You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.
I'm working on paving over the Amazon rainforest so I can build the world's largest roller coaster, but for some reason people keep trying to talk me out of it. Good thing I have this bucket of sand to put my head in so I can tune them out.
But intentionally blinding yourself to the debate and plowing ahead anyway (which is how I interpreted your parent comment) sounds like willful ignorance.
You most definitely don't have to reply. I wasn't really expecting you to.
> I've already moved on
Imagine there's a certain kind of candy that you enjoy. Now imagine you learn that candy is manufactured by literal child slaves, its ingredients include the ground-up bones of an endangered species (which happens to be carcinogenic), and the company which makes it donates all of their profits to political causes that you strongly disagree with. Would you reconsider buying said candy in the future?
Are there any facts or perspectives that you could become aware of which might change your mind about the ethics surrounding large language models? Or is it an entirely closed case for you?
I personally try to keep an open mind about pretty much everything. It's not that I don't have opinions, but they're always subject to change.
To put my cards on the table regarding my current opinions of the current subject: I've historically been pretty anti-copyright; I believe that information wants to be free. However, I'm unsettled by the uneven application of existing intellectual property laws (if these laws are going to exist they should be enforced consistently). I'm undecided as to whether I think LLMs themselves should be considered derivative works of their training material, but I definitely think they're often used to produce derivative works (sometimes unintentionally/unknowingly). None of that means they aren't useful for building cool stuff or that the technology behind them isn't amazing.
New php extension https://github.com/hparadiz/ext-gnu-grep
A Demo showing how to stream webrtc to KDE Wayland overlay. https://github.com/hparadiz/camera-notif
A fun little tool that captures stdout/stderr on any running process. https://github.com/hparadiz/bpf_write_monitor
Then I upgraded my 10 year old hand written framework to a new version that supports sqlite and postgres on top of existing MySQL support https://github.com/Divergence/framework
But then I was like eh lemme benchmark every PHP orm that exists just to check my framework's orm....
https://github.com/hparadiz/the-php-bench
And published the results.... Here
https://the-php-bench.technex.us/
And then I decided to vibe code a simulation of the entire local steller group https://earth.technex.us
Followed by my simulation of the Artemis 3 landing sites at the lunar South pole https://artemis-iii.technex.us/?scale=1.000#South-Pole
And I left the best for last.....
https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon
A brand new task manager written in C for Linux that supports a plugin architecture with an event bus. It's literally the best gui Linux task manager ever. Still working on it.
I'm not even talking about my paid job. This is me just fucking around.
If you think none of this stuff is cool I don't even respect you as a dev.
Agendas like, "let's not check our API key into a public github repo" or "Let's not store passwords in plaintext" or "Don't expose customer data via a public api"?
Moreover, all of the tools that the people who build software use are also cool stuff.
It's also not just code and software that is benefitting from these new tools. Use of LLMs in engineering tasks is blowing up right now.
I'm really not trying to be a hater but when people tell me that we're already in the AI Nirvana it gives me pause.
While there's a loud minority who love to debate the topic, LLM use has become status quo on most products and projects pretty much across the board, and most people are happy to acknowledge 1:1 that their personal productivity is some multiple of [all time before they started using LLMs]. At the same time, you can surely appreciate why many are quiet about their personal usage because there's no upside to discussing it but there's lots of people just hanging out waiting to tell you that you're imagining the whole productivity thing when you do.
At some point, the path of least resistance is to let the loud minority be loud while you get an extraordinary amount of work done.
Can we point to any hard metric that has improved in the industry in the last 2-3 years? It explains why work hours are short, everything is cheaper and non-AI companies are experiencing cost reductions. Services are more reliable. Except, where is all that?
You could argue that it's yet to come but to argue that it's already here... how do you justify that?
I can see from a lot of replies the "cool" threshold is undefined, but here goes:
For myself it let me finish a project I started a year ago for measuring how much home energy efficiency upgrades will reduce my AC usage. I bought a pile of Raspberry Pi Picos and turned them mostly into temperature reading devices, but also one that can detect when my AC turns on.
So I can record how often my AC runs and I can record the temperature at various points around the house, which lets me compare like-for-like before-and-after.
The easy but unrealistic way to accomplish what I want is to use Python. It gives me access to a file system, a shell, and all sorts of other niceties. But I wanted to run these on two AA batteries and based upon my measurements they would last about 2 weeks. I tested using C instead and they should last 4 months. That's long enough for my use case. There's enough flash storage for that time period too.
However this means I need to write all the utilities for configuring the Picos myself. There's all sorts of annoying things such as having to set the clock (picos lose it anytime they lose power), having to write directly to flash memory (no operating system), having to write a utility for exporting that data from flash memory, and so on.
And AI coding let me burn through a pile of code I knew how to write but didn't care to spend my weekends doing so.
The pattern is the same for my friends who are software devs. And yeah, you're probably never going to see any of it, but that's not why they're making it, they don't want the maintenance burden.
Yes, I'm suing you, since it's my stuff now, I've licensed your code 5minutes ago.
Prove me wrong at court, you have create it...
hardly. at best you're going to be asking a robot to build questionable stuff with other people's LEGOs