I think the thing that makes me saddest about this whole “use an LLM to generate code” thing is that many of my heroes are no longer my heroes.

@jlink @dtemme Cannot compute. Gonna put my head in a bucket.

@firepoet @samir @sanityinc @lizzy
Wow, thanks! I gotta say, though, you may be dipping pretty deep in the barrel of heroes to come up with me!

@samir Oh, yikes. That's disappointing. Even throws in "open source or open weights", like those words have any meaning in this context.

@samir Despair here as well.

@samir my biggest objection to marriage, bigger than a feminist critique of it, is that people change

@samir @janl (this is strictly a "yes, and" to your point, to be clear) the way i've tried to think of it is that much like "good person", a hero is a particular moment in a person's life rather than some status that one attains. i have values, and various people over the years have taught me those or embodied them in particular moments, for which i admire them and am grateful. but later they might turn against those values, and i can criticize that without losing what's most important.

@RosaCtrl @rzeta0 @samir

I mean, Deepmind’s Alphafold won the literal Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to universal agreement?

So Terence Tao and others exploring Deepmind’s ANNs for other sciences seems like a pretty obvious thing to do.

It’s not that all ANN’s became bad just because LLMs hallucinate.

And yes, the key difference is that in Science/Math you can have automated and/or experimental checking of results, unlike for code security, the statistically average Redditor, or MechaHitler

@Akshay @RosaCtrl @samir

yes, I think formal verification sets this apart

@samir
Simple. It's Anil Dash. He's nothing if not unreliable inconsistent.

@lizzy @samir Does he still work for Google, the famously anti-AI company?

@dtemme
ESR was trying to convince a bunch of us to go shooting with him at Linux Expo or whatever it was, pre-911. A handful of Canadians. He just couldn't understand how we could live without The Freedoms.

Not 15 minutes before that, RMS got angry at some guys that photoshopped his head onto a Star Wars poster ad R2D2.

Didn't even take sexpest stories to kill them in my eyes.

@samir @bodil @janl

@theorangetheme @samir first of all, trying to blame workers for their employer is a dead end and a reversal of responsibility. have some class consciousness.

in any case, we don't know if he still works at google, but there are speculations about him having quit a while ago. he had a very public and explicit crashout against AI shit.

@lizzy @samir Nobody has to work for Google.

@theorangetheme @samir it is never a worker's responsibility to quit their job, throw away their career, abandon their colleagues and the projects they're involved in, or risk unemployment just because bourgeois investors have turned the corporation into an unethical hellhole. working class people already overwhelmingly suffer the disastrous consequences of these decisions. the burden is not on them, and I will die on this hill.

@xinit @samir @bodil @janl thanks for sharing that. That is pretty funny though

@samir …if his job depends on it and all that. I unsubbed the RSS now.