Junk Drawer
For all those little papers scattered across your desk
Junk Drawer
For all those little papers scattered across your desk
I stand for the Constitution, for due process, and for community that takes care of each other.
Collected from Discord
In response to both this quote:
The user apparently believes LLMs are inherently unethical in their existence, so, by extension, any use of them is also inherently unethical, and they (the user) will therefore not use any products of LLMs in any way whatsoever.
and recent projects collecting lists of “tainted” “slopware”:
I think most absolute positions are likely incorrect, but at the same time contain merits. For example, I think the notion of abstaining entirely from any software that has been touched by an LLM (Vim? The Linux kernel?) is untenable in the long run, and I desperately hope it won’t lead to too much fragmentation of ideas. (Competing software that does it better is of course welcome.)
As another example, take explicitly condoning LLM use without a statement engaging with others’ concerns (be it quality, displacement of labor, ethics, or anything else). I can also sympathize with the absolute position that this condones and encourages other evils associated with the makers of today’s commercial LLMs. So my modulation is to take those concerns as indicative that perhaps we ought to form a community statement about what, precisely, LLM use means to Racket.
A tool and aid for continuing to do things we value? Something else?
See for example « Engineering rigor in the age of LLMs » and « The peril of laziness lost » which I have linked before. I may dislike some of Brian’s enthusiasm for them, but I also can see where he’s coming from and respect how he encourages rigorous use.
In response to this quote:
I think it’s inevitable though. Every leap in technology from books to film/video to the internet often displaces/shakes industries up. It’s either adapt or be the old man who shouts at the clouds saying “back in my day…”. Whether its generated by LLMs or not, what matters above all else is if its valuable and improves the project
I think the difficulty is pinning down meanings of « valuable » and « improves ».
Is it valuable to add new features if they also create legal risk ? Is it an improvement to automate away paper cut bugs that deprive new contributors of pathways to get started, learn the code base, and mature into maintainers?
These things are decidedly grey areas to me.
I think it’s hard to deny that there are valuable uses. I think it is equally hard to deny there are wasteful, or evil, or <other negatively connoted> uses. And I think the commercial side (even Anthropic in some ways) leans into one side more than the other, to our detriment. I think this makes it more important to qualify what our community holds dear and how LLMs fit (and don’t fit) into that equation.