Yeah, don't let pesky discussions about ethics get in the way of building cool stuff.
I'm working on paving over the Amazon rainforest so I can build the world's largest roller coaster, but for some reason people keep trying to talk me out of it. Good thing I have this bucket of sand to put my head in so I can tune them out.
The argument that you're ignoring is about whether they're ethical or not. Your priors may land you on either side of that argument, but ideally you're willing to have your mind changed if the other side makes a strong enough case.
But intentionally blinding yourself to the debate and plowing ahead anyway (which is how I interpreted your parent comment) sounds like willful ignorance.
I'm not ignoring anything. I've already moved on and I don't owe you further debate. No one does. If you don't like it we have a very thorough legal process you can follow.
You most definitely don't have to reply. I wasn't really expecting you to.
> I've already moved on
Imagine there's a certain kind of candy that you enjoy. Now imagine you learn that candy is manufactured by literal child slaves, its ingredients include the ground-up bones of an endangered species (which happens to be carcinogenic), and the company which makes it donates all of their profits to political causes that you strongly disagree with. Would you reconsider buying said candy in the future?
Are there any facts or perspectives that you could become aware of which might change your mind about the ethics surrounding large language models? Or is it an entirely closed case for you?
I personally try to keep an open mind about pretty much everything. It's not that I don't have opinions, but they're always subject to change.
To put my cards on the table regarding my current opinions of the current subject: I've historically been pretty anti-copyright; I believe that information wants to be free. However, I'm unsettled by the uneven application of existing intellectual property laws (if these laws are going to exist they should be enforced consistently). I'm undecided as to whether I think LLMs themselves should be considered derivative works of their training material, but I definitely think they're often used to produce derivative works (sometimes unintentionally/unknowingly). None of that means they aren't useful for building cool stuff or that the technology behind them isn't amazing.
Well the rainforest is about 6 million km² so that's what I have to work with. Assuming I can finish my other project of turning the Grand Canyon into a giant iron mine to produce enough steel, I want to use as much of that space as I can (but I'll need to set aside at least a million km² for parking lots, bathrooms, concessions, etc). I'll probably keep the main channel of the Amazon River in place for sewage and other waste disposal, but I can bridge the coaster over it so that's not a problem.
I can see from a lot of replies the "cool" threshold is undefined, but here goes:
For myself it let me finish a project I started a year ago for measuring how much home energy efficiency upgrades will reduce my AC usage. I bought a pile of Raspberry Pi Picos and turned them mostly into temperature reading devices, but also one that can detect when my AC turns on.
So I can record how often my AC runs and I can record the temperature at various points around the house, which lets me compare like-for-like before-and-after.
The easy but unrealistic way to accomplish what I want is to use Python. It gives me access to a file system, a shell, and all sorts of other niceties. But I wanted to run these on two AA batteries and based upon my measurements they would last about 2 weeks. I tested using C instead and they should last 4 months. That's long enough for my use case. There's enough flash storage for that time period too.
However this means I need to write all the utilities for configuring the Picos myself. There's all sorts of annoying things such as having to set the clock (picos lose it anytime they lose power), having to write directly to flash memory (no operating system), having to write a utility for exporting that data from flash memory, and so on.
And AI coding let me burn through a pile of code I knew how to write but didn't care to spend my weekends doing so.
The pattern is the same for my friends who are software devs. And yeah, you're probably never going to see any of it, but that's not why they're making it, they don't want the maintenance burden.
Then I upgraded my 10 year old hand written framework to a new version that supports sqlite and postgres on top of existing MySQL support https://github.com/Divergence/framework
But then I was like eh lemme benchmark every PHP orm that exists just to check my framework's orm....
A brand new task manager written in C for Linux that supports a plugin architecture with an event bus. It's literally the best gui Linux task manager ever. Still working on it.
I'm not even talking about my paid job. This is me just fucking around.
If you think none of this stuff is cool I don't even respect you as a dev.
Without the milk drop plugin it's stable around 175 with all the other plugins. With no plugins it's about 80 mb at idle but the memory usage is higher if there's more processes running.
there seems to be great innovation in npm package hacking, but that's about it. Oh yeah, bad uptimes and ruined open source projects. If only AI was left to discrete math brute forcing problems and alphafold.
I'm not sure that extrapolating the last 2 to 3 years as a sign of things to come is as enticing an argument as you seem to think it is . If you exclude AI for ai's sake, the feature lists of the last 2 years have been incredibly anemic. If you include AI companies bootstrapping themselves with AI, the cash flow has been a nice change but I can't say it's felt fully baked, or flooded with stable software and well-crafted workflows.
I'm really not trying to be a hater but when people tell me that we're already in the AI Nirvana it gives me pause.
I don't know how to argue with this without making the same kind of sweeping generalizations that you are. I don't know that you or I are qualified to set the goalposts or come up with any kind of objective measure for the progress of all recent software and all recent hardware that is convenient to analyze or debate in this text box.
While there's a loud minority who love to debate the topic, LLM use has become status quo on most products and projects pretty much across the board, and most people are happy to acknowledge 1:1 that their personal productivity is some multiple of [all time before they started using LLMs]. At the same time, you can surely appreciate why many are quiet about their personal usage because there's no upside to discussing it but there's lots of people just hanging out waiting to tell you that you're imagining the whole productivity thing when you do.
At some point, the path of least resistance is to let the loud minority be loud while you get an extraordinary amount of work done.
So we've abandoned the idea that coolness is even perceivable. Even if the argument was about pure productivity, or any hard measurement, the numbers don't seem to add up.
Can we point to any hard metric that has improved in the industry in the last 2-3 years? It explains why work hours are short, everything is cheaper and non-AI companies are experiencing cost reductions. Services are more reliable. Except, where is all that?
You could argue that it's yet to come but to argue that it's already here... how do you justify that?
I'm building the same stuff I've always built. Just faster and with less dependence on others. Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas has been my biggest benefit from coding agents.
> Not having to argue with devs that have their own agendas
Agendas like, "let's not check our API key into a public github repo" or "Let's not store passwords in plaintext" or "Don't expose customer data via a public api"?
I'm happy for you, but please, for all of our sakes, keep it to yourself. Don't make a public repo, don't post links. Go sit in the corner by yourself with your slop generators and leave the rest of us alone.
