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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • The seal looks like this:

    Code completion is probably a gray area.

    Those models generally have much smaller context windows, so the energy concern isn’t quite as extreme.

    You could also reasonably make a claim that the model is legally in the clear as far as licensing, if the training data was entirely open source (non-attribution, non-share-alike, and commercial-allowed) licensed code. (A big “if”)

    All of that to say: I don’t think I would label code-completion-using anti-AI devs as hypocrites. I think the general sentiment is less “what the technology does” and more “who it does it to”. Code completion, for the most part, isn’t deskilling labor, or turning experts into chatbot-wrangling accountability sinks.

    Like, I don’t think the Luddites would’ve had a problem with an artisan using a knitting frame in their own home. They were too busy fighting against factories locking children inside for 18-hour shifts, getting maimed by the machines or dying trapped in a fire. It was never the technology itself, but the social order that was imposed through the technology.






  • only a tool

    “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”

    Every tool contains within it a philosophy — a particular way of seeing the world.

    But especially digital technologies… they give the developer the ability to embed their values into the tools. Like, is DoorDash just a tool?








  • The original source was much more sensible.

    The comparison makes sense for evaluating whether you’re over-invested in something. Like, if Nvidia suddenly poofed out of existence, would it seriously be worth 16% of everything the whole country makes in a year to get it back?

    Owning a car that’s worth 16% of your yearly income sounds reasonable, no matter what your actual income is. A Pokemon card collection that’s 16% of your income is probably too risky, no matter what your actual income is.

    Also, GDP is a decent scale to use for charting investment in a productivity tool, because if GDP ramped up at the same time as investment then it looks less like a bubble, even if they both ramp up quickly.

    But that’s not what we see. We see a sudden and volatile shift, nothing like the normal pattern before the hype.