NeutralCrane

If you don’t think Europe shares our values, I’m curious who you think does?

uv has been around for less than two years. It’s on track to become the default choice, it’s just a matter of time.

It really isnt

They aren’t changing their opinion though. They aren’t seeking to scale back non-AI tech.

Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.

There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.

I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.

This is the fairy tale as it’s often told. Doesn’t match up with my experience. The incompetence and waste in private organizations is staggering. The free market efficiency and competency of the free market is greatly overstated.

It’s entirely possible to spread yourself too thin across too many interests, but the solution to that isn’t to “go all in on one thing”.

“Learning” as a concept is too ill defined to use as a distinction. What is learning? How is what a human does different from what an LLM does?

In the end it doesn’t matter. Here “learning” means observing an existing work and using it to produce something that is not a copy.

Copying a style isn’t theft, full stop. You can’t copyright style. As an individual, you wouldn’t be liable for producing a work of art that is similar in style to someone else’s, and there is an enormous number of artists today whose livelihood would be in jeopardy if that was the case.

Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted in AI. They are rooted in capitalism. Fighting against AI as a technology is foolish. It won’t work, and even if you had a magic wand to make it disappear, the underlying problem remains.

We do make this argument all the time though. Film is probably the number one example in my mind. After actors, we celebrate directors more than any other individual in film. Directors often don’t write the script. They don’t handle the camera or the lighting or sound. They don’t create the music. They don’t do the editing in post. They don’t do the acting. But they do direct all of the people doing those things to achieve an overall vision, and we recognize that has significant artistic merit. Directors are not artists, or cinematographers, or composers, or actors, or visual effects artists, or sound technicians. But they are still artists, because art is more than the technical skill to produce something.

Except it uses existing art transformatively, which means that even under our absurd, dystopian IP laws, it’s not exploitation. There isn’t a single artist out there who wouldn’t be running afoul of copyright law if that wasn’t the case.

It’s been insane to me to watch the “creative class”, long styled as the renegade and anti-authoritarian heart of society, transform into hardline IP law cheerleaders overnight as soon as generative law burst onto the scene.

And the environmental concerns are equally disingenuous, particularly coming from the video game industry. Please explain to me how running a bunch of GPUs in a data center to serve peoples LLM requests is significantly more wasteful than distributing those GPUs among the population and running people’s video games?

At the end of the day, the only coherent criticism of AI is that it stands to eliminate the livelihood of a large number of people, which is perfectly valid concern. But that’s not a flaw of AI, it’s a flaw of the IP laws and capitalistic system we have created. That is what needs addressing. Trying to uphold that system by stifling AI as a technology is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

That’s the point. No one cares about line smoothing algorithms but they lose their mind if it’s background textures or throwaway voice lines.

Not recognizing societal causal effects on radicalization is letting even more people off the hook.

I don’t think those are the extreme views, those are the views being overreacted to.

> If it takes a few thousand pages of textbooks or other reference material to gain competence

This is a huge assumption and not one I’m sure holds up. In my experience gaining competence is often more a matter of hands on experimentation and experience, and the thousands of pages of reference material are there to get you to the point where you can start getting hands on experience, and debug your experiments when they don’t work. If AI can meaningfully cut back on that by more efficiently getting people to the experimentation stage, it absolutely will be more effective. And so far in my limited experience, it seems extremely promising.

I recommend engaging with ideas next time, rather than making reductive, ad-hominem, thought-terminating statements.

This seems like an overly reductive worldview. Do you really think there isn't genuine interest in LLM tools among developers? I absolutely agree there are people pushing AI in places where it is unneeded, but I have not found software development to be one of those areas. There are lots of people experimenting and hacking with LLMs because of genuine interest and perceived value.

At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't).

The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.

> It seems like critical thinking, nuance, and just basic caution have been turned off like a light-switch for far too many people.

Ironically, this response contains no critical thinking or nuance.

You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.

I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

Microservices have nothing to do with the underlying hosting architecture. Microservices can all run and communicate on a single machine. There will be a local network involved, but it absolutely does require the internet or multiple machines.

It’s the equivalent of someone running on a platform where there would be world peace and no hunger.

That’s great and all as an ideal but realistically impossible so if you don’t have anything more substantial to offer then you aren’t really worth taking seriously.

Ironically, some of the worst tech debt I’ve ever dealt with has been because the initial implementation was an overengineered disaster by an dev who thought they were solving all possible problems before we really understood what all possible problems are.

“Zero tech debt” is an impossibility. The most elegant solutions incur some kind of tech debt, it’s just less than others. More realistic than “zero tech debt” is a continuing dedication to addressing tech debt combined with using implementations that minimize “one way doors”.

Are there other alternatives you have been looking at? I’m just getting started looking at these LLM gateways. I was under the impression that LiteLLM was pretty popular but you are not the only one here with negative things to say about it.

My point is that what people say and what people do are not the same thing. It may sound self-explanatory that if people don’t trust AI, they will avoid AI products, but I’m interested in data proving this. Self-reported attitudes regarding AI are not the same as customers actively avoiding products using AI.

We are just now looking into LLM Gateways and LiteLLM was one I was considering looking into. I’m curious to hear more about what makes the code quality garbage.

That doesn’t say anything about pushing people away from using products with AI though. People are enormously negative about the effects of social media, and yet social media use is incredibly pervasive and sticky.

If it competes with a PS5, but runs my Steam Library, it’s automatically won IMO.

> All that means is the companies charge everyone else more to subsidize the cost of those who are more at risk.

Literally the purpose of insurance

I guess my confusion is that there already are ways to query this data with DuckDB or something like that. So is the magic here that it’s Postgres? What makes being able to query something in Postgres special? And when we say it’s now queryable by Postgres, does this mean that it takes that data and stores it in your PG db? Or it remains in S3 and this is a translation layer for querying with PG?

Fascinating. My friends and I were obsessed with stickpage.com in the early to mid 2000s, where Xiao Xiao and a bunch of imitators and derivatives were hosted.

I kind of miss that era of the internet where there were random, niche sites you would fall in love with and it wasn’t all just a post on YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or something.