since December 2022. I have repeatedly posted about resources about ai anxiety. I focus on how llms can be used to improve quality and human communication when used in a professional context. I use it daily to support my community. I research ways of making local models do real work.

You are doing the exact thing I am talking about, that there are only maximalist proponents and the only way to counter it is to aggressively bully every body wanting to talk about its uses.

If the point is to reduce ai harm, that’s not an effective strategy.

prom™️6h ago

@mnl But, it is not sane to expect people to be this rational under direct and outspoken threat. I don't think that you are subject to brainrot or anything! I just dislike, that you are going in so early and playing this game while it's dictated by quasi-fascists. And people who don't know you don't have the opportunity to distinguish your argument from other people's argument, so why do you expect them to treat you differently?

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz it is because the game is dictated (for now) by more or less over fascists, certainly capitalists, that I am so invested. Because I know (not just believe) that the technology is useful and I don’t want to leave it in their hands.

prom™️5h ago

@mnl Those who give in to fascist trends, are the most relevant and numerous supporters of fascism. If Hitler builds an Autobahn, in the moment it's never a good Autobahn, even if it makes perfect sense to build one.

You also argue "usage" more than "independent control". Knowing your perspective, this makes sense to me - but not necessarily others.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz I am not the one accusing others of brainrot and shutting down discussions though.

And I’ve always been most vocal about the fact that llms allow us to _take independent control_ over our computation devices. That’s why I am such a “proponent”. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s why so many people are so indiscriminately generating slop or falling into delusions, because there is something real there.

And I want to help channel that in ways that give power to the individual/the community, not the big players. It’s all the more unnerving to be told that I don’t care about normal@people or I am privileged being in tech wanting to play with fancy toys, when I’m basically eliminating or seriously reducing the reliance on me when providing _real non tech people in real life_ the means to do things with their computer without being beholden to expensive Saas walled gardens harvesting their data and removing their agency.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 6h ago

@promovicz because I don’t believe in giving up. Because I think that the best way to counter anxiety and fear is to take action. Shouting at people that are in a similar situation as you could be on your side is not action. You think I don’t experience anxiety and fear, as a software developer that believes that llms can replace pretty much all software development labor, as somehow who left their job over ai slop?

prom™️5h ago

@mnl This sounds perfectly sane, but you will get bunched in with people who act naively, and the political situation around us makes it very hard to dinstinguish your behavior from a stan, because most people are less competent and experienced about these things than you are?

You are a privileged early adopter. Why does it surprise you, that this is not an equal position?

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz that’s exactly my point lol. The discussion we are having is the ones I want to have. It’s been 3 years now, everybody knows what ChatGPT is, there’s front page articles about Claude code in the nytimes. Yet the discourse here is often still “AI is useless” because people assume that we’re still in the gpt-3.5 times or something. That’s _on them_, honestly. I don’t have some super privileged starting position besides being someone working as an engineer and able to afford a $20 sub. I’m just a dude with a computer. I barely have friends in tech, I’m not in a tech hub, i don’t have a degree, I don’t have a secret network of insiders.

Because taking a knee jerk anti ai stance makes it impossible to discern signal from noise, and thus take meaningful action. All that’s left is diffuse fear.

prom™️5h ago

@mnl No, the fear comes from "we're going to destroy half the tech industry" and "watch us buy all your RAM, even if we don't even promise to pay for it". You really should consider how this acts on other people, who do not share your early-adopter privilege.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz right, those are real fears, because they are true. You can’t ostrich and shout your way out of them. I’m not sure what your point is here, I am an early adopter for a product that had the biggest MAU growth ever when it was launched. I was an early adopter when 90% of the discourse here seemed to be about AI and LLMs. That’s not privileged, that’s just me actually not shutting off my brain and yelling like the rest of the crowd, but digging in and applying my hacker mindset.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz I wrote this 3 years ago: https://the.scapegoat.dev/llms-a-paradigm-shift-for-the-pragmatic-programmer/

I was called delusional (still am) and told I have no clue about software engineering. I could more easily forgive it then because models were really difficult to wield. That’s not the case anymore, anybody using even opensource models running on my local i7 (I don’t even own a gpu!) is miles ahead of where things were. And yet the discourse on mastodon doesnt seem to have progressed an inch…

LLMs: a paradigm shift for the pragmatic programmer

the scapegoat dev I have always been a software development aficionado: I love all the tools, I love all the paradigms, I love all the languages, I love...

the scapegoat dev

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 5h ago

@promovicz think about that, models running on my 8 year old computer with no gpu are _miles ahead_ of where things were 3 years ago. !! How is that for independent control !!

prom™️4h ago

@mnl I don't really disagree. Locally run models would be cool, but you don't have the training data - right?

I also think that text-based LLMs may get beaten by token/construct-based approaches? It's not like this whole subject has no interesting angles... :)

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 4h ago

@promovicz I don’t have the source to my wifi firmware either but it’s a compromise I’m willing to make. That’s the type of discussions I would like to have, though. Im definitely an outcomes based person. If gpt5 allows me to reverse engineer iot cameras and open source their firmware, im ok with giving Altman and co some money, for example. I think of it as “I’m perfectly ok with driving a fossil fuel powered car to deliver a batch of junk bicycles to the local bike repair club”. I could disassemble them and awkwardly carry them one by one on my own bike, but that doesn’t really help all that much, because I’ll maybe deliver 5 and not 30 and my back will hurt and I probably won’t do it again all that soon.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 4h ago

@promovicz but that’s very different from “you can’t fit 30 bikes in a car” (true, that’s why we have trailers and vans) or “you fossil fuel industry shill that only wants to cover the planet with asphalt and burn more oil” (not true). I’m just a dude that wants more people to have free bikes and a local bike repair club.

prom™️3h ago

@mnl In politics, this reduction argument does not work. It can work on a personal level. But the discussion you're annoyed about, is a political discussion following political logic ("all politics are about compromise through trading of concerns", "if you argue concerns, you must try to behave consistently with your argument").

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 3h ago

@promovicz so should I by your logic shut up, stop using llms, in fact just stop using cars computers food electricity altogether? Where’s the reductionism? I am annoyed that this seems to be the only acceptable stance.

prom™️2h ago

@mnl Welcome to politics. When I was a teenager, the state had an interest in me, and most people in public thought that hacking is "evil". That wasn't fun, but it was very real.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 2h ago

@promovicz the state is not calling me brainrotten on mastodon though, that's what is so upsetting.

prom™️3h ago

@mnl I see no parallel between fimware and training data. The point is, that your local model is not independent. Most of them are *both* stolen and based on unclear sourcing. And that's a problem, in any case. It's not about copyright/left either - but about powerful entities dictating policy through involuntary means. As long as we carry that, or profit from it, this problem won't go away.

Who pays me, for my contribution to the LLMs? This is not optional. It is a right.

prom™️3h ago

@mnl I might even believe in copyleft (which I really only do partially) - and I would still demand compensation, because it is my right, and tactically useful to enforce it even if I believe differently. It is not your right to negate this law, and certainly not the right of some corp that crowns itself as the next-best-thing...

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 3h ago

@promovicz the firmware being a black box also means it’s outside of one’s control. I personally dgaf about copyright, and while I think companies should be required to at least provide the training corpus metadata to the public and respect “do not train” licenses, in order to actually contribute back to the commons, and it also putting a stick right where it hurts (properly labeled training data is hard in the same that deleting data is hard, vs just harvesting stuff), I am glad to be in the training corpus and I never wrote opensource for compensation or recognition. It might be different for other people, and it’s a valid point. Not one I personally agree with, actually out of moral principles: I’m privileged enough to have the skills and time to write opensource, and everybody should benefit from it, even if they don’t mention my name in some obscure file no one ever reads (speaking of MIT here, which I’ve used since the nineties).

The whole copyright thing is a double edged sword for big tech anyway, as we’ve seen with the Claude code leak _immediately_ being laundered. Now let’s do it for the wifi firmware as well (to circle back 🤣).

prom™️3h ago

@mnl but wi-fi firmware can be reversed and reconstructed. OSS has done that repeatedly, in various forms.

you do not have to care about copyright, to appreciate that other people will not allow having their rights violated. this is where you come off as snobbish and privileged. you may not care - but what about other people’s livelihood? the state has a duty to maintain a minimum balance of rights, and LLMs would tip towards corporate rights. I don’t want that tendency.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 3h ago

@promovicz please read what I wrote. I said I want companies to be regulated when it comes to the training data. I said wanting to have owns copyright respected is valid. I don’t know how to put it in clearer terms.

And models excel at reverse engineering, which is why despite having the skills I have reversed more in the last year than in my entire career, because it made it so much more accessible.

prom™️2h ago

@mnl Let me put it differently:

As a scene hacker and pirate (myself) I can accept your local compromise, but I can not make it non-marginal to the mainstream debate. You are acting ahead of the law and its perceived justice. A public-acting politician cannot do that. They have to argue yesterday's justice, or take their followers along for a transition in zeitgeist - and they can't easily do both at the same time. AI marketing tactics are the cause of this blockage, through disruption.

prom™️2h ago

@mnl There are many problems about LLMs that may not occur in your world. The "war on jobs" is pretty real. In many companies it's not people like you who get booted, but people like me. Some of those companies don't fare well at all. This may not matter to you, but it matters to me.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 2h ago

@promovicz I am unemployed because I left over AI slop... I live in a country without any worker protections, I don't have healthcare. I rejected multiple upper 6 figure offers to work for AI companies. It would be so easy for me to just put my principles aside and take my bag.

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 2h ago

@promovicz that is what is so upsetting. there's an assumption that i'm this rich white person without a care in the world, uber privileged and thus entirely dismissable. And people working at google telling me I'm privileged and shouldn't use AI, while I actually am struggling to make ends meet _because_ I didn't want to use AI in a certain fashion, is ... upsetting.

prom™️1h ago

@mnl The privilege I'm talking about, is a different one. And it's not even real - just perceived. But in politics, perception is pretty real sometimes, imo.

Sorry about your job! Those types of things tend to go under in public discourse. I'm not particularly well either, but I do have a reasonable job atm, that's not under immediate threat. I sure wish you good luck, even if I don't quite follow entirely about the LLM thing... 🤜 🤛 💙

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 2h ago

@promovicz if this is about not using the output of llms because it is "illegal", i'm willing to take that risk. I don't think the law is going to protect the interest of the people here. I don't think copyright law has served us well in the last 20 years, for example.

AndiS 🌞🍷🇪🇺3h ago

Seems you're right and wrong at the same time.

Your observations regarding most people's reactions here are certainly correct. You still got a decent discussion out of it 🙂

mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl 3h ago

@andi with one friend of 25 years 🤣