Hacker News Reader

> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let the LLMs have the UI patterns and libraries I've developed it would dilute my IP, like it has Studio Ghibli's art style.

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance...

Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future?

I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.

I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives.

Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.

I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant.

Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).

Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.

> technology rarely yields a net positive

This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with.

I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.

> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.

I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.

Why would that be bad? Why is more better?

Would you ask that your starving great-n-grandparents worried about whether they're able to feed the infant that would later become your ancestor?

Isn't that a food distribution problem not a food production one?

It is now, because of mass production, industrialization of agriculture, and Haber Bosch process.

Do YOU want to die of starvation? Or are you ok with just others dying?

typical emotionally charged, false dichotomy.

To your question I'm not ok with either. We will likely ALL die from the impact of industrialization.

> To your question I'm not ok with either.

Then you must be ok with mass food production, there's no third way.

I have looked. Malnutrition has effected humanity throughout history. But it correlates more with systems than technological development.

I concede nutrient intake correlates with mass production we've seen in the last hundred years.

The argument is fallacious and prevails because it supports a certain narrative.

Without this kind of food production maybe we'd have 50% the carrying capacity, but 20% of the actual population. What's your utility function? Is it the total happiness function that requires us to reproduce as much as possible even if conditions are shit, or is it the average happiness per person?

It's odd to me that you live in a place where it's hard to find a theatre. Living in a cosmopolitan city there's so many theatres with anything from professional shows to amateur dramatics all at very reasonable price points.

Sure, Edinburgh, London, New York, got plenty enough.

My point is that technology displaces or replace activities.

In many cities there are no theatre. To be clear I meant performance theatres by the way.

We used to consume live performance. Drama, dance and whatnot. Comedy for instance is now for the masses, more or less controlled. Costing pennies to distribute via air or streaming platforms. They compete with a more valuable but harder to afford media. so they win.

Is it a net positive that we can converse in almost real time for virtually no cost, with niche communities on the other side of the world. Yes. Anyone can still walk into a Café or the park and engage in conversations with others. But overall, the compounding of all tech advancements and what they displace, I think, is an overall net negative.

Not because I'm an anti progress or losing my job because of technology, quite the opposite. I sat down and wrote down the list. How technology enables VS affects me personally, and other persona. From upperclass worker in New York, to the cocoa bean farmer in Ivory Coast. Overall it appears that technology isn't benefitial to humanity.

I then challenge those who disagree. Typically, they haven't taken into account the negative seriously. The few who concede to do so, eventually agree that the question is in fact complicated and abandon the debate.

It doesn't mean I'm right. I read the detractors in there, perhaps there is something I missed. So far there isn't.

Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.

Gemma4 is apache2 licensed.

I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'.

Open source is the only way forward, I agree.

> Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are.

Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...

Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests.

I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.

Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more.

If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.

But I considered that when I said "Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally."

You can have a great LLM model with vast coding knowledge running on your computer right now, for free. It won't be the best one nor the fastest one, but still a very good one.

You must not be serious. Every single person using LLMs, whether paid or free tiers or open models, whether using them for chat or as part of some kind of data pipeline - so possibly without even knowing they're using them - benefits.

"Few individuals" get money mostly for providing LLMs as a service. As far as tech businesses go, this is refreshingly straightforward, literally just charging money for providing some useful service to people. Few tech companies have anything close to a honest business model like this.

> seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies.

I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property).

I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit.

> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs

The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment.

Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression.

So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination.

Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?

Corporations are not humans.

And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it.

So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.

So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.

There are some local benefits, there are some local and global costs. My point is that we are in a strongly net negative situation, mr Jack.

"Samantha Altgirl and the Involuntary Beneficiaries" (Russian doomer band)

Is the argument "LLMs must be greatly beneficial because they get everywhere"?

The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything.

It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely.

Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).

It does help us a lot, actually, and the treatment should be analogical. It's not a cop-out, it's reality.

Including sociopaths in humanity benefits and protects only them. And it renders the rest of us - their victims - powerless.

If as a society in general we agree that we have a right to keep serious transgressors in prisons, then we should seriously consider keeping there people who are fundamentally incapable of aligning with humanity values - the golden rule of reciprocity in particular.

Tell me you follow a value system invented by sociopaths without... actually reflecting on what value system you follow, and whether you chose it intentionally - or just bought into it by following the path of least resistance and are now inextricably stuck.

As a society in general, do you agree that unjust laws, false positives in enforcement, prison slavery, and endemic rampant abuse of authority, are things that exist?

As a society in general, do you think those are a legitimate price to pay "to keep serious transgressors in prisons"?

As a society in general, do you think serious transgressors more often get locked up for life, or more often get a slap on the wrist and a quiet promotion to more serious transgressors?

As a society in general, how do you know - falsifiably! - that prisons are even effective for their stated purpose?

Just like prisons perpetuate crime, excluding sociopaths and their behavior from what is thinkable as human only permits us to ignore them. And to contrive our own excuses for their sub-criminal abusive behaviors - which is the primary way in which they blend in and remain beyond reproach. You are their enabler. Go figure out how to stop being that.

What are cancer cells, but a subset of cells whose modus operandi transgresses our values? They're not some unique abomination, and I think the analogy is apt.

> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs

This is not true tho. The moment LLM will be necessary, we will all have to pay to the monopoly owners, as much as they can extract.

But, they will never pay to us.

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on.

Same here.

I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet.

I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies.

I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry.

All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon.

I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products.

Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?

Im of the view that I think slop is a force for good if it gets people back into engaging in the real world. If that means destroying the web as we know then frankly so be it.

THere are serious problems that have prevailed into society because of the side costs of the web. I also see sovreign centralisation of the web emerging in the future with identity being a key theme.

> there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on

Could you publish under AGPLv3, so any AI users with recognizable patterns from your code can get in trouble?

I always did apache, I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people and the AI companies would find a way around it. Companies in foreign countries would still get it and then the companies here could get it from them, or something like that. They're probably already trying to figure out a way to obfuscate when the LLM directly copies from a licensed codebase. And there's that site that rewrites GPL repos so they can be used commercially. On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.

> I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people

I don't understand what you mean here. AGPLv3 guarantees the four essential freedoms to all users. It only restricts developers from removing users' rights, like the GPL family.

> On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.

For that we should support NGOs fighting for users' rights like https://eff.org.

> Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay

This is already happening and you don't have to look far to find it.

Personally HN is the only site I browse and comment on anymore (and I'm on here less than I once was). The vast, vast majority of my time online is spent in walled off Discords and Matrix chats where I know everyone and where there's a high bar to add new people. I have no real interest in open communities anymore.

> Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem#Plot_summary

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...

    The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

    Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

    The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)

It’s a recurring theme, see dune’s references to Samuel Butler.

I say this with a multiple decades-spanning love of the game and the lore, but Warhammer 40k is what you get when teenagers try to create something immediately after reading Dune.

Most people don't care, provably from historical data. And trying to keep secret knowledge is a losing battle; as the saying goes, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Look how well that strategy served Claude with the recent source code leak

Directionally correct. But seems overly optimistic to think that moats can be kept from the prying eyes of LLMs, unless you're not interacting with the market at all.

Sounds lifted from Alpha Centauri

Scary... where can I find more of that?

There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.

As far as I can tell, the dark ages were called the dark ages because there wasn't much evidence to be found: writing was less prominent during that time.

> It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today.

You are seeing the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire a bit too rosy. Compare and contrast https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.

Population decline? Less emissions? Haven't we reached consensus that those would be welcome today? Is it time for a pro-dark-age movement?

The world is projected to hit population decline already sometime between 2060 and 2080, so I guess the younger ones of us will find out definitively whether it's a good or bad thing.

I am very sorry, but you are wrong. Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD) there was a period of not only standstill, but regression, devolution and forgetfulness. Compared with what came before, it can be rightly called the dark ages.

I am very sorry, but you are very wrong.

It's dark ages in Europe but it's really golden age in Islamic Empires which far surpassed the Greek and Roman. The epitome was the Baitul Hikmah or House of Wisfom established at the time of Abassid Caliphate [1].

>Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD)

During this time Al-Khwarizmi was born and House of Wisdom was established. His contributions in algebra (book Al-Jabr) and many others, and the word algorithm literally originated from his name [2].

Many Greek and Indian books translated to Arabic during this myth so called dark age by the Islamic Scholars.

Many many more new books were written that improved and innovated the prior knowledge. These books greatly expanding the state-of-the-art centered both in Baghdad, Iraq and Toledo, Spain.

The book Almagest by Ptolemy studied by Galileo was the Arabic translation of the Ptolemy works. Of course at the time of Galileo, Islamic astronomers knowledge and contributions have already far surpassed the Greek and the Indian.

The Islamic scholars not only translating (that it self is a progress) but also contributing to the body and foundations of knowledge not only in astronomy, but in many others in mathematics, sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), medicine, engineering, geography, psychology, politics, economy, architecture, etc.

There are numerous other polymath scholars like Al-Khwarizmi, for examples Al-Haitham, Ibnu-Sina, Ibnu-Rusd to name just a few. But European community has been in denial for so long time and in addition unfairly supressing these Islamic scholars contributions. They even literally changed the scholars name and Latinized them with lousy names like Alhazen, Avicennia, Averroes to hide the fact that they are Islamic scholars. Imagine if now people changed name of the scholar like Newton to Nawab in the literature.

Heck, even Copernicus copied diagrams from the Islamic earlier astronomers' books without proper citations, that in the modern will be plagiarism [3]. If this happen today, the university president (if plagiarised his/her book/thesis/paper) will be asked to resign.

[1] House of Wisdom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

[2] Al-Khwarizmi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi

[3] Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus [pdf]:

Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus [pdf]