@djsumdog @Suiseiseki He's going to scold you for using the term "open-source" instead of "free software".
Maybe you should make a little web game, a quiz with some tricky questions to teach people all the terminology: Free (as in beer), Open Source, Free and Open Source, Open Source (but not Free as in Speech), etc. Something fun and funny like the JsDate quiz: https://jsdate.wtf/ (I hope you can run that. The code is MIT: samwho/jsdate.wtf is the github repo).
Would seriously be helpful.
Cringe and proprietary pilled.
Do you work in the software industry? I have a feeling you don't because you literally can't if you hold to your free software extremist views. For all us normies out there who make daily compromises (and I feel like I make fewer compromises than most, the LLM stuff isn't going away.
I was inherently skeptical of a lot of it too, because most of the weighted random token guessing machines are mostly wrong or annoying. The fact is, it has gotten better though. Early stuff could only regurgitate solved problems. When trying to develop an RTSP server in Kotlin/Java, I remember one of these tools, after several prompts/iterations, simply give me a skeleton and "Add your RTSP implementation here." It could not do anything novel. At my last job before layoffs, we had a CoPilot license and the code it generated wasn't great and had a lot of issues.
Recently using the IntelliJ $10 plan, I was trying to adapt my MediaHug app (AGPLv3) to work on Wayland. To do that, I needed to use the existing python-mpv
library to render to OpenGL in Qt6. There were examples out there, but only for QQuick and my application uses traditional QWidgets. There were literally no examples I could find anywhere, and I looked at a LOT of QtOpenGLWidget examples. My forum question went unanswered. The generated example I got from the IntelliJ chat wasn't perfect, but it did work and I eventually massaged it into this implementation:
https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mediahug/-/blob/master/mediahug/gui/mpv/gl_player.py?ref_type=heads
This is a novel implementation that doesn't exist in any off the official python-mpv
documentation or any other examples I could find.
Do NOT use LLMs to copy software
The trouble is, that's probably not what LLMs do. A lot of people quote Carmack's fast inverse square root example of the early CoPilot while it was in beta (where it duplicated his code including comments). I suspect at this time Microsoft was probably still using a lot of Vector Search combined with RAG. I don't think a lot of model tools like Claude/GPT4 do that anymore for liability reasons (and all the enterprise licenses contain clauses where they'll accept liability for lawsuits. I really want to see one of these go to court). The models themselves cannot store actual code. They're massive weight/parameter mappings. That's why so much of it seems "made up." But at the same time, we can't really know what the big commercial models are doing behind the scenes. I doubt they're straight copying from RAG or Vector search anymore though.
The trouble in industry is we're facing massive layoffs. The AI stuff has massive speedup advantages, and it's getting weirdly better in some respects. I know several people who've told me they wouldn't hire any senior engineers who refuse to use it. There's no really turning back the clock on this stuff now, if you want to get/stay employed.
@Suiseiseki @djsumdog @xianc78
> Such weight/parameter mappings appears to work out as an undocumented form of lossy compression where the code is stored.
interesting perspective!
> The NEET will inherent the Earth.
indeed. what's the point in doing work that sucks the life out of you and then have at least half the money stolen to be used against you.
the expectation is that one has to use LLM to even be considered feels like a giant brainwashing op tbh. requiring people to use a statistical black box, created using a secret process and stolen data, requiring unobtainium hardware to run effectively.