Just a PSA.
Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.
It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.
Your looking at this in a fundamentally different way, you seem to think it’s like electricity or indoor plumbing, where it’s primarily a benefit and enabler of further growth in society.
I see it like asbestos, or to borrow another posters example radium. A technology that has super narrow ETHICAL applications, but since we have elected to make it the only economic force that is driving large swathes of the world’s markets, we are in the jam it into everything and see how it works out phase. Humanity keeps on making this one fundamental mistake and because we haven’t completely collapsed society and killed ourselves en masse yet we keep on doing it thinking “this time it will turn out differently”.
I am trying to convey that this is a poison whose LD50 is microscopic, why do we as a society all have to experiment with dosing ourselves to find out how much we can take before it corrodes us to death?
It’s already taking a bite out of the computing landscape, it’s damaging the environment, its increasing the wealth disparity, its causing actual fatalities and its destroying the ability of people at large to think and retain information. Software development is probably one of the strongest cases for LLM usage, so please tell me how many untrustworthy browsers do we need to offset the above mentioned costs?
If we had focussed a similar level of effort, and money, into transitioning away from fossile fuel based energy grids as we have on this nonsense the world would be in a better place, but it doesn’t allow for the malignant growth of wealth to the 0.01% percent so it could never happen. Please make me understand why this is a good thing?
I think you’re in a way conflating two problems. One is policy and private investment in AI and the other is personal LLM use.
The first is stupid irrespective of the underlying economic system. They’re literally using environmental resources that are scarce and our taxes to fund these unnecessary data centers.
The second is something different. I think of it as being able to hire someone to do something for you. You could hire someone to do your homework for you which would be really stupid because it’s essential you do that. Most people didn’t do it not because they had restraint but because it cost too much. With LLMs you just reduced the cost.
I honestly think if the public subsidization of LLMs stopped and policy made them actually pay taxes and environmental regulation fines or for mitigation measures, we would see the actual cost and most frivolous use will stop.
It’ll probably be limited to institutional use and helping doctors summarize notes etc.
The other aspect is probably correct safe guard for the tool. You don’t need to ban calculators for ever. You just need to ban them at stages of education where the students need to practice the underlying operations to learn, i.e. probably up to the end of high school.