• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As AI Improvements Hit Brick WallEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    Not all thoughts are original.

    Agreed, and I am also 100% opposed to SW patents. No matter what I wrote, if someone came up with the same idea on their own, and finds out about my implementation later, I absolutely do not expect them to credit me. In the use case you describe, I do not see a problem of using other people’s work in a license breaking way. I do however see a waste of time - you have to triple check everything an LLM spits out - and energy (ref: MS trying to buy / restart a nuclear reactor to power their LLM hardware).

    Further, whether I should be at fault for LLM vendors who may be breaking copyright law, is like trying to make a case for me being at fault for murder because I drive a car when car manufacturers lobby to the effect that people die more.

    If you drive a car on “autopilot” and get someone killed, you are absolutely at fault for murder. Not in the legal sense, because fuck capitalism, but absolutely in the moral sense. Also, there’s legal precedent in a different example: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-you-get-arrested-for-buying-stolen-goods/

    If you unknowingly buy stolen (fenced) goods, if found out, you will have to return them to the rightful owner without getting your money back - that you would then have to try and get back from the vendor.

    In the case of license agreements, you would still be participant to a license violation - and if you consider a piece of code that would be well-recognizable, just think about the following thought experiment:

    Assume someone trained the LLM on some source code Disney uses for whatever. Your code gets autocompleted with that and you publish it, and Disney finds out about it. Do you honestly think that the evil motherfuckers at Disney would stop at anything short of having your head served on a silver platter?

  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As AI Improvements Hit Brick WallEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    You are right. My apologies, and my congratulations for finding the correct “tone” to respond to me ;) The thing is, I am absolutely fed up with especially the bullshit about snake oil vendors selling LLMs as “AI”, and I am much more fed up with corporations on a large scale getting away with - since it’s for profit - what I guess must already be called theft of intellectual property.

    When people then use said LLMs to “develop software”, I’m kind of convinced they are about as gone mentally as the MAGA cult and sometimes I just want to vent. However, I chose the word parasite for a reason, because it’s a parasitic way of working: they use the work of other people, which for more specific algorithms, an LLM will reproduce more or less verbatim, while causing harm to such people by basically copy-pasting such code while omitting the license statement - thereby releasing such code (if open source) into the “wild” with an illegally(*) modified license.

    • illegal of course only in such countries whose legal system respects copyright and license texts in the first place

    Considering on top the damage done to the environment by the insane energy consumption for little to no gain, people should not be using LLMs at all. Not even outside coding. This is just another way to contribute missing our climate goals by a wide margin. Wasting energy like this - basically because people are too lazy to think for themselves - actually gets people killed due to extreme weather events.

    So yeah, you have a valid point, but also, I am fed up with the egocentric bullshit world that social media has created and that has culminated in what will soon be a totalitarian regime in the country that once brought peace to Europe by defeating the Nazis and doing a PROPER reeducation of the people. Hooray for going off on a tangent…

  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Announcing the Ladybird Browser InitiativeEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Thanks for laying out your concerns. As a C++ developer who does not know the other languages you speak of (I assume Rust, Go), I can agree to some of your points, but also some of them I see differently:

    1. C++ can be complex, because it has a lot of features and especially the newer standards have brought some syntax that is hard to understand or read at times. However, those elements are not frequently used, or if they are, the developer will get used to them quickly & they won’t make development slow. As a matter of fact, most development time should be spent on thinking about algorithms, and thinking very well before implementing them - and until implementation, the language does not matter. I do not think that language complexity leads to increased bugs per se. My biggest project is just short of 40k lines of code, and most of the bugs I produced were the classical “off by one” or missing range checks, bugs that you can just as well produce in other languages.

    2. C++ no longer requires you to do manual memory management - that is what smart pointers are for, and RAII-programming.

    3. I can’t make a qualified comment on that, due to lack of expertise - you might be right.

    4. You’re somewhat repeating point 1) here with slow development. But you raise a good point: web standards have become insane in terms of quantity and interface sizes. Everyone and their dog wants to reinvent the wheel. That in itself requires a very large team to support I would say. As stated for point 1), I do not agree development in C++ has to be slower

    5. True, as someone who just suffered from problems introduced on windows (cygwin POSIX message queues implementation got broken by Win10, and inotify does not work on Windows Subsystem for Linux) I can confirm that while the C++ standard library is not much of a problem, the moment you interface with the host OS, you leave the standard realm and it becomes “zombieland”. Also, for some reason, the realtime library implementation on MacOS is different, breaking some very simple time-based functions. So yeah, that’s annoying to circumvent, but can be done by creating platform specific wrapper libraries that create a uniform API. For other languages, it appears this is done by the compilers, which is probably better - meaning the I/O operations got taken into those language’s core features

    6. I am highly doubtful of people relying on garbage collection - a programmer that doesn’t know exactly when his objects come into existence, and when they cease to exist is likely to make much bigger mistakes and produce very inefficient code. The aforementioned smart pointers in C++ solve this issue: object lifetime is the scope of the smart pointer declaration, and for shared pointers, object lifetime expires when the last process using it leaves the scope in which it is declared. For concurrent programming, I do not know if you mean concurrency (threads) or multiple people working on the same project. While multi-threading can be a bit “weird” at first, you have a lot of control over shared variables and memory barriers in C++ that might enable a team to produce a browser that is much faster, which I believe is a core requirement towards modern browsers

    As for your tl;dr: definitely not “less concurrency”, that makes no sense. The other points may or may not be true, keeping in mind the answers I gave above.