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.

"Healthy people cost less.
Educated people contribute more.
Housed people are more stable.

...in a healthy society there are no "undeserving".
There are just people."

PSA: following the example from various other projects within GNOME (such as Loupe and libadwaita), GNOME Calendar now explicitly forbids AI-generated contributions, with the same policy: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/725

We honor the exquisite art of organic homegrown code made with care and a willingness to learn the craft, and want to protect the time of people who help review merge requests.

#MaintainerLife #FreeSoftware #FLOSS #OpenSource #GNOMECalendar #NoAI #aislop #genAI #LLM #GNOME #libadwaita

The greatest—and most hilarious—political rebuttal I’ve ever read.

And yes, this is real. It’s a joint reply from the Tla’amin, Klahoose, K’ómoks and Homalco Nations over a local MP getting up in arms over First Nations land acknowledgements.

We need more “Chillax, Bud”.

The Death of Curiosity

https://medium.com/@cupofcat/the-death-of-curiosity-96b6a09328b6

How nine forces spent sixty years hollowing out the soul of software engineering — and why blaming AI misses the point.

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online

I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players

ssh snakes.run to join!