So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.
Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.
I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".
I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.
Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.
> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives.
I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.
Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".
Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.
> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently.
Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.
This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.
Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.
While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.
I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.
I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.
Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment
Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.
"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"
This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.
Blue pill: The supplier of the thing you want is friendly and has your best interest in mind. (Suppliers can be corporations, government, the opposite sex,...)
Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.
Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.
White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.
and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.
edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments
> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”
"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.
This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue.
The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].
To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.
LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.
[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.
> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.
At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.
And I hope I am just being a Chicken Little, but if LLMs become the go-to place for searching, we will lose traditional web search engines. They won't be profitable if not enough people use them. For those who don't remember how the web was before Google's search engine, we had search engines that really didn't work, web rings, and people's list of random bookmarks. The web is much too complex and big to ever be able to go back to those methods. The web will be effectively unnavigable and dead. All we will have left will be the unattributed knowledge distilled in the LLM with no way back to the old methods. And please tell me I'm wrong.
This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.
Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).
Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?
So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.
Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.
I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".
I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.
I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.
Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.
> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.
Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".
Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.
In the same vein, Jonathan Blow's modestly named "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.
One of my favorite talks.
> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently.
Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.
This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.
Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.
While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.
I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.
This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.
I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!
I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.
Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.
I love computers.
Generally agreed with most of the points.
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.
Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video?
[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092
https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo
(reposting my comment from lobsters)
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
Thank you!
So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...
[3] https://genode.org/about/road-map
"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"
This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.
I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.
Blue pill: The supplier of the thing you want is friendly and has your best interest in mind. (Suppliers can be corporations, government, the opposite sex,...)
Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.
Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.
White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.
his flagged "goodbye" submission mentioned at the circa 26 minute mark for those who are curious https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645
and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.
edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments
> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”
"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.
Crazy to see how many people miss 26:15.
This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it.
In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.
I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".
I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".
It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.
It's ok to show generosity.
It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.
Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.
Although, I do with these LLM companies would be better about licensing their derivative works (the models) under GPL, when they ingest GPL’d code.
The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue.
The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].
To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.
LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.
[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.
> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
[1] https://bactra.org/research/2026-03-10.html
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03296
In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.
At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.
And I hope I am just being a Chicken Little, but if LLMs become the go-to place for searching, we will lose traditional web search engines. They won't be profitable if not enough people use them. For those who don't remember how the web was before Google's search engine, we had search engines that really didn't work, web rings, and people's list of random bookmarks. The web is much too complex and big to ever be able to go back to those methods. The web will be effectively unnavigable and dead. All we will have left will be the unattributed knowledge distilled in the LLM with no way back to the old methods. And please tell me I'm wrong.
> It clearly memorized the code
This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).
I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this one: "Don't be snarky."
Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).
Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?