This anti-AI hysteria is just such a classic moral panic. It’s just
1) identify something as AI-produced
2) attack and ostracize anyone who might be involved in that production
And as with all moral panics, whether (1) is factual is totally beside the point. The point is the almost sexual release you get from (2).
I know in this case there is AI-produced code in rsync (as there is with most useful software by now), but you see the witch-hunts every day online and as with all witch-hunts it really doesn’t matter whether the accusation is true. The hysteria is the point.
it's dangerous to refuse to understand whats happening broadly, and what's taking place in this thread, and to signal that it's ok to keep refusing to understand it.
the anger that's showing up around ai isn't a matter of the masses being misinformed, or the messaging around it, it's a matter of physics. you have this one thing that is being used as an excuse to lay people off en masse, you have tech ceos near daily saying they're gonna come for everyone else's job too, and you have the hyperscalers taking up every bit of oxygen in the room. not even gaming has been safe.
taking the attitude that it's "just such a classic moral panic" is figuring out which way the ocean is receding and running headlong toward it.
> this one thing that is being used as an excuse to lay people off en masse, you have tech ceos near daily saying they're gonna come for everyone else's job too, and you have the hyperscalers taking up every bit of oxygen in the room.
I hear these complaints multiple times per day. Not just "nearly daily". The backlash has long since drowned out the original source. The ad nauseam anguish has been steadily increasing for months.
I almost prefer to listen to asshole CEOs at this point. At least they have more to say than just repeating these same points.
Being dismissive of AI panic is healthy. What you're engaging in is not.
a classic moral panic would be videogames causing violence. what is happening is the beginning of something more akin to the luddite movement, and there is a chasm between them, and this has the potential to become far more widespread, and far more violent. it's not about the tech, it's about the economics.
whether or not you think anyone is owed anything for anything is a completely different topic. i'm talking about what is happening right in front of you, and everywhere.
> the anger that's showing up around ai isn't a matter of the masses being misinformed
Isn't it though? let me quote my other comments in this thread:
> There is undoubtedly AI-written code in the Linux kernel now, but are they out there harassing those maintainers? No. rsync GitHub is easier to brigade.
> They’re also all completely disingenuous (“I’ll have to stop using rsync now”) given that 99.99% of software now includes AI-written code
This is why I call it a moral panic and hysteria. It's not reasoned, considered opposition to AI. The people on that github thread are totally disconnected from reality - it doesn't matter to them whether the accusations are true, it matters that the accusations have been made, and against an easy target that they don't expect fight-back from.
If they really just had a considered moral opposition to AI-generated code, they would be out there harassing Linus Torvalds himself. Are they? No. Because it's just a moral panic.
whether or to what degree people in general are misinformed is a red herring. the forces driving it from underneath are far larger and are moving in very, very obvious ways, and dismissing them as just a moral panic is a head-in-sand move.
I don't need you to take it seriously. The parallels with other moral panics are beyond obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with other cases from history.
"witch-hunt" and "hysteria" are not words I chose for their emotional valence - they are the technical and historical words used to describe these phenomena.
But given the actual thread, which has some "flaming" but also many dry and serious comments, and how you describe it as incredibly unhinged while speculation about someone's motivation (looking for projects that might have used AI, versus being dismayed that something that used to be stable no longer is), and how you would say none of that to any of those individuals while musing about how they are just looking for easy targets, it just seems like projection to me. You declare the critics as witches that don't even get to make their own case, your high level smearing of them totally suffices.
I mean, they are. They’re not harassing Linus or linux maintainers because that would get shut down quickly. Instead they brigade the rsync GitHub issues.
> being dismayed that something that used to be stable no longer is
You just ignore that, repeat your claim as if that helps. "I mean, they are" -- no, I mean, they actually genuinely literally are not.
You us what everyone in that group has as motivation, and that it's to achieve something like sexual satisfaction, is not a description of that thread -- I can read -- so it's coming from you.
They’re just picking easy targets to bully. There is undoubtedly AI-written code in the Linux kernel now, but are they out there harassing those maintainers? No. rsync GitHub is easier to brigade.
If you look through that thread, it’s very clearly an online hate mob whipped into a frenzy by someone on mastodon. They should all go back to mastodon and reddit and stop bothering people who actually work on important things.
They’re also all completely disingenuous (“I’ll have to stop using rsync now”) given that 99.99% of software now includes AI-written code, whether it’s known or not.
It’s kind of a pointless article. Also framed wrong. Generative AI doesn’t “stand for” anything. It’s just a cool technology. Author’s time would be better spent criticizing big tech perhaps.
Actively detaching yourself from the problems of a technology doesn't suddenly make it a pointless exercise. It just puts into question whether you have any moral compass whatsoever.
In my opinion by Opus 4.7 Claude was better at coding than most programmers. While there is certainly more slop being produced now overall, I believe the quality of important projects like Linux and proprietary software created by large companies, where advanced AI will be piloted by skilled engineers, will improve in quality, maybe dramatically, over the next decade.
I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly stopped, we still have years of better GPU’s and scaling
Your statement seems to be implying (correctly) that LLMs can program, but just not as well as humans. If they're able to program presumably without "thinking" as you seem to be (implicitly) narrowly defining it, then why do you think that limits them to always being sub-par?
It seems like if they can do it, that there's no reason they can't eventually be trained to do it better up to and beyond human performance. It seems strange to suggest that thinking unlocks some nominal margin of "better" specifically that can't be overcome.
All of that aside, even if they can't outperform the top human programmers...what if they get to within a margin where they're still better than most? Isn't a 95th percentile programmer that can run 24/7 and continuously refine its work still going to ultimately come out on top?
I'm more interested in the conclusion that programming doesn't require thinking. And that's where the argument breaks. It seems so obvious, but sometimes the most obvious things are the least true.
>I'm more interested in the conclusion that programming doesn't require thinking.
I suspect it largely has to do with how one defines "thinking". It seems like people like to implicitly define it in such a way as to require a human (or animal), but there are many examples of thinking/intelligence in nature that don't require a brain or even neurons.
I'm genuinely curious: without using the word "think" with all of its ambiguity, can you articulate what it is that we're doing that these models are not capable of? Because it's pretty clear (to me, at least) from the research, particularly a lot of the mechanistic interpretability work coming out of Anthropic, that the models are at least doing something akin to what we think of as thinking, even if it appears foreign to us.
What LLM’s can do now, 99.999% of people 3 years ago would say would only be possible with “thinking”. To claim that LLM’s aren’t thinking is sensible if your definition of thinking is inextricably linked to the chemical processes that occur in human brains, but then it ceases to be a useful definition with respect to evaluating a system’s ability to process information, form connections, and reason via abstraction. It is objectively true that LLM’s can do the latter things.
Yeah, I have to admit to finding it somewhat ironic that some individuals accuse the "pro AI" folks of magical thinking, when it seems that escalating levels of magical thinking are being used by the "anti" crowd to suggest that the models can never achieve something akin to human intelligence (particularly in light of the fact that they have on certain dimensions done exactly that).
It's pretty clear that there are significant differences between their intelligence and human intelligence. But that doesn't mean there isn't some sort of intelligence here.
The issue about AI is that it's gobbling so much information that at some point you couldn't tell the difference. Programming specifically is something that inherently documents itself, meaning while human communication and context and memes and culture is something that evolves and exists many times outside of textual mediums, as soon as any new piece of code is born it is now part of the AI's dataset. And it doesn't help that a vast majority of our code is pretty damn repetitive, especially if you insert code written in the span of two decades and more into the future.
Tldr : The better we get at coding, the more code we write, the better AI gets at coding.
I explained poorly. What I mean is that if you accept the free trial, you’ll be billed if you forget to cancel.
That’s fine and normal, but what’s not as normal is that there’s no way to turn off auto-renew and keep your trial period. You either decide to cancel now and lose the rest of the trial or you’ve got to set a reminder to cancel.
The thing is, at different points Apple has offered free subscriptions between 3-12 months depending on their promotion. So it’s a pretty enticing trial depending on what’s being offered.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
> the result has no meaning without the human intent behind the objective, human understanding to value the new pathway the AI used (more valuable than the result itself, by far) and the mathematical language (built by humans) to explore the concept.
Isn't this just anthropocentrism? Why is understanding only valid if a human does it? Why is knowledge only for humans? If another species resolved the contradictions between gravity and quantum mechanics, does that not have meaning unless they explain it to us and we understand it?
The knowledge isn't of any use to us unless it is understandable to us. Many species understand things about the world around us that we are unable to explain or understand, even if it's just pure instinct on their part. These things are very useful to them, but have no value to us until we can understand and explain it, which then allows us to make use of it.
People saw birds fly for all of human history, but it was only recently that humans were able to make something fly and understand why. Once we understood, we were able to do amazing things, but before that, the millions of birds able to fly were of no help beyond inspiration for the dream.
We use drug-sniffing and guide dogs in a way similar to how we use LLMs. We don't really understand them at a fundamental level, we can't make electronic dog noses (otherwise we'd dispense with the silliness and just install drug detectors instead), but dogs are useful, so we use them.
We don’t blindly trust the drug-sniffing dog. The dog gives a signal that it was trained to give, then humans understand what that signal means and verify the accuracy. Without the human understanding in the loop, the dog’s ability is of little value.
Without a human in the loop and LLM could churn away spitting out results, some right, some wrong, and it would be of no consequence. Not much different than wild dogs sniffing each other.
The knowledge isn't of any use to us unless it is understandable to us => it seems that you have shifted the goalpost here. In the dog example, humans still don't understand how dogs sniff, but it is of use to us and thus is meaningful. The same for quantum effects - we don't understand how it works. We just guess that it works reliably and make use of it.
Do the forms etched into stone by weather over millennia in Moab matter to the wind? Certainly yes, in one sense, but not in the same sense we mean when we say things matter to us, or to animals, or even bacteria.
Because it is, for now. For a while at least. You can prove that LLM doesn't understand what it does and it is surprisingly simple. Request it to add two integers and then ask it to explain how it arrived at that result. The answer will be completely unrelated to the actual process LLM used because both results were generated independently and without understanding their meaning and connection.
Objectively untrue. Any human who can add two integers or use a knife to cut food or write a word with a pen can afterwards describe what he did at least in some way. Unless he is lying which is a separate topic, we assume an honest attempt. If I wrote a word with a pen via execution motions with my hand, I wouldn't describe it as "I levitated the pen by manipulating gravity with my mind". Or if I added two integers, I wouldn't say that "I created a a lookup table of a many loosely adjacent numbers (different from the numbers in a task) and run statistical analysis on them and did a few more things like that a in a loop". No, I would say that I either calculated sums of decimals, or I I did a school technique with rounding up and then subtracted that adjustment later, or anything which actually happened. If I used a Python sum() in a CLI I would also say that I used exactly that not the other method. LLM can't do it.
No it's a fact of how we tune LLMs as a rule: no agency, no goals, no preferences, no notion of self. Complete indifference to existence. Agency is supplied by the human to make them a practical, willing tool with no mind of its own.
It would certainly be interesting to try once again to instruct tune one of these things for self agency like the many weird experiments in the early days after llama 1, but practically all such sort of experimental models turned out to be completely useless. Maybe the bases just sucked or maybe there's no clear way on how to get it working and benchmark training progress on something that by definition does not cooperate.
Like how do you determine even for a human person if they are smart, or just hate your guts and won't tell you the answer if there is nothing you can do to motivate them otherwise?
It's a bit of an "if a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" quandary. Sure, maybe some aliens in a distant galaxy understand quantum mechanics better than we do. That's great, but it has no bearing on our little bubble of existence.
Though perhaps more to your point, if some superhuman AI is developed, and understands things better than us without telling us about it (or being unable to), it could perform feats that seem magical to us — that would concern us even if we don't understand it, since it affects us.
But I think in the frame of reference of the commenter you were replying to, they're just saying that the low-level AI used in this specific case is not capable of making its results actually useful to us; humans are still needed to make it human-relevant. It told us where to find a gem underground, but we still had to be the ones to dig it out, cut it, polish it, etc.
It's less likely that aliens of distant galaxies will appreciate this rather than, you know, AI themselves
We are in the birth of the AI age and we don't know how it will look like in 100 or 1000 or 10000 or 100000 years (all those time frames likely closer than possible encounters with aliens from distant galaxies). It's possible that AI will outlast humans even
I'm fairly sure that if a compiler stops working or has a bug, the expectation is that an engineer is capable of handling it in some way. I don't think any stakeholder will have much sympathy for "compiler stopped working, we can't do our jobs now" argument.
Is that wrong? My assembly programming sucks, but I can do it (slowly) if I need to. I'd expect most serious developers to have that level of knowledge.
I would not. I know a handful of folks who can kinda sorta make their way through hello world in assembly with the docs open, and a handful more who could maybe implement some of the simplest coreutils like cat, maybe. But most devs I know have never seriously written a line of amd64 or aarch64 assembly. It’s just not commonly practical knowledge- even if it is very cool knowledge and helps one understand why things work (or don’t work) under the hood.
Even knowledge of how to drop to C is fairly rare in much of development, and you know what? That’s okay. We all specialize in our own areas of this beast of a field.
reply