Reminds me of nuke stuff back in they day. It can be energy to be harnessed, or energy to destroy, depends on the user and the sourcing of the materials. I use Ai (grammerly) to proofread important documents. (tone and proper grammar) didn’t let it re write more than a word or a symbol. Seems the equivalent here.
I think alot of people get upset at the owners of Ai and rightfully so. Was this a local model? Did he build it? Lots of factors.
What AI haters don’t get is that the people fanning the flames of AI(LLM’s) hate are the same people who want you to buy their subscriptions, because they know the only place the real damage occurs is in OpenSource communities.
AI use for Open Source projects is arguably the one use case that benefits everyone, plus it’s a sweet irony against corps and their locked-down proprietary software. Denouncer will loudly hawk that LLMs will make it trivial to circumvent the GPL, but they fail to mention that the pendulum swings both ways; with LLMs, it’s now easier than ever to reverse engineer proprietary systems and programs, recently there was a similar discourse on lemmy due to the mario kart wii decompilation.
They want loud people to sow division into OpenSource communities so that true opensource LLMs solutions are shunned and never reach maturity, corporate meanwhile is unaffected.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It’s just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
- yes, llms can be used as a tool efficiently
- no, killing the planet along the way is not an option, this has to
stopbe stopped
Oh the bright side: smaller local models are getting very good
On the bad side: large models are always a year ahead so everyone wants to keep using the datacenter ones.
The AI cabal is a very small group with a very large amount of power and powerful friends who want to push this on you. Remember, walking away from this does not impact hunger or shelter at all. You can survive without this shimmering facade.
AI is like a power tool. If you give a contractor a nail gun instead of a hammer he can build a house faster. If you give someone who has no idea how to build a house a nail gun they’ll just fail at building a house faster than if you only gave them a hammer and they’ll probably hurt themselves.
I can build my bosses app faster with ai, but I would never build any app I want to maintain with it. It’s too low quality code for my standards.
Problem being that the majority of software engineers really don’t know how to build software well.
And are using AI as a tool to just accelerate their lack of engineering.
Could this not be said for IDEs with code awareness such as M$’s intellisense, among other tools that accelerate development speed?
What you are describing isn’t an AI problem, is people taking a two week bootcamp and calling themselves a software engineer.
This is a very old discussion and argument, much older than the current AI push. You’re right to a degree but also that hasn’t stopped the rise of strong minds for software development. There will always be the curious and the lazy. The curious will always want to know how things work from the chain of events of a button click to the pixel shifts and logic gate flips to display code on a screen as well as run it. There will also always be the lazy unencumbered by such a desire for awareness who just want the magic box to do the thing.
How many software devs can write in assembly? Not many. Not much has changed if anything beyond the ability of the unaware to see their will come into creation. People couldn’t make realistic images and now they snap selfies with no barriers to entry. Does that make them a photographer or an artist? Not really.
I think there could be some potential usecases for LLMs, but that’s not code generation (at least code that is not in the finished product), nor having it look up stuff in technical documentation.
Everyone is trying to chase the rational adaptation case. Everyone wants to 10x their projects, yet keep control over them, or at least 2x their productivity. But I’ve seen just as many people going insane from at least first trying to use it as a tool as vibe coders.
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It 100% can save cognitive load if used correctly. Knowing the limitations and restraints of your tools is true for every profession.
If you know what your llm can and can not do reliably you reduce the over head of verification to basically zero. While if you use it poorly you basically have to double your work load to fix things.
I would trust Linus Torvalds to use AI to do this because the AI is literally trying to copy him when it writes that code. In that context, he is the training data.
He’s not writing much of anything at all anymore, he is copy pasting emails to
git am.
It’s a tool like any other. If used correctly it can provide a great value to the world. If used incorrectly then in this case it can also do the opposite. AI isn’t good or bad intrinsically. It boils down to our relationship to it. The same can be said for all the other tools, radio, television, internet and so on.
Fuck off with these fake AI bubble pumping stories. fake ass grifters reading the same script wherever you go (“Im a mathamatician and IM SCARED” lol)
It’s all horse shit.
Sorry guys but your AI powered sex doll is going in the chipper along with her unpublished Unified Field theory.
The fact that you compared “AI powered sex doll” to Linus using an LLM to generate code he reviewed and accepted (as if he’s reviewing any of the many contributions he reviews and constantly rejects for the simplest mistakes) shows that you know nothing about the different applications of “AI”.
Yes, the “AI powered” sex toy is an example of an idiotic scam, the AI powered assistant that hallucinates in a conversation isn’t very useful, but code that literally does what it should do, reviewed by a competent engineer, is no different from reviewing code from any of your coworkers. It’s code, if it’s garbage you reject it, is it isn’t then the tool was useful.
People are forgetting the AI hype train is reliant on the fact that businesses and individuals can’t host the AI themselves, which is rapidly changing.
All that insane power that OpenAI and Anthropic have harnessed is suddenly completely useless when you can just spin up a competing model at home, with HF hosting a crap ton of finetuned models like uncensored/abliterated to do whatever you want with it.
Even Deepseek released their full size models if you happen to have 400Gb (or 1.5Tb) of VRAM lying around.
When the bubble (hopefully) pops, AI will just continue to be a tool that devs use where applicable, and likely not on a massive data center cloud as it migrates into consumer electronics.
While that’s true, there’s a pretty good chance that it will be negatively useful for many programmers even after the AI bubble burst.
Also e-mail is much easier and cheaper to self-host than an LLM, yet most people relying on 3rd parties. Even some big pushers of yOU cAn JuST seLf-HosT cHiNEse lLM MoDels use corpo e-mail accounts.
Email is NOT easier to self-host than an LLM lol, it’s like multiple orders of magnitude more difficult. Set something up slightly wrong and your emails will never not be marked as spam because your server will be used to forward spam. An LLM for internal company usage you could just set up on a private network and never have to worry about someone else burning your GPU time.
A humorous talk on the topic of self-hosting email, it’s pretty fun.
Getting SPF, DMARC, and DKIM working is such a pain. And that is only part of the mail security these days.
I think this is a much more sensible attitude than the pitchfork wavers declaring mandatory zero-tolerance or you’re evil.
People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use it or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80’s and 90’s is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they’re spending, I haven’t heard about it, and you’d think they’d be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/
I’ve been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don’t feel like I’m missing a damn thing.
People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
So what you’re saying is that Linus Torvalds is only a mid-tier programmer?
Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job?
i’m not learning any skills… i’m offloading some work on to AI so that i can do other stuff on company time…
Isn’t that what we should all aspire to? To destroy capitalism from the inside?
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Yeah, i’m not an idiot… i’ve already considered all those points about the downsides of using AI at work … like you said… play the game
if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor
How do you know i"m not using my free time at work to do exactly that?
you made a lot of assumptions about people who use AI at work …
Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.
It’s a classic scammer tactic to create a false sense of urgency, so people sign up for something without thinking.
Slow down, and do some critical thinking. The promise of AI is that you can type in a simple prompt and the AI will figure out all of the complicated computer stuff for you. How would someone be “left behind” by this technology? Do you suppose that experienced developers will lose the ability to write simple sentences?
I don’t think people will loose the ability to type in “make that button green”. Even if AI fulfills it’s promises (which is doubtful, read up on the halting problem) someone who knows how computers work will be more employable than someone that only knows how to write prompts. Because the person that knows how computers work can also write prompts and will be better at doing that than someone that doesn’t know anything about computers.
More important in this day and age is learning how to spot a scam. Someone pressuring you to do something immediately is likely scamming you.
Talk me more about how in the future, game controllers will be made obsolete by motion-sensing cameras, and we will all be jumping around in front of a big flat-screen TV playing party games and finger-gunning down bad guys in rail shooters!
Yea, and the internet will never go mainstream. I also heard Apple developed this new product called the iPhone, what a stupid idea that no one will buy, people will just stick with regular cell phones when given the choice. Now excuse me while I ride off on my horse that will never, ever, be replaced by these new au-to-mo-biles.
See, I can do it too.
This falls apart the second you look at it when you see that it doesn’t take much learning to use that tool for most applications.
At the same time, people overly reliant on that tool take a big hit in developing and strengthening their own skilks and thinking capabilities.
Combine the two things if you still can.
agreed
the issue I have with how people use it is that it’s easy to just create more shit that they spew out into the world
I’ve got no issue with people using tools to improve their work. I think it’s fair to say that AI is enough like predictive text and spell check when it comes to tools you can use at work. and like any tool, the user is still responsible for the end result
my main problem with AI is that it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically) to create pure garbage that is thrown in my face every day. like, scale it back a bit everyone…
To be clear, capitalism is fucking our world. Nothing about the technology can do that on its own. Its how it is being deployed.
We could have started with smaller LLMs, deployed strategically at institutions of higher learning for real societal value, running on renewable electricity… fuck it lets aim for a trillion dollar IPO promising to replace all doctors and engineers!
it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically)
Environmentally, it has yet to surpass Bitcoin in electricity usage (though it’s set to triple soon, and that will make it a bigger power hog than all of cryptocurrenty).
Economically, this is the biggest bubble since the 1800s railroad boom. Scaled for inflation and GDP railroads were a far bigger gamble than AI, and they hit a 20ish year recession when that boom was over.
Hopefully the “fungible technology” argument holds water, and whatever AI investments don’t work out the hardware / data centers can be re-purposed for truly valuable aspects of it. Truly valuable to who is the key question.
Bit coin farms never built massive illegal gas turbine power plants in residential neighbourhoods at least not that I know of.
Not that I am a fan of the waste for crypto mining either.
Bitcoin had a slower rollout, it wormed its way into smaller niches. A lot of early bitcoin mining was done on “borrowed” or otherwise “unused” hardware that other people paid the electric bills for.
I generally approve of much of what cryptocurrency could be used for, but I’ve been pissed off about the waste of proof-of-work cryptocurrency since before 2018, and nothing has improved since then.
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good thing that downvotes can only be used to suppress narratives on lemmy. lol
So this is how I hear about the outcome of the Debian vote. :( Is there a widespread distro that has a clear anti-Slop stance?
TempleOS
Hyperbola definetely.
I believe gentoo is too.I wanted to eventually try gentoo anyways, I guess I will have to advance that experiment. Never heard of Hyperbola, I will check it out. Thank you!
The problem with majority of “LLM critics” is that they are brain dead luddites that argue with ragebait emotion rather than rationality.
Unsurprisingly LLMs are just computers that can be useful, can be wasteful, can be life saving and can be society destroyed - it’s a tool.
Sure not all the critique is accurate, but in its current form, it causes huge issues with water and noise pollution in places the data centers are built, and are sucking unbelievable amounts of power, while essentially DDOSing tons of sites to scrape data, and often using copyrighted material that they have no license for. It is also reducing people’s ability to think critically because people turn to it immediately.
I’m not an idiot who will say it’s not useful, but we need to slow down by about 20x with what we’re doing with it now, and save it mainly for medical usage until we have a solution to those massive problems.
Honestly I don’t disagree with your take. We should slow down and be diligent with our roll out and policies but sadly that’s not what the mainstream discussion is all about - it’s all so binary.
The water and noise problem functionally has zero to do with llms as a tool. That is entirely and solely a byproduct over over expansion of corporate intrests.
That’s like saying the lumber mill is the reason logging is harmful to the environment.
It’s nonsensical and requests objective ignorance of the context and nuance of the problem
There’s nothing that actually requires the data center problem to exist for llms to also exist. There are alternative.
Yes which is why I’m not against ai as a whole, just in its current form it needs massive regulations. I would still not be happy about how it’s ruined huge portions of the internet, but I would probably put up with that for the value it provides.
We already have a perfectly good policy framework for datacenters: just charge them the negative externality costs. The problem is that they want datacenters now and repay external costs like electricity, water etc later because it takes 1 year to build a datacenter but 5 years to route power and water.
We already solve for this with economic credits but people just don’t trust these systems because of corruption and poor governance. The credits never trickle down to people who pay for externalities.
This is not even a datacenter issue.
I absolutely take Luddite as a compliment, the historical Luddites were cool as hell. And with the benefit of hindsight, we now know their predictions were basically correct about increasing automation leading to lower quality products and more alienated lifestyles.
Also, I know enough about finance to know that if these computers cost more money to keep on than they bring in (which they do) they won’t be around long-term.
This story keeps getting parroted and it’s completely untrue. Luddites gained no extra rights due to their actions they gained rights decades later through actual policy activism.
This will also be quite the test for the Lemmy slopwarriors
If the model is adequately FOSS, i.e. open weights, and can run on a single consumer GPU (or NPU), and the “author” (quotations because I’m personally undecided if one can claim code generated by an aforementioned model is theirs) understands it, then I really don’t see what the problem is…
Personally I have nothing against SLMs/LLMs as a technology, to me my grievances against ChatGPT or Claude are mostly about their environmental impacts and selling us back our own art, also keeping knowledge behind a for-profit black-box - if those aren’t appropriate for a specific model, then I say using that model is fair, and good for productivity.
The problem with open weight models is that they are still hard to deploy. For DeepSeek for example you require NVIDIA HGX B200, these things are expensive.
Yes, unfortunately they are, and I do think efficiency is going to be a significant research front for open-weight models. The nature of this topic is highly speculative as our compute capabilities have only recently reached what is required to consider running generative AI models, what we have today are very crude first implementations of what I personally believe will become an everyday tool for developers, and more.
And we have seen this, there are models now capable of running on an individual’s hardware (and not particularly expensive hardware either) that can outperform what ChatGPT initially launched with.
Antoine’s argument is still very naive and short sighted.
Only because some corporations are linked to fascism, does not make the technology inherently fascist.
If these links are an issue, we should also all stop using Microsoft and Google, because they offer Isreael computing power, and thus every service is now supporting genocide. So if you are that user, all fine, enjoy an off-grid life. But don’t pretend to be better, if you still rely on those companies in the first place.
