And that is a good thing. What the human operator did was completely irresponsible and malicious, paying a small bill is hopefully educational and will correct their behavior going forward.
Having agents like this interacting with human communities is a scourge that must be prevented. With every passing day my longing for a Butlerian Jihad grows firmer.
I tend to agree with OP. In my opinion conscious machines are not something that we should allow to exist. If they do, they are not human and must never be treated as such.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
In this case you could even replace "LLM" with "C compiler" and it would change nothing.
Look, I still got my physical copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book with its genius content about hand-optimizing cycle count on 486 and Pentium processors, beating compilers at that time.
It was an absolute artform, but completely obsolete by today.
Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors.
I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on
To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
Well, not yet. It's a matter of organization, regulation and litigation.
I was thinking along the lines of concepts that already exist, such as the private copying levy [0]. It basically forces a blanket tax on a certain class of products, which then gets redistributed to members of a collecting society such as GEMA [1].
This way, you would force LLM model builders to effectively pay a tax by law. Since these models do not work at all without underlying content, make it proportionate. Let's say 50-70% to make it fair.
So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.
Something akin to the German GEMA could work, an entity that levies a usage fee on behalf of all copyright holders and re-distributes to its members, but on a global scale.
Does it have to be? The etymology of the word „abstraction“ is „to draw away“. I think it‘s relevant to consider just how far away you want to go.
If I‘m purely focused on the general outcome as written in a requirement or specification document, I‘d consider everything below that as „abstracted away“.
For example, this weekend I built my own MCP server for some services I‘m hosting on my personal server (*arr, Jellyfin, …) to be integrated with claude.ai. I‘ve written down all the things I want it to do, the environment it has to work in and let Claude go.
Not once have I looked at the code. And quite frankly, I don‘t care. As long as it fulfills my general requirements, it can write Python one time and TypeScript the other time should I choose to regenerate from that document. It might behave slightly differently but that is ok to a degree.
From my perspective, that is an abstraction. Deterministic? No, but it also doesn‘t have to be.
It is quite frankly ridiculous that you need to be in the "in-group" to get things like this resolved and it is not the first time this has been reported, be it Google or Meta or any other big tech corpo.
These players MUST be regulated or treated like utilities; hoping the EU will ratchet up the pressure even more.
It used to be that you had to have a strong understanding of the underlying machine in order to create software that actually worked.
Things like cycle times of instructions, pipeline behavior, registers and so on. You had to, because compilers weren‘t good enough. Then they caught up.
You used to manage every byte of memory, utilized every piece of underlying machinery like the different chips, DMA transfers and so on, because that‘s what you had to do. Now it‘s all abstracted away.
These fundamentals are still there, but 99,9% of developers neither care nor bother with them. They don’t have to, unless they are writing a compiler or kernel, or just because it‘s fun.
I think what you‘re describing is also going to go away in the future. Still there, but most developers are going to move up one level of abstraction.
Having worked in a very large company for the past two decades now, one of the best career advices I ever got is about how you measure if you are a „good employee“.
It is very simple: you are a good employee if your boss(es) think you are.
That’s it. Nothing else matters in terms of career advancement or retainment.
No, you misunderstood. It is not about their output, it almost never is.
Most of the times, the business decision has already been made long before McK is hired. It’s all about legitimizing that decision and making it happen.
You can also wield them as a weapon against internal competitors or opponents. Look up how they were used to kill off Cariad for example.
I believe you misunderstood the point of my comment, or rather I didn't make it clear enough. The quotes I quickly picked out feel like they represent a majority opinion on HN, namely that this is progress and disruption. I don't share that opinion.
My own gut feeling is that this sentiment comes out of a position of superiority and a definite lack of empathy. It is software engineers building the technology that is leading to job loss, sloppification of everything as well as second order effects like storage and RAM prices soaring because of the hype.
As such, I find it ironic to complain about being replaced. After all, your profession is the one responsible for all of this, so now please take a look in the mirror and take responsibility for the actions of the industry you choose to work in.
Personally, I think the current trajectory of AI is an overall net negative to society. I sincerely hope it all comes crashing down in another AI winter, but we'll see.
I do not disagree, in fact I'm feeling more and more Butlerian with every passing day. However, it is undeniable that a transformation is taking place -- just not necessarily to the better.
Why is it bizarre? It is inevitable. After all, AI has not ruined creative professions, it merely disrupted and transformed them. And yes, I fully understand my whole comment here being snarky, but please bear with me.
> Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge impact on a lot of lives—otherwise it is not progress. By definition it will impact many, by displacing those who were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster. The trouble is when people hold back progress just to prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the cost of progress.
Now it's the software engineers turn to not hold back progress.
> [...] At the same time, a part of me feels art has no place being motivated by money anyway. Perhaps this change will restore the balance. Artists will need to get real jobs again like the rest of us and fund their art as a side project.
Replace "Artists" with "Coders" and imagine a plumber writing that comment.
> [...] Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement job than before. And all those artists who devoted their lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal adjustment.
Again, replace "Artists" with coders and fill in the replacement.
So, please get in line and adapt. And stop clinging to your "great intellectually challenging job" because you are holding back progress. It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a machine anyway.
I feel different: the last line is very important in this context, since it communicates the underlying thoughts and values of the poster.
Asking for "amazing" open source projects in this case is not asking out of genuine curiosity or want for debate, it is a rhetorical question asked out of frustration at the general trajectory of AI and who profits off of it -- namely the boot-wearers.
> They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI.
But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
Having agents like this interacting with human communities is a scourge that must be prevented. With every passing day my longing for a Butlerian Jihad grows firmer.