This project in particular has been unconcerned with new coding practices so far, primarily, because I derive pleasure from hand-written implementations of my ideas, and believe that overcoming challenges the hard way is the main value I get from it.
Multiple times I got partially broken "citations" of GPL licensed code out of the models as answers to basic research questions (aka prompts) w/o any mentioning of the original license applied to the code. Just adding some random bugs every 10th line doesn't make it not a direct derivate. Image generators happily generated Sonics or Bart Simpsons (w/o directly prompting for that either). No mentions that those are copyrighted characters either.
- Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to.
- There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into.
With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where thought didn't go into it. So, seeing some result isn't an indication of skill, but also not even an indication thought went into it.
I guess there's still something lost if someone isn't going to share code they've put thought into. -- But on the other hand, if it's just for me & I don't have to share it with a wider audience, getting LLMs to write out code isn't so expensive.. so code itself isn't necessarily something to value so much.
I think the key part is how much thought goes into something.
Optimistically, LLMs are good at taking unstructured input, and (probably) producing the intended output from that. -- This allows for an interesting new way of coding: a set of instructions don't need to be as rigorous as a shell script, but can be natural language.
That part surely extends creativity. An LLM will be familiar with domain ideas I'm not, even if an LLM is completely disinterested in doing things.
Pessimistically, I think it's still not clear what the right way of interacting online with all of this is (other than clear expectations of "no AI")... in some sense LLM output is worthless to share, in the sense that I'm just as capable of asking the LLM to output something as anyone else is.
There was a relatively big shift in riding style right around the same time of the first mass production of vehicles.
First, I think it's the best time to write software since so much boring stuff can be automated. I can put my thoughts into what I'm trying to achieve instead of how. To put it otherwise, I think about big picture much more than about mundane details like dealing with particularities of a programming language.
Second, most people were using SO to solve just about any issue they had. The number of developers producing truly original code was minimal even 10 years ago.
If a one-person show, closing it up would effectively kill it? Or (re?)turn it into a hobby project developed at snail pace.
If some community exists: fork coming up?
Worse, because the sometimes valuable real time answers are generated by scraping the web and rewriting the IP in plain sight.
A couple of academic psychopaths who write horrible academic code themselves steal all valuable human knowledge right before our eyes and market it as "tech".
There should be a new civil war against these modern plantation owners and slave holders.
I see a lot of risks involved in people surrendering their own decision-making to LLMs, but that's a question of how they're used, not how they're trained. The idea that using FOSS software to train LLMs is somehow a violation of FOSS norms just doesn't seem valid.
Not true. Most FOSS licenses require attribution and many require derivatives to be released under the same license.
Or are you saying that you think anything generated by an LLM qualifies as a derivative work of anything included in its training data?
I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet.
And the AI IP that makes that possible is still enclosed rather than open.
Could you perhaps explain that irony a bit more explicitly?
Can you provide any examples of "commercialized enclosure of software IP" somehow backwashing into the FOSS ecosystem and closing things up that are already open?
I feel this pain, one of my small donation driven sites has been destroyed by crawlers who just ignore robots.txt and burn the site into the ground.
Sort of jokingly I proposed an update to the "spam fax" law:
https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
Attribution is often required even on MIT or BSD licenses where code is being redistributed, either in original or modified versions, but that would relate to this discussion only to the extent that one regards using LLMs whose training data included a certain bit of code as itself constituting redistribution of that specific code -- but that in turn is a very debatable premise which really ought to be argued for, and not merely argued upon as though it is already generally recognized as true.
And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.
And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.
You have a hole here. Your web server is sending the response and the bot is receiving.
Fix that and … profit? :-)
> The initiator of the communication pays, not the server operator.