Debate over, all sides have been expressed.

How many PR's do y'all tend to have in flight at once? I sometimes think being a native (C++) developer makes me have a different take on some of this. Maybe if I was a JS dev making quick changes with 5 PR's a day I'd care more about this.

Which is exactly why you can't use it as an example, there is no control. This is basic stuff.

Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.

The configuration capability of factories is only there such that you can then go on to run the repeatable process. No one would build configurable factories if you were only going to run one unit.

With that out the window, the factory analogue breaks down entirely. Think of something else.

I'm sure that doesn't matter much to big tech folks seeking to fill that promotion packet though, or to executives seeking to demonstrate the overwhelming utility of this new income stream.

If they have only the rights that their human creators have, then access to them cannot be sold, in the exact same way that I cannot sell you a database that I have collected filled with copyrighted material. The "humans do training too" argument only holds if you imbue LLMs with similar rights to humans.

I am allowed to sell myself (in a very limited capacity) to others for them to exploit my training, even if that training was on protected material, which is a privilege humans should have, but machines should not.

I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.

People thinking that this isn't the case everywhere need a reality check. Most software is riddled with obvious security issues. If we can remediate them with AI, great, but don't be thinking that this is something that we could only have dealt with with AI. Enough attention and prioritization of these issues would also have sorted it.

Ask yourself if we weren't currently in an era of AI-focus and AI was just another boring tool, if we would be bothering to do this sort of thing. Loads of us still aren't bothering with basic static analysis.

By this logic, we cannot blame anyone who is the agent of anything that we deem to be inevitable. Just because it is eventually going to happen, that means you are completely non-culpable for being the person who does it. This could obviously be extended into justifying pretty much anything.

Odd argument considering you could also say lifting heavy objects makes you more effective over time, as it makes you stronger.

Also not a fan of the assumption that software is a lucrative career to the degree implied here, similar to pro atheletes. Perhaps in certain parts of the US, but not elsewhere, where it's just a regular decently paying job. This also changes the replacement economics depending on where the true cost of LLM's end up landing. There's plenty of jobs that could be replaced today if we had infinite access to capital, but are still at no risk.

Perhaps it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if US engineer salaries deflated to be more in line with the actual difficulty of the work relative to other professions.

I'm just about done with Blood in the Machine, and didn't quite remember the authors name so expected Sean to be critiquing this one as overly Marxist, since it is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the luddites and the working class in general, but apparently not.

In any case, I think it's important that everyone in tech follow Seans example here and gain a historical perspective of the Luddite movement. Whilst the movement won't go the same way, the historical incentives around labour centralization are extremely similar.

Done some reading. Thanks to the article to waking me up to this fact at least. I didn't realize that the epsilon provided by languages tends to be the one that only works around 1.0, and if you want to use episilons globally (which the article would say is generally a bad idea) you need to be more dynamic as your ranges, and potential errors, increase.

- The copyright issue is more about equality and justice and any conceptual belief in copyright. I think many leftists would like copyright to be abolished, but take justice as a higher priority. You do not get to abolish copyright as soon as it becomes convenient to the rich and powerful. The hypocrisy is the issue.

- The second seems to hinge on the belief that leftists are all radical, nihilistic materialists and thus can't make spiritual arguments. I agree that these arguments have not so much in vogue in mainstream culture during the era of neoliberalism, but there's a long storied tradition here. Some form of transcendentalism is necessary in any sort of communistic project.

- The third seems like a category error. The consistent axis of critique is around the liberty of the individual vs the larger power structure. Individuals can do weird, technological art in a decentralized manner without contradiction.

- Fourth is just a prioritization thing. The left mourn job losses where the redundant are abandoned to manage in this unfair system on their own, but not so much as they mourn the imminent un-inhabitability of our one planet.

My take on this sort of thought is that the left/right wing axis is mostly about your core belief in whether humans have personal agency, or "free will". The more leftist you are, the more you believe that humans do not have very much independent agency at all, and therefore are much more suspect of systems that can so broadly alter the inputs that cause humans to make decisions and form opinions, especially in such a centrally controlled manner.