stop yapping and post more yuri
I spent some time earlier this year trying to piece together my thoughts on LLMs. This turned out to be a grand waste of time, because very few people care about it. And I was writing way too defensively, too.
I've previously left a vague sentence to point out that my employer has a vested interest in LLMs, but I think I haven't been clear enough. I am employed by one of the big LLM model providers, though I am in a completely different department.
I've recently started using the For You feed on Bluesky more, because it surfaces some stuff that I would not naturally get in my Following feed in satisfying amounts (like artwork of fictional characters being sapphic at one another). However, this exposes me to more LLM discourse, from both sides, because I have friends on both sides of the discourse.
And to the discourse I have one fairly short message:
I think if you are pro-LLM you should shut the fuck up about the LLM discourse and stick to doing cool stuff to prove to others that your viewpoint is workable, and if you are anti-LLM you should shut the fuck up about the LLM discourse and stick to doing cool stuff to prove to others that your viewpoint is workable. Or don't, but have some fucking nuance I don't know. It's just tiring reading the same shit over again and then one side finding a poor sample of the other side and brigading on them. LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE AND PROVE THEM WRONG THROUGH THAT.
Take this from here if nothing else.
I'm just profoundly tired of the discourse, because I am not radical enough to find either side owning the other side reinvigorating.
On one hand, for programming stuff, LLMs (especially the overpowered ones I get handed by my workplace) are surprisingly good at some bug triage. That's probably my main use case for them, especially in codebases which are Java-flavoured Golang (where everything is an interface and the IDE is not helping me cmd-click through to the implementation).
On the other hand, if you try to convince me that LLM-first software development lifecycle is the only future, and I will be left behind, then I will probably ask you to leave me behind. I get very little joy from having an LLM solve programming for me. The puzzle and the quirks of building programs were my special interest, before capitalism decided to get in the way of it.12
So, having one foot on each side, I get punched equally by strawmen and spite from both sides. This annoys me. Do better with your arguments. Maybe even remember there are (still, for now) humans on the other side of the screen.
Before someone snipes me, I'm only talking about programming. I find the use of generative models for imagery and music straight up abhorrent. I'm more lenient about programming, because programmers built the Torment Nexus, programmers deserve the Torment Nexus. But leave the others the fuck alone.↩
Oh and the economical and ecological impact sucks too. But that's just how our society works right now. I really enjoyed how All Of A Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi describes capitalism (as a system that sustains the city-now-here by taking away from the outside-later-elsewhere, until it has to shrink the city-now-here to have more space to draw resources from).↩