My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

I saw manyfold/AGENTS.md in the @manyfold repo and I was like "awww no not another good project" then looked in the file;

Legends.

https://github.com/manyfold3d/manyfold/blob/main/AGENTS.md

had a good conversation earlier that went something like this:

them: “is AI making pentesting easier?”

me: “yes.”

them: “why, because you can use it to look for vulnerabilities in code quicker?”

me: “no, because it generates vulnerabilities in code quicker”

I have released #PHPUnit 13:

https://phpunit.de/announcements/phpunit-13.html

I may regret this at some point, but I felt the need to put down in writing how I feel about this moment in the tech industry.

It is not kind. You may well be insulted by it. If you are... then you really should question yourself.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

#AI #LLM #Programming