You haven’t been keeping up to date on the damage they are doing to existing projects have you? Ask the team behind curl how useful the slop submissions are. They are reaching breaking point just keeping up the flood of crap. It’s not that LLMs will out compete, they will overwhelm and infect.
How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you might credit. Rendering engines on the other hand, yeah there’s not much variety there.
Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I’m afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilic terrorists faster than you can blink.
Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.
We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?
Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?
At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of “AI” I’m really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.
So LLMs are going to achieve what Microsoft has been unable to, destroy open source and upend the world of coding. Nice. We really are living in the dumbest timeline. Can’t wait for Nintendo’s lawyers to decide they found a fragment of Nintendo code in the output of an LLM and start the lawfare to destroy the pesky breeding ground of emulator writers.
Said it in another thread, I have yet to meet a strong advocate for LLMs that isn’t a cunt.
How do people gain the ability to make these major projects if not for cutting their teeth on the small ones though. We cut the apprentice and journeyman stages of mastering an art out, replace it with slop, and then ten years from now we wonder why kids these days are so incapable of actually creating anything.
I have talked to kids who have told me that the assignments they got at school were so trivial they just ran them through ChatGPT rather than waste their time. When I pointed out that the reason the assignments were “trivial” was to give them the skills and confidence to do the big projects when the time came I got, at best, blank looks.
I said it somewhere else, if you are using an LLM to generate unit tests I find it hard to be terribly mad at that. If it’s scaffolding documentation, meh whatever. If it’s generating the main body of your project, I have concerns. Plus I circle back to how can you open source code that may have been stolen from a copyrighted work?
And it’s so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it’s swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive “work” on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.
I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn’t like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It’s so insidious, by being “helpful” it reinforces its necessity.
I still don’t think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it’s amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?
Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can’t be better it will be subsumed in slop.
Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these “AI” companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.
I think I can provide you a great equivalent. Firearms, they have utility, but there are people who make them a lifestyle choice, and there are people who make them their whole personality. There are also a lot of people just desperate for an excuse to use one. I grew up with a couple of farmers in the extended family, I would never argue guns should be entirely banned, but I am so glad I live somewhere with sane laws around gun ownership. It would be so nice if we had similar consideration around regulating LLMs.
The danger to open source as I see it is that LLMs degrade the quality and ability of developers while increasing their throughput, and I have never once heard someone complain that open source lacks quantity, but I hear a lot of people complaining about the quality.
Ergo its a tool, a search engine replacement, that we wouldn’t need if search hadn’t gone to shit due to neglect and active internal sabotage.
And every time the use of LLMs for open source development comes up we get the same tired spiel from people about how it’s just a tool and implications that anyone who doesn’t embrace it with jpy in their heart is just a Luddite.
It seems to me that it’s less a tool and more like intentionally infecting your project with cancer. Sure it shows all the signs of rapid growth, but metastasization isn’t sustainable or desirable. Plus I am yet to encounter a strong advocate for LLMs who isn’t a cunt.
Audiobookshelf is fantastic, however if you aren’t ready to self host I would have a long think about if you want to start pulling that thread.
We are not IOS users so can’t comment on client software but the experience on Android is pretty good.
Got my wife set up and a few titles from Librivox for her to stream while driving across my home state for work and she essentially jumped from Google Play Books to Audiobookshelf without missing a beat, saved us a lot of money on a voice she largely ignores to help her focus.
For one, what’s her name? Perhaps I just forgot meeting her, otherwise my point still stands.
For two, I’m Australian, it would be extremely insensitive for you to make negative statements about my dialect.
I will admit I am being inflammatory with that language, but honestly the only person I have met who I would call an honestly good person who was super positive about LLMs, giant math nerd who talked over my head for 10 minutes about the implementation of convolutional networks. He might have just been super excited I was taking an interest and doing my best to ask questions that didn’t make me sound to dumb.