How is this chaotic good?

Well, I respect the honest desire to learn and I’m glad you understood the subtly that full creative freedom makes something “spiritually indie”

Have a good one

If you write a book and go to a publisher to print it, that’s independence. You wrote the book on entirely your own terms

If the publisher pays up front for a book, or pays you to edit a book to their standards, that’s not independent

Ok, yeah that sheds some light on the situation. It sounds like you’re in a gatekeeper role

I think pushing to force transparency is good, especially if you are getting traction on the issue

I have also found that the software in question wants to install 40 more packages from its creators personal website. This isn’t disclosed anywhere. And that is objectively shady af imo - but again, probably not actually illegal.

But this though…That is shady as fuck. Perfectly legal, but that’s a huge red flag. There’s a very high chance they have some data collection packages in there already, it is a reliable way to make money off free software

It also means the security is “trust me bro”. That’s far more disturbing to me than all the legal and transparency concerns put together. They may not be doing anything bad yet, but it means they could sneak it in easily later

Is there any sort of legal situation here?

Legal action runs on money… So no, legally I’m very confident nothing will come of it

Ethically? I mean, really ask yourself if your objections would make a difference. Would your concerns be heard and respected, or would you be risking your position for nothing? IDK the situation, but you should consider the situation

Then ask the more important question, if you could live with this or if it would eat you up inside

Your concerns are likely valid, but probably no one will thank you for raising a stink about it. In general terms I personally would probably go along with it since it doesn’t seem like a place where I could make a meaningful difference, and that’s the core question of my professional ethics

But you have to have to keep your own code of ethics. If this violates yours, you should do what you have to do

Be the person you want to be

Yeah…I really like AI, it’s such a fun tool to build things with. It’s like magic

But I don’t know how we’re going to make new senior devs like this. The baby coders are being deprived of opportunities to go through all the trials by fire that give you the intuitive understanding of how software works

No, just make it illegal. Actually doing it would be pretty straightforward. Fine them, make card processors drop them, make them unable to make money in our country

If someone overseas wants to burn money providing free llm access, who cares? If someone sets up a VPN or let’s their friends use their stack, who cares?

Those are just drops in the bucket. I’m not making a moral argument or something, I’m talking population level outcomes

Yeah, but therein lies the problem

If you don’t have new junior devs learning how it all works through trials by fire, we’re going to be the last generation of senior devs.

I like llms, they’re interesting and can be a real force multiplier. They let you skip the unimportant details and build bigger and faster. You design the system and focus on the architecture, and you get pretty great results

But you can also leave it all up to the ai and create things that no one understands. They’re also not going away

But I don’t know how we go forward from here. My best idea is that we make it illegal to provide llm access as a service - maybe everyone who uses one should have to set up their stack themselves. It’s not a perfect solution, but at least everyone who uses them will have to learn them like they would any other tool in their toolbox

I don’t fear AI in the slightest, but I do fear the ways we’re using it as a species

Honestly, I doubt it, they’re incredibly beholden to the insurance companies themselves. Plus medical malpractice insurance, which they can lose if they break the terms and breaks their protection for every patient they’ve ever treated

Private practice was also gutted by the Obamacare hand outs to the insurance companies. They literally spend more time dealing with insurance requirements than actually seeing the patients. So on top of all that, they’re also restricted by the healthcare groups that employ the majority of them

They know the system is broken. The really conservative ones think it’s simply how it has to be, but honestly they’re also put through a ridiculous system themselves to even get a license to practice, let alone keep it.

The main exception is the doctors who work for the insurance companies. They’re essentially forced to break their oath just to keep their job, I don’t know how they live with themselves

That’s pretty cool. Llms are great for this kind of thing, I’m hoping they can bring hacking to the point you can cobble together random hardware and make it work

I think that’s where the magic is. It’s like mighty putty - it’s not great as a building material itself, but it fills in gaps and let’s you stick all kinds of things together

If you really mean that I envy you. I’d like to live in a place like that

I’d buy a mountain and build a nature retreat so friends and family could visit. I’d probably only spend a million or two on it, after the land and off grid infrastructure I’d build it myself, making cabins and gazebos over time. I’d curate the land to be full of fruit bearing trees and make animal friends

Then I’d make more friends and invite people to stay. I’d look for damaged people and offer them a refuge from the world for as long as they want

I’d probably buy a significant amount of silver, yuan, and euros as insurance. The rest I’d hand over to a financial advisor after taking time to find someone I can trust, then I’d try to never think about money again

I’d spend most of my time enjoying a life surrounded by nature and friends who are free to live without worries. Travel occasionally to meet new friends and see more of the world, but mostly I’d just be happy to live freely

Your approach wasn’t hacky. You don’t control external services, you only control your own system

Accept what you can’t change and change what you can’t accept. Clearly that means you have to make your response handling more robust to handle retries gracefully and accept partial responses to be fleshed out later

Prices supposedly dropped 20% this month after openai backed out of some of their purchase agreements. Google also came up with new methods to train using 1/6 of the ram needed before

It’s not going to go up forever, we might have passed the peak already

Might even be sooner than that. Google came up with a way to cut memory usage for training to 1/6, and Chinese ram is looking like it’s very close to entering the market

Open AI backed out of some of their orders either because of this or financial issues. I’ve heard ram prices dropped 20% this month, it’s a long way back to reasonable prices but it’s a solid start

But also deeply unhappy people

Post programming questions online and you’ll inevitably get someone saying, “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Why is it so bad to step outside the box?

This is totally different… That’s not deference to authority or conformity, that’s fundamental best practices

If you want to do more than play with code puzzles, the first question you should ask is “how have others solved this problem”. And the second should be “how have others approached similar problems”

Code is castles upon castles built of sand… Even the language you use and the rock that runs it are entirely manmade. Coding is a fundamentally collaborative process, and if you want to innovate you need to understand how and why things were done the way they are first.

Otherwise you’re going to write really shit code, even if you’re the cleverest coder to ever live, the code will be shit because it’ll be a huge pain in the ass to work with for everyone else. And probably for yourself too, once your realize why things are done a certain way and understand that it’s usually there’s been a ton of thought and discussion that led it to being the way things are done

If you’re asking questions without comparing the proposed benefits of your new solution to the normal approach, you’re not yet prepared to enter the discussion on how things should be done

So of course the correct response should always be to remind you that you should first learn how others did it. That never goes away, it’s something we remind each other constantly even at the deeper levels of understanding

It’s good life advice too. Humans aren’t nearly as creative as we like to think, as a species we hardly ever have truly new ideas. The way our creative process works is by rearranging the concepts we already know in new ways. If you want to be an innovator, you should be constantly finding wisdom in others and the world around you

As for the deference to authority? That’s because we live in uncertain times and people are scared. It’s more comforting to think someone knows what they’re doing instead of acknowledging the truth… We have very big problems that we are not confronting as a species in any meaningful way.

That tendency as a species is one of those very big problems in fact

Am I reading it wrong? Did ban ai via social contact not win?

Are you sure you’re not mixing up Debian for Ubuntu?

I’m pretty sure Debian just said they weren’t going to allow AI contributions

Just imagine him slamming together hulk hands going “it’s sundar-ing time” at the R&D offices. Then one by one punching out monitors and telling employees “you’ve been sundered”

I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened