Generative AI in Servo
azabani.com
azabani.com
"Easily"? No. Just check the article, it's plenty of examples of skilled programmers stopping to use A"I" because long term they discover more bugs than they would have written themselves. And you can even write the code yourself and have an LLM check it because it'll find tons of false positives.
LLM are fundamentally probabilistic text generators. We need and expect tools that have an error rate as low as the hardware error rate.
What business have projects mandating the tool I use for my contributions? I’m responsible of the quality of what I send and should be the sole arbiter of if I want to clean generated code or not. This person is basically calling all their potential contributors too stupid to reasonably use some class of tools. That’s downright insulting.
I have lost all the good will I had for Servo.
it's their project and they're entitled to set whatever rules they want
> I’m responsible of the quality of what I send
if you read the article this is is their primary concern
> I have lost all the good will I had for Servo.
I bet they're devastated
This is not the point.
Projects are free to ban vim users if they want and I’m free to say it’s utterly baffling and should be none of their business.
Rules don’t magically become acceptable because the people who put them in place were allowed to do so.
It reminds me of the opposition to static analysis I used to see sometimes a decade ago because people would be too dumb to sort out the real cases from the false positive. I’m always impressed by how change averse the field is.
> if you read the article this is is their primary concern
That’s my whole point.
They are basically implying that I’m too stupid to use some tools to produce quality code and they being the clever ones they are should shield us poor fools from ourselves.
That’s the insulting part. At least the copyright infringement angle makes sense.
Is it disappointing that drama is an important reason people contribute to Servo?
> This post is my personal opinion, not necessarily representative of Servo or my colleagues at Igalia.
...so I don't believe it's fair to say that you lost all the good will you had for Servo based on just this article.
When _writing code_, you achieve a certain level of understanding because you fundamentally need to make all the decisions yourself (and some of them are informed by factual statements).
When _reading code_, a lot of those decision points are easy to miss or take for granted which means you don't even notice there are alternatives. Furthermore, you don't look up the factual statements, therefore you have a lower level of understanding. Also you have no opportunity to review if those statements are actually true so decisions made on false assumptions get into the codebase.
Finally, reviewing code (to the same level of depth) is significantly more mentally taxing.
Yet when i try to use these tools, they fall short. They can probably be useful for generating half broken prototypes quickly because speed is more important that quality. But for real code, especially long term, they just never seem to end up breaking even.
This post somewhat restored my confidence in the world's sanity. There are still people who care about quality and who are willing to call bullshit bullshit.
EDIT: The most important part is that he links to tons of examples from other people. There's clearly a sizeable group of people who are not being heard often enough.
HN is infested with grifters, sorry, entrepreneurs think that A"I" is their ticket to quick and easy riches
part of the confidence trick is keeping up the charade that A"I" is actually intelligent and not just a sophisticated bullshit generator
and if what you saw when you honestly tried using it last week was bad, then that's no longer state of the art, the latest model will fix everything, see, this latest benchmark they-definitely-didnt-cheat-on says so
I googled it and got "Hackers/Founders is a community of tech founders." I think that is sufficiently telling of what it's really about. It's another scam to "get those socially inept nerds to work for us and make us money without even realizing they are getting less than they deserve".
You go there, meet some people, have some conversations. Sharing information is the quintessential non zero sum game humans play.
If your LLM is so great, why don't you make it add that feature, Microsoft?