Alex M

@fesshole that is genuinely horrific. Those tokens you burn are actual resources in the real world, like water and fossil fuels.

@anon_opin@mastodon.social in more civilized times software used to be published. Starting from about the mis to late 90s, software started being unleashed on its users.

Anyone working for a company that's not drinking the "ai" koolaid that's looking for software engineers? I've been programming for over 20 years and I'm comfortable with a host of languages (c#, f#, python, go, rust, ocaml, lisp). I've led teams, mentored engineers and worked on every layer of an application, from platform to frontend. I'm looking for something remote or based in Edinburgh. #GetFediHired #jobsearch #fedihired

@fesshole@mastodon.social just use a vpn?

@hanscees@ieji.de @davidho@mastodon.world it's not a very useful question, so I don't think it requires a thorough answer. We don't have a good definition of what consciousness is, and I don't think hypothesising it's three llms in a trenchcoat is going to get us any closer. It does look like there's a next word prediction component in the brain (very roughly speaking) but I don't think anyone has proposed that's related to consciousness.

@jiub@not.an.evilcyberhacker.net do you have a minute to talk about our lord and saviour vim classic: https://vim-classic.org/

@hanscees@ieji.de @davidho@mastodon.world no

@rzeta0@mathstodon.xyz the truth of the implication tells you nothing about the truth of its converse

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange option-(left|right) arrow has worked as long as I can remember

@ajn142@infosec.exchange @fesshole@mastodon.social cherry blues would like a word

@peter can confirm. Going through the same at $employer. Wild

@fesshole chances are they may have made a good candidate

@johncarlosbaez Gerry Sussman has been exploring similar ideas for computing: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute/

@slava I was actually thinking about a restricted form of this idea a while back. Stack-based, N stacks, you can switch between them, but the elements of the stacks are functions with the same domain and range and you use function composition to combine them.

@Kadin2048 he's not using llms. Someone used claude to solve a problem posed by Knuth in volume 4. Knuth was impressed by the result.

@dalias @fesshole that's a myopic way to look at it. Most likely the employer doesn't care enough about you to want to deskill you by exposing you to "cognitoharazds". They're following hype and/or they're misguided. I'd be tempted to say they don't even have a strategy around the use of llms, but that's just speculation. So you're not really sabotaging the company by burning tokens. What you're doing is moral posturing that makes you feel better about yourself because you're the main character in your story and you're sticking it to the man. But that's a pointless exercise that only ends up sabotaging the cause you're supposedly fighting for (taking down capitalism, llm hype, late stage capitalism death cult). By silently complying, and using the tokens you're just bolstering their policy.

@dalias @fesshole is it really mandatory? Have you taken it up with the employer? How do your workmates feel about it? Have you talked to them? If the employer is threatening to fire you because you don't use llms then there are labour laws that can protect you (at least in the civilized countries). Even if you are forced to use llms, you can do it in more productive ways. Use it to save work if you can, and use the spare time to join/form a union, raise awareness with your peers on how this is damaging to their careers, do something that actually has a chance of changing things.

@dalias @fesshole ok, carry on doing your thing then.

@slava I thought about this a bit more, and I don't see a way to make it turing complete without basically ending up with a typed lambda calculus with extra steps

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I'm sure they'd find a home, if you take them to your local oxfam :)

@lnicola@mapstodon.space @nixCraft@mastodon.social In what way is the difference meaningful?

@lnicola@mapstodon.space @nixCraft@mastodon.social While technically (almost) true, the difference doesn't seem relevant in this context. The caveat is because you seem to imply that scraping inherently breaks copyright laws, which it does not. I point you to google, if you have any doubts. Sure, saying scraping when the original source used distilling is sloppy. But that doesn't make it "bad journalism".

@lnicola@mapstodon.space @nixCraft@mastodon.social There's many ways of scraping. Just because llm companies have aggressive scrapers that disregard robots.txt and don't throttle requests, doesn't mean all scrapers are badly behaved. But generalising from "people complain about llm scrapers" (rightly so) to "all scraping is bad" (I think you may have implied that all scraping breaks copyright as well, which is a non sequitur) is just as sloppy as mixing up scraping with distilling

@lnicola@mapstodon.space @nixCraft@mastodon.social It's not. You made a point of the difference. You could have ignored the sloppy wording. But you chose to have a go at what you perceived as a post biased against llms.

@bweller@mstdn.social @lnicola@mapstodon.space @nixCraft@mastodon.social Even if you don't agree with @lnicola@mapstodon.space, it's ok to keep a civilized tone. Yes, he made a strong statement that he hasn't backed (that mixing scraping and distilling is bad reporting). I'm still waiting for him to say exactly why the difference matters in this context.