For one, it's bound to teach us something about our brains. And while I'm not usually an optimist, I actually find it more likely that we'll take active steps to stop the evil applications of this if research like this is out in the open.
> Again, your doctor is more of an authority than you on medicine. It'd be hubris to think you'd understand the field better, no matter how smart you are.
You are talking to strangers on the internet. When I go see my doctor, I initiate a conversation with a certified professional subjected to serious state scrutiny. I'd indeed do well to take their medical advice to heart. Nothing similar applies to reading your comments.
Moreover, part of the reason that I do trust the doctor is that I know that their claims can be challenged and that the claims will withstand that challenge (this is in part ensured by certification and regulatory bodies, and in part by the medical community). You seem not to want to respond to such a challenge.
Here's another doctor-based analogy: Suppose my doctor suggests I suffer from a specific medical condition. Even though I know that they are the professional, it wouldn't be insane for me to voice a concern I have that the condition does not seem to fit what I'm experiencing. That's not even really a challenge to their authority – it might just be a way for me to try to understand. Now, if the doctor responds to that concern by angrily tapping his diploma saying "you know nothing, I'm the professional, bow before me you moron!", I think I'd be wise to change doctors.
> omg you don't know anything, being without the thing is primitive and everyone sophisticated uses it.
You can see how you can be accused of not actually presenting any arguments here, right? If you're gonna appeal to authority, at least back that appeal up with something.
Huh? You can accept things that are forced onto you, due to needing to earn a living, while still acknowledging that the things that are forced onto you are bad.
All I'm trying to say here is that slopcode is generally a bad idea. If you are forced to slopcode to earn a living, I am not saying you shouldn't do that ("be a purist", as you'd put it). I'm just trying to point out that HN doesn't seem to generally acknowledge that concept as being bad.
> In ten years we'll be drowning in subtle bugs introduced by the unreliable garbage that is machine-generated code
Yes. But replace
> and the industry will hopefully have learned to never rely on anything that wasn't at least seriously looked over by an actual thinking human being that understands it.
with: "and the industry will throw even more LLMs at the problem, producing an even deeper soup of garbage that in some cases perform a tiny bit better, and when things do break it's always the fault of someone else. So for example a bank denies you a mortgage or an insurance company fails to process your claim, and you are almost certain that it's due to some slopcode somewhere, but you have to suck it up because the world has become accustomed that this is just how things are done."
It's a way of breaking computers that I'd never thought I'd see. We're wilfully taking the one cool thing about computers – them exactly interpreting instructions carefully crafted by humans to do exactly the right thing – with bucketloads of vibes that hopefully mostly do the right thing most of the time ("the tests pass"). What the hell are we doing.
Indeed. I wouldn't call everyone who uses LLMs to generate code a slopper. But I'm afraid that there are so many sloppers that they pose a real danger to the ecosystem, especially considering the amount of code they generate. A volunteer project has limited resources, and I can totally understand why it doesn't wanna use those to separate the wheat from enormous amounts of chaff. If that's the case, an outright ban might be a smart move.
Note that a ban on LLM-generated code is not a prohibition on other forms of LLM-based assistance. Those other forms don't incur a direct burden on the maintainers.
Alternate take: in ten years we'll be pulling our hair out cursing at the world over how we could possibly accept "10k lines added, 8k lines removed" as the normal everyday churn of software development. We'll curse the morons who gave up understanding our own code.
I think you're wrong. And I think that FOSS is our last best hope to keep software under the control of the individual.
The sloppers are diving head-first into a world where not knowing how a basic idea translates to code is embraced. This is not true of every slopper, but it is true of enough that sloppers are a threat.
> What confuses me about this stance is that LLMs are basically indistinguishable from any mid-to-low-tier dev.
I disagree. Behind an LLM sits a developer. They steer the LLM. For them, directions to the LLM is the preferred form of modification of the software. The output of the LLM is not a preferred form anymore. This poses a huge problem for free software, especially when the LLM that translates preferred form into "source code" is not FOSS.
> But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
Alright, but that's fine for now. It's still really cool as a basis for resilient, decentralized networks. Maybe one day it'll have to be replaced by something else. Right now, it looks really valuable as an experience-gaining tool the way I see it.
> but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
Prototype, maybe. Niche art project? Disagree! It looks like a very interesting exploration of an underexplored space to me.
> You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand.
> That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.